Make The Internet Fun Again</h1> <article> <h1>Make The Internet Fun Again</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I was thinking the other day how much I missed StumbleUpon.</p> </article> <article> <h1>DevOps Notts: The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning in GitHub Actions</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I’ll be speaking in person at DevOps Nottingham on Tuesday, 25th August 2026 at Fothergill House. The talk is based on my article, <a href="http://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-03-24-the-comforting-lie-of-sha-pinning/">The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning</a>.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Sunk Cost Fallacy as a Feature</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>The other week I came across the concept of <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-9588-0_1">Fuben-Eki</a>, which roughly translates as the “benefit of inconvenience”. Initially I thought it sounds like one of those ancient Japanese philosophies that has been tidied up for LinkedIn and eagerly scrolled down to the comments to see the ‘<em>Engagement</em>’ but it is apparently a relatively recent system-design concept. Hiroshi Kawakami described it as looking for benefits that can only be gained through inconvenience: value that sits outside the usual axes of efficiency and functionality.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New Shiny AWS FinOps Toys?</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>AWS appears to have spent June quietly scattering new FinOps-shaped features around the place. Some are immediately useful, some are probably worth a exploratory look, and some are AI-flavoured that I want to poke them with a stick before declaring them helpful.</p> </article> <article> <h1>¡Hola, soy DORA. Why hasn’t AI improved my metrics?</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I’m often asked about AI stuff as the rest of my blog might suggest. The world is currently scrambling around for how and where AI best accelerates delivery of software programmes, but I still don’t think there is one solution - similar to what happens when you ask any two people how Jira should be used to be fair.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>In March 2026, Trivy became the latest reminder that software supply chains are, at best, loosely held together with convention and trust.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Preparing for Quantum Computers That May or May Not Exist</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>In my day-to-day life as a Platform Engineer I find I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about identity. Not so much in the philosophical sense. In the much less interesting sense of certificates, tokens, key exchanges, and authentication. Logging in to AWS. Signing API calls. Issuing certificates. Rotating secrets. Establishing tunnels between systems that would rather not trust each other… and everything in between.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Terraform Six Years On (Retrospective)</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Back in 2019 when I started at BJSS as a fairly junior Platform Engineer I was first introduced to Terraform around the time when 0.11 and 0.12. If you remember that migration path, you’ll know it wasn’t exactly the gentlest onboarding experience.</p> </article> <article> <h1>JPEG Compression, but for Thought: AI as Clear-Text Encryption</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>There seems to be a current trend happening corporate and professional communications - looking at you <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidenvaines/">LinkedIn</a> - where people write bullet points and have AI tools expand on it.</p> </article> <article> <h1>AI Site Generator - Outsourcing (Too Much) Responsibility to AI</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p><strong>Static Site Generators are good, but what if they were more gooder?</strong></p> </article> <article> <h1>Prompt Driven Development; BDD but shift-left-y-er</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:00:00 +0000</p> <h2 id="déjà-vu-in-the-ide">Déjà Vu in the IDE</h2> <p>Every few years the industry seems to come back to the same idea with a fresh lick of paint. Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) was all the rage when I entered Platform Engineering, what feels like forever ago. With Cucumber, Gherkin, SpecFlow and the rest, the plan was to write tests in something approaching natural human language: Given … Then … When. It is not far from the familiar As a … I want … So that … format we use in user stories.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Cursed Knowledge</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>The creators of the Immich photo hosting app have a page for <a href="https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge/">Cursed Knowledge</a> and the concept really resonated with me. In particular two really stood out, the JavaScript Dates indexing, and the Cloudflare workers redirect loop problem. I have without any shame ripped off that concept and intend to add to it as I go along in my journey.</p> </article> <article> <h1>A Unix Tree command - but for S3!</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I was trying to visualise some S3 buckets for a cost optimisation exercise and wanted to be able to run a Tree command on it, obviously thats not a thing the Unix command can do … and I’ve been playing with JavaScript recently.</p> </article> <article> <h1>This blog post was not written by AI</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I read <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15q5qzdjqxo">this piece from the BBC</a> and <a href="https://www.zetteler.co.uk/">Sabine Zetteler’s</a> words — <em>“Why would I bother to read something someone couldn’t be bothered to write”</em> — really resonated with me. I’ve long felt that when AI is used to generate content, it often becomes effortless and as a result, thoughtless and empty.</p> </article> <article> <h1>A sort of golf related game about synonyms.</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I’ve been trying to think of a small game idea I could build as a way of playing with React and came up with a small game about guessing synonyms.</p> </article> <article> <h1>AWS User Group: Taming the AWS Lambda Deployment Jungle of Packaging Patterns</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>A talk so good, I’m <a href="http://www.vaines.org/talks/2024-04-24-notts-techfast-taming-the-aws-lambda-deployment-jungle-of-packaging-patterns/">doing it again</a>! this time at the Leeds & Your AWS User Group, hosted by <a href="https://burendo.com/">Burendo</a> on the 10th of April 2025 on an entirely unexpected topic of Serverless, Lambdas & Terraform (unless you’ve heard me talk before, in which case it’s quite expected).</p> </article> <article> <h1>Building a Simple Ecommerce Site with Hugo, Cloudflare Workers, and Square</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I accidentally picked up a new hobby after my partner gifted my dad and I a wood turning course/experience thing for Christmas 2023. After talking to a colleague about it, it turned out she had a lathe in her garage that was going unused; after borrowing that for a bit it’s quickly taken over my spare time (and most of my house). With wooden bowls, pens, and all sorts of other creations piling up, I need a way to offload these one of a kind, priceless artefacts to recoup the costs of wood, oil, and sandpaper.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Leeds Digital Festival: AI: Stop Talking, Start Doing!</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I spoke at and helped design a workshop for this years Leeds Digital Festival; everyone seems to be talking about AI but very little actual hands on opportunities are available for engineers to get down and dirty with the services.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Notts Techfast: Taming the AWS Lambda Deployment Jungle of Packaging Patterns</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I’ll be talking at the upcoming Nottingham’s TechFast on the 15th of May 2024 on an entirely unexpected topic of Serverless, Lambdas & Terraform (unless you’ve heard me talk before, in which case it’s quite expected).</p> </article> <article> <h1>Platform Engineers hate these 5 simple patterns for packaging AWS Lambda functions</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>There are many ways to manage cloud infrastructure and code we cram on it. In working with projects from the scale of one person’s hobby project to a service supporting millions of daily users there are considerations on how to deploy and deliver stuff in the cloud. When looking particularly at cloudy Serverless deployments here are some 5-ish patterns I like for handling the delivery, why, and the considerations involved.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Leeds Digital Festival: Catchphrase Brain Battle - Humans vs AI</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I’ll be talking at this year’s Leeds Digital Festival; We’ve taught Microsoft’s AI and ML services to play the ITV classic, Catchphrase.</p> </article> <article> <h1>AWS User Group: Why you are using Lambda wrong - Comparing monolithic vs microservice architectures for AWS API workloads</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>My colleague Dan Yip and I will be talking at the Leeds AWS User Group on ‘Why you are doing Lambda functions wrong’</p> </article> <article> <h1>My obligatory GPT post</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Seemingly everyone must now have a blog post about using ChatGPT, lets get on that band waggon.</p> </article> <article> <h1>A janky python alternative to Timeular using an Aqara cube from AliExpress</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 21:00:00 +0000</p> <p>This little project stemmed from me seeing what looked like a fun idea but being a tight-arsed Yorkshireman. I’m not paying <a href="https://timeular.com">£70 for a bit of plastic and £10 a month to use it</a>, but I would find some of the features useful, namely, a way of tracking which project I’m currently working on. and for it to be historically referable.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Death to Bastion Hosts, long live Bastion Containers!</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>For a long time now most container based workloads and projects I have worked with have needed EC2 Bastion hosts for various reasons; as Fargate in particular has expanded features and general functionality those needs for an EC2 bastion hosts have been in decline.</p> </article> <article> <h1>How I See Troubleshooting</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 19:00:00 +0000</p> <p>When I’ve been involved in an incident or dragged in to one of those “if we get enough people involved one of them might know” calls, one of the first things that usually catches my attention is the lack of solid troubleshooting that’s gone on.</p> </article> <article> <h1>An odd AWS EFS & Terraform AWS pagination issue</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p><em>I know the AWS CLI is different to the AWS CDK used by the provider and the two are not the same. For the sake of this explanation of my issue its good enough</em></p> </article> <article> <h1>Finding the most and least frequent list elements in JavaScript</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000</p> <h2 id="the-problem">The Problem</h2> <p>I love working through the <a href="https://adventofcode.com">Advent of Code</a> puzzles, this year I decided it was a good opportunity to learn some JavaScript. Having only ever done some very basic stuff with JS before, there’s no time like the present</p> </article> <article> <h1>Triggering a Cloudflare Cache Purge from S3 Object Events</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000</p> <h2 id="the-challenge">The Challenge</h2> <p>I’ve have been looking at some cost and performance improvements in some of my infrastructure. This particular environment is essentially a handful of websites which use some shared static assets that reside in an S3 bucket think assets.website.com which is used by website.co.uk, website.nl and website.ie.</p> </article> <article> <h1>CI/CD Agnostic, mono-repo pipelines for Firebase (Hosting, Database & Functions)</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>I have been trying to teach myself how to build a simple Node.JS API with a NoSQL backend. A few of my colleagues mentioned that Google’s Firebase is probably the easiest place to start and off I went.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Starting with Terraform: Taxing, Tangled & Troublesome</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 23:00:00 +0000</p> <p>One of the first tools I picked up walking in to the DevOps world was Terraform, I found it a bit challenging to get to grips with one major concept. The language itself is easy enough to get to grips with but actually structuring anything slightly complex just didn’t click for me.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Unified authentication with AWS Cognito!</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Attempts to minimise the number of credentials required is becoming more and more common, particularly with the adoption of social logins. Many well known services are backing off their authentication mechanisms to Google, Facebook, GitHub etc and passing a session token back to the initial site.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Script to get the binary differential replication status of all SCCM packages</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>An SCCM Environment I was looking at had a few hundred application packages. I needed to find out which were enabled for “Binary Differential Replication” to get to the bottom of some bandwidth issues that didn’t add up.</p> </article> <article> <h1>PowerShell Framework Module: Connect-Office365</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>One of the most common things I use Powershell for is Office 356, this requires the modules be installed and connecting to one of the Office365 sessions, Skype, Exchange or the Security & Compliance center.</p> </article> <article> <h1>PowerShell Framework Module: Connect-AD</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>One of the most common things I use Powershell for requires the ActiveDirectory module. In its self, this isn’t an issue, I know I have it installed and that it will import automatically. The problem comes when sending or transferring the script to someone else.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Script to flash populate an Active Directory lab</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>When you need to test Active Directory in a lab with sample users, creating sufficiently realistic test accounts is a time consuming and tedious process. There are a few quick scripts for creating something similar but many of them only create basic users which don’t emulate a production environment very well.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Many to one mailmerge aka Manager mail merge</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Sometime it’s necessary to email an individual about multiple people. Sometimes, its necessary to email loads of people about loads of people.</p> </article> <article> <h1>PowerShell Framework</h1> <p>Aiden Vaines — Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000</p> <p>Writing code that can be maintained by multiple people always requires some sort of structure. A lot of the frameworks I have seen are overly complicated for what is still essentially quite small scripts. So I decided to build my own</p> </article> <article> <h1>About</h1> <p>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</p> <h2 id="im-aiden-vaines--a-digital-plumber-and-tech-lead">I’m Aiden Vaines <br> <strong>A Digital Plumber and Tech Lead</strong></h2> <p>I’ve been working in IT for a bit over twenty years. I started out doing infrastructure and operations work and gradually took on more responsibility around design, delivery, and technical direction.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Contact Me</h1> <p>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> <article> <h1>Privacy</h1> <p>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</p> <h2 id="privacy-policy-for-vainesorg">Privacy Policy for Vaines.org</h2> <p>At Vaines.org, accessible from Vaines.org, one of our main priorities is the privacy of our visitors. This Privacy Policy document contains types of information that is collected and recorded by Vaines.org and how we use it.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Search Result</h1> <p>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</p> </article> </main></body></html>