In this story of mystery and intrigue 🕵️‍♂️ (well, not really 😅), we’ll explore the world of LLMs 🤖 and how I extended the awesome simple-openai library to support the Gemini LLM provider from Google via its OpenAI API compatibility layer ✨. This is a tale of code 💻, collaboration 🤝, and the quest for robust interoperability 🔧 in the ever-evolving landscape of AI.

“The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” ~ Andrew S. Tanenabaum

Github Actions are pretty cool 😎 as far as CI/CD pipelines go. But evolving and testing non-trivial workflows can go south real fast ⚠️. The core issue is that for any other code, the CI/CD system (if designed and implemented correctly) keeps you honest ✅, runs your tests 🧪, and only accepts successful PRs 🚦.

But when you need to make changes to your CI/CD workflows, the situation is different 😬. I learned it the hard way, so you don’t have to 💡. Let me share with you our current software development lifecycle for Github Actions workflows 🔁. The same principles can be applied to any CI/CD system 🛠️.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” ~ Juvenal

AI agents are all the rage these days. They’re the new shiny ✨ toy that everyone wants to play with 🧸. There’s only one small problem: they’re not real 👻. Yes, you heard me right 👂. AI agents are just a figment of our AI frameworks 🛠️ — really just an anthropomorphism 🧍‍♂️ of a very useful pattern for interacting with LLMs.

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

Two weeks ago I became a manager 👨‍💼 again. Throughout my career, I have managed several teams. I was even a director of software development a couple of times. But, I always stayed close to the code 💻, and remained hands-on. This time may be different. I’ll tell you why. But first, let me introduce my team: Devin, Claude and OpenHands… 🤖

“Unfortunately, humans have a long history of trying to fix their engineering mistakes with more engineering mistakes!” ~ Steven Magee

Building optimized container images is a science 🧪 and an art 🎨. You need to know what you’re doing to get it right. In this post, we will build a Python-based 🐍 container image for troubleshooting Kubernetes ☸️️. Along the way, we will discuss some of the best practices for building images, when they apply and when they don’t! 🔍

For the impatient:
https://github.com/the-gigi/docker-images/tree/main/py-kube

“When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.” ~ Idries Shah

Observability 🔭 is table stakes for any serious system. But, when you throw GenAI and LLMs into the mix it is no longer just nice to have. That’s the game at Invisible, where we’re wrangling LLMs in our multi-agent web automation platform on the daily. Let’s pop the hood and see how we made the leap from black box 🤷 to glass box🔎 with LLM Observability. Designing, building and integrating LLM observability into our stack was one of my favorite projects at Invisible.

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” ~ W. Edwards Deming

Everything on the internet starts with DNS 🌐, so it’s kinda important ⭐. Cloudflare is one of the top DNS providers and it offers the unique capability of intercepting any HTTP(S) request right after DNS resolution and mess around with it 🚀. Let’s see how this works and how we have used it effectively at Invisible to handle elegantly a thorny issue with a 3rd party provider.

“It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS” ~ Every network engineer, ever

Ephemeral storage 📦 is a fancy way of saying temporary storage. In Kubernetes ☸️️, it means storage that is associated with a pod that disappears when the pod goes away. This is almost true 🤔 as we shall find out soon. We will see what happens when pods and nodes run out of ephemeral storage ❌ and how to troubleshoot it 🔍.

“I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it’s there and then it’s gone” ~ Maggie Smith

At the beginning of 2024, I joined Invisible Platforms 🥷 - a small startup with a super-talented team (I worked with 95% of the engineers before) and a big mission. I’m the infra guy 🛠️, which covers a lot of ground in a startup. I got to wear many hats 🤠, play with some cool toys and even made myself useful on occasion. Let’s see what I’ve been up to in 2024!

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ~ The Queen from Alice in Wonderland

Horizontal pod autoscaling is one of the best features of Kubernetes ☸️. In this short blog post I’ll take quick a look at the horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA) and point out some gotchas.

“The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale” ~ Arthur C. Clarke

☸️ Kubernetes is a powerful platform for running containerized workloads. It will happily scale your infrastructure to meet the demands of your applications. Unfortunately, this can get expensive ( especially in the cloud). The goal is to utilize the resources you provision efficiently. In this post, we’ll explore the ins and outs of Kubernetes bin packing 📦, which is one important piece of the puzzle. We will also show how bin packing interacts without other aspects of optimizing resource usage.

“Letting go is even more important than adding.” ~ Marie Kondo

Today we are going deep on upgrading Postgres on AWS RDS to a new major version. You may be shocked, but there will be very few emojis in this post. Database upgrades are no joke, so let’s be serious for a change. 🫡

A SQL query walks into a bar, sees two tables and asks, “Can I join you?” ~ Anonymous

The grand finale is here, where lazy man🚶‍ Gigi defeats anti-Javascript counter-measures in password-protected forms using the Rust programming language 🦀.

The complete source code for the entire project is available here:

https://github.com/the-gigi/auto-web-login

“Laziness is the mother of invention.” ~ Anonymous

Welcome to episode #3, where lazy man🚶‍ Gigi recruits AppleScript 🍎 to automatically close browser tabs on his behalf.

If you’re impatient the complete source code for the entire project is available here:

https://github.com/the-gigi/auto-web-login

“Laziness is the mother of invention.” ~ Anonymous

In this episode, lazy man🚶‍ Gigi can’t be bothered to manage two collections of items in a TamperMonkey 🐒 script, so he is forced to write a Python 🐍 program to generate the script.

If you’re impatient the complete source code for the entire project is available here: https://github.com/the-gigi/auto-web-login

“Laziness is the mother of invention.” ~ Anonymous

In the olden days 🏰 (a few years ago) upgrading a Kubernetes cluster was a stressful task 😰 that could bring the system down 💥 or at the very least cause major disruption, deployment moratorium 🚫, and significant toil for most of the engineering team 😓. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case 🎉…

Once upon a time there was a lazy man🚶‍. Let’s call him Gigi (because that’s his name) 😊. Gigi would go to extreme lengths to avoid work. This is the story of how Gigi used browser automation 🤖 to avoid clicking the mouse 🐭 a few times on a web page.

“Laziness is the mother of invention.” ~ Anonymous

You have an AWS EKS cluster ⎈ and your workloads use a managed Postgres DB 🌐 deployed on AWS RDS. You need to access it from your laptop using your favorite DB visualization tool. What’s the best way to do it 🤷 ?

Keep reading to find out…

The design of the OpenAI tool calling API can cost you major bucks 💵. In this blog post I dive into the nuances of tool calling and show how one brave library (simple-openai) fixed it for you.

Imagine that nobody has to type git clone ever again! Can you even begin to comprehend what a gigantic improvement in the quality of life of every developer it would be? This pipe dream has just become a reality! Enter Cyclone🌀 - a little Rust program I built to make the world 🌍 a better place.

WARNING: This is a Kubernetes-free Post

Kubernetes is insecure by default! Let’s Pwn it to make a Pwoint (see what I did there?) 😜.

Your postgres DB 🌐 runs in the cloud with a private IP address. It requires a password 🔐. You need to access it from your laptop for a quick psql session. What’s the best way to do it 🤷 ? Keep reading to find out…

What do you know about the intricate web 🕷️ of interactions between advanced Kubernetes scheduling techniques and the cluster autoscaler? Probably not enough… read on to get a taste of some gnarly nuances and how to deal with them.

Spot instances are da bomb 💣!! You just have to be careful they don’t explode in your face 💥🤯 Let’s explore how to effectively use spot instances with Kubernetes…

TIL: When using un-pinned versions you must use @v. When using pinned patch versions use the exact release tag @, which may or may not have a v prefix

It was a dark night. The wind was howling outside. Suddenly, I got a Slack message that our EKS cluster has run out of IP addresses 😱. To be continued…

I recently joined a cool startup with some awesome people! It’s unbelievable how much happened in just 4 weeks.

Alright. This is going to be a long one. We’re going on a wild hunt for the BEST Java library to talk to OpenAI API-compatible services!

Starting a personal blog…