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Learnings from a new manager

June 26, 2023 / / 0 Comments

It’s been ~12 months since I started managing an engineering team, and I’ve learned so much from them. Here are 9 things I wished my previous managers did (or didn’t do).

No scheduled 1-on-1’s

Make it clear that you don’t have to wait until a recurring touchpoint to bring up issues. Always be available for chats; enabling them is your primary job. Also, translates to: don’t be so busy it deters people from reaching out. Having them think, “He’s probably not busy; I can give him a call,” is a good thing.

Goals

Please don’t ask them to translate company … Read more

Introducing AI Spend: AI API Usage Monitoring Made Easy

June 10, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As an AI enthusiast who has built multiple AI products, I know the importance of tracking OpenAI API costs, identifying abuse instances and preventing runaway apps. While there are several tools available that enable you to see your API usage by entering the API key, I wanted an effortless and passive monitoring tool to keep track of my API usage.

Keeping this in mind, I developed AI Spend – an intelligent monitoring tool that synchronises your API usage per model in cost, tokens, and requests in an encrypted database. With this tool, you can effortlessly control the costs and … Read more

Using OpenAI’s [free] Content Moderation API

March 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By now, everyone knows about ChatGPT, GPT itself, and OpenAI. However, OpenAI is more than GPT: you can use their API to do image generation, speech to text, and text moderation assessments. This post is about their text moderation API, as I’ve recently discovered it’s free.

The idea is to use the moderation API to decide whether the rest of OpenAI’s models would accept the input text, but it can be used on its own as well. It might change in the future, but moderation API calls are not metered against your bill. 

Why would you want to … Read more

Tunneling Plugwise Smile P1 Stats to Grafana

March 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Hi! It’s been a while. I’m going to (re)start sharing solutions to problems that I’m building things for. Expect posts mostly around coding and IoT. Starting with this post; a quick tutorial on how to get power statistics from a Plugwise Smile P1 gateway to Grafana, using Telegraf.

I’ve got solar panels with Enphase inverters with central management, which has an API. Its been streaming power generation stats to Grafana using this solution, for a while. Recently, I added a Plugwise Smile P1 gateway to monitor the smart meter and I wanted to get its power stats into

… Read more

Azure DevOps – Post-job Installing Apple Certificate failing

November 29, 2022 / / 0 Comments

For backwards compatibility purposes, I like to keep my continuous integration and deployment workers on the lowest version available. For macOS, this was 10.15 up until recently when Microsoft (rightfully) retired it and made macOS 11 the lowest version available.

Here’s the reason for this post: there’s a change in the exit code behavior of the security command, making any pipeline with multiple certificates fail.

It took me a while to figure out why and there wasn’t an existing post documenting this error. So, here we go. 😉

App & Installer Certificates

I mostly build desktop apps, which have … Read more

AdminPatron: The AI Assistant I wish I had years ago

October 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The amount of time I’ve spent googling commands, configuration templates, or steps to configure something is wild. As an infrastructure engineer, I have tons of cheat sheets for networking, security, PowerShell, Kubernetes, and more. Sometimes I forget what’s on these cheat sheets and resort to Google again. This is why I built AdminPatron.

Introducing AdminPatron

AdminPatron is an AI-driven assistant that can formulate anything you need as an engineer. From one-liner scripts, commands to run on Linux, or networking components, configuration templates ranging from Kubernetes YAML to networking and security devices, API calls and examples, and even step-by-step instructions … Read more

Using Tailscale for Home Lab VPN Connectivity

September 12, 2022 / / 2 Comments

I’m always looking to simplify connectivity between my networks’ different connections. With a home lab, colocated servers, and a few clouds that host projects, it’s a web. 

This was all connected with VPNs in the past, but everyone hates VPNs. 

I moved to SD-WAN when VMware acquired VeloCloud, and I had the fortune to get a few SD-WAN edges. But I handed them back when I left VMware, so I also needed to update the connectivity. 

Enter Tailscale.

Note: this is not a sponsored post. I just really, really like the product. 😃

Tailscale?

The Cloudcast introduced me … Read more

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