#random - June 2025

Didn't realize he retired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelsey_Hightower

Hi everyone,

Hope you are all well! I’m Jessica, field marketing specialist at Mirantis. We’re excited to be hosting a joint webinar with our partner Nirmata, creators of Kyverno on June 18. If you know anyone who might be interested in policy-driven multi-cluster Kubernetes management, please feel free to share this with them.

• Webinar title: Policy-Driven Multi-Cluster Kubernetes for AI Workloads Made Simple with k0rdent and Kyverno
• Date/time: Jun 18 2025, 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm BST
• Registration page: https://bit.ly/4dJPrf2
• Posts to share on social media
◦ X (Twitter)
◦ LinkedIn

So this past week I've been using Willow Voice on my Mac and it's been freaking awesome. In Cursor (editor), I kept looking for the missing microphone feature. Well, no more.

On my Mac, every time I'm in Slack or writing an email, it's so frustrating that there's no great dictation. Let's face it, Siri sucks ass.

Like a lot of you, I've been using just ChatGPT to transcribe, then copy and paste. Well, you don't need to do that anymore. I can just press a hot key and it'll perfectly transcribe what I'm saying and paste it right in—even with rich text formatting. Just map the function key or map some key on your keyboard and when pressed it'll transcribe it perfectly, just like this message I'm sending right now.

Get one month free with this link (and give me one too!) I've already paid and signed up our team.

https://willowvoice.com/?ref=EOSTERMAN6

Can’t wait to try this

Hey folks 👋
Refact.ai Agent has just become the #1 open-source AI Agent on the SWE-bench Leaderboard! 🔥
• SWE-bench Verified → 70.4% solved - 500 real, production-grade issues
• SWE-bench Lite → 60% solved - 300 tasks
Read the full technical breakdown on our blog: https://refact.ai/blog/2025/open-source-sota-on-swe-bench-verified-refact-ai/
We also open-sourced our SWE-bench pipeline. Check it on GitHub: https://github.com/smallcloudai/refact-bench

Give Refact.ai Agent a try and tell me what you think 🙌

This is AWS-related but unofficial, so hopefully #random is right.

I'd like to share two cost-cutting tools. 💰️

• 🏷️📆⏱️ github.com/sqlxpert/lights-off-aws stops and starts EC2 instances and RDS/Aurora databases based on cron schedules in their tags. You can also tag these resources, plus EBS volumes, to trigger AWS Backup without writing backup plans. Last but not least, the tool can delete and re-create any resource specifiable in CloudFormation, based on schedules in stack tags. (My example deletes AWS Client VPN associations overnight, reducing VPN cost to $1 a day.)
• 🛑 github.com/sqlxpert/stay-stopped-aws-rds-aurora re-stops RDS and Aurora databases when AWS starts them after the 7-day maximum.
Confession: I use CloudFormation (because it's available to all AWS users, with nothing extra to set up). Each tool supports multi-region, multi-account installation as a StackSet and single-region, single-account installation as an ordinary stack. I provide references for wrapping CloudFormation in HCL, since most people here use Terraform.

Even if we don't manage EC2 instances directly anymore, lots of money is wasted on dev/test RDS and Aurora databases that sit idle all weekend. Lights Off is unusually flexible because schedules, not references to schedules, go in each resource's tags.

As for Stay-Stopped, you'll find alternatives all over re:Post, AWS blogs, and Medium, but they suffer from timing bugs/race conditions, bound to bite us eventually in large environments. The Stay-Stopped ReadMe ends with a perspective on the two best alternatives I found, plus AI-generated solutions from Amazon Q Developer.

This work is a labor of love. We heard in Office Hours yesterday that, according to the New York Times, programming is devolving into menial work as AI code generation spreads within Amazon. Stay-Stopped was an eye-opener because it showed that poor-quality AI training data (solutions on the Internet), plus Amazon Q Developer's poor awareness of AWS API documentation, can contribute to low-quality AI-generated code. There is no substitute for human understanding and effort.

Apart from the pleasure of learning, trying to make simple but reliable software, and documenting it so that others can learn from it, I enjoy hearing from users. I've worked on Lights Off and its predecessor since 2017 but I wrote Stay-Stopped recently, based on feedback from a user. Please try these tools and let me know how I can improve them. Thank you!

👋 Hey team!

I just put together a GitHub repo covering real-world Docker scenarios that are super useful for interview prep and day-to-day DevOps work. It includes practical commands with scenarios and clear explanations — like multi-stage builds, resource limits, health checks, logging, cleanup, and more.

🔗 Check it out here: https://github.com/SHIVANIUM-GIT/Docker_interview_question

Whether you're brushing up for an interview or want to sharpen your Docker skills, I think you'll find this helpful! Feel free to star or fork it if it helps you too. 💡

#docker #devops #tools #interview-prep

hey all,

Been hacking on a small tool to make 3 a.m. pages less painful.
It bundles three things I always wanted:
• squashes duplicate/flapping alerts through noise rules
• grabs logs/metrics/past context and drafts a quick RCA
• auto-links the alert to the runbook that fixes it
It’s rough but running. If you’re on call and have ten minutes to kick the tires, DM me. You can signup too—just looking for some really blunt feedback.
Thanks 🙂

🔥🔥End-to-End Static Website Auto Deployment Using Bash Scripts🔥🔥

Tired of manually copying and pasting files every time you deploy your application? You're in the right place. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to write a Bash script that automates the deployment of static files to a server simply by providing the path to a zipped file. This will work on every server.

Prerequisite(s)
✅️ Basic knowledge of bash script

Objective(s)
✅️ Create Bash Script that auto deploys a static website

Click on the link
https://devsecops-blog.hashnode.dev/end-to-end-static-website-deployment-using-bash-scripts

Are you interested in cloud/devops. I have videos for you. Everything simplified for everyone (whether you are just starting you have been in the game)

https://www.youtube.com/@africacloudpapa

Don't forget to subscribe🙏🙏. "Make we see food chop"🤣🤣

Follow us on our SM platforms. "Make we self happy" 🙏🙏🙏
https://x.com/africacloudpapa
https://www.instagram.com/africacloudpapa/

Link previews for AWS console links in Slack
I got tired of AWS and GCP console links in Slack - there's no useful preview, obviously! So I built something to preview AWS resources when you mention console links (and ARNs) in Slack.
I'd love to get some feedback on pricing and feature set!
https://cloudref.app

I remember hearing about the context7 MCP server in a previous CP Office Hours. I have it a try writing a Dagger module and found it helped a lot with prompting cursor to work with Dagger's specific conventions around working with containers, directories, and modules.

aw, I missed office hours, but wanted to mention this: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/34685

Hey everyone! We ran a session on prompt engineering + AI Agent workflow.
Based on feedback, it turned out to be more useful than expected. So I’m sharing the recap.

Not about 'magic words' but about:
• workflow prep
• proper context mngmnt
• iteration strategy etc.

Watch the recordings here : https://youtu.be/DP_yKoHeWI8

Hi everyone!

I'm Jessica, field marketing specialist at Mirantis. We’re excited to be hosting a joint webinar with our partner Tigera, creators of Calico on July 2. If you know anyone who might be interested in multi-cluster Kubernetes security and networking solutions, please feel free to share this with them.

• Webinar title: Simplify and Secure Multi-Cluster Kubernetes with k0rdent and Calico
• Date/time: July 2 2025, 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm BST
• Registration page: https://bit.ly/405Ohoj
• Posts to share on social media
◦ X (Twitter)
◦ LinkedIn

Things are moving really fast

Hey all 👋!
Proud to share that Refact.ai Agent is now ranked #1 on SWE-bench Multimodal — a benchmark built around real-world, screenshot-based bug reports.
Really useful for JavaScript devs working on UI issues 🤝
It also leads on SWE-bench Verified (Python, pass@1).
The best part? It’s fully open source, runs autonomously, and solves tasks end-to-end.
https://github.com/smallcloudai/refact
Feel free to try it out, share feedback, or contribute — we’d love to have your input!