This blog has moved from AWS Amplify (with zero monthly cost) to being hosted on a self-managed VPS, as part of a push to reduce monthly costs and have more control over my cloud infrastructure. That might seem counter intuitive, but this website is just the first test before I move robparkers.photography over, along with its currently really costly Postgres database.

So far i’m having a great time setting up the VPS from scratch and even after years of being in software engineering roles I’m learning a shit load of absolute basics. You get a much better apprectiation for sysadmin shit, I wish I had done this years ago. I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way when I move the Django Monolith over.

In February this year, after 12 years living in East London, and not having the stomach to pay the prices commanded by either the area I lived or the place I grew up, I did what any self-respecting 30 something in Lower Clapton would do, moved to the Kent Coast and bought a reno by the sea.

Recently I rode a fixed gear to Ostende in Belgium and I almost blew my knees out. Despite the story having a happy return journey, I decided it was time to build something a bit more practical..

One of the biggest selling points of moving here was the ease of accessing the European mainland, and at the end of August I had a couple of days off to explore by bike.

Today I deleted an entire module from my infrastructure terraform repo, the one that related to my photography project. It was always massively over-engineered and at this point in my life I can’t justify the cloud costs. Everything is gone except the media in the buckets and a big pg dump.

Walking The Malvern Hills

Approximately 4 - 6 hours

Walking North to South along the tops of many of the Malvern Hills from the North Hill to the Hollybush hill via Eastnor Obelisk.

The future of AI tools can already be seen in the present state of Google search

Cycling from The Hackney Marshes to Erith, via two Victorian Pumping Stations

About 2 hrs at a slow pace.

The East End of London has tons of walking routes in and around the various canals and the Thames. I did a little post about one of them here, but this time I wanted to see a bit more in a day and the best way to do that was to get my old bike out.

Now that my photography project looks pretty much how I wanted it to, I’ve turned my attention to polishing it and trying to get it to render quicker in the browser.

One of the reasons I’ve given this some extra attention is perfectly captured in the gif I made for the original post..

A bit of a laugh innit