DevOps & Automation¶

Claude Code: AI Development That Actually Thinks - Making Coding Fun Again (2025)

We are living in the future! Between riding in a Waymo in San Francisco that dodged a jaywalker and now Claude Code making development autonomous and actually fun again, I honestly can't believe this is real life.

Before Claude Code: You write buggy code → Copy error to ChatGPT → Get generic fix → Debug manually → Repeat cycle

After Claude Code: You describe what you want → Claude reads your entire codebase → Writes production-ready code → Tests and fixes its own errors → Explains what it built and why

This isn't incremental improvement. This is development workflow transformation.

Debug GitLab CI/CD Pipelines Instantly (No.gitlab-ci.yml Changes)

Have you ever been debugging a pipeline job and keep having to go add bash commands, like set -x or a thousand echo statements to figure out what is going on?

Well there's an easier way! You can simply add a CI/CD variable to your project (or group) and automatically get debug output without having to make a branch/MR or changes to your scripts!

Use BATS to Automate Kubernetes Testing

Have you wanted to test things that you know how to run in your bash scripts or terminal, but aren't quite sure how to make it happen? The Bash Automated Testing System (BATS) makes that dream a reality!

BATS lets you create automated, repeatable tests using familiar bash commands. Your tests work equally well in your terminal and CI/CD pipelines, giving you confidence to promote Kubernetes resources to production.

This post covers practical examples of testing Kubernetes clusters, from basic API connectivity to complex application health checks and resource validation.

Unit Test IaC with Terraform Tests

A challenge of being a DevOps engineer is that some of the typical dev parts don't always fit nicely. Unit testing is one example, where IaC is often hard to test in isolation and without some sort of actual deployment in a "test" or "sandbox" environment to validate against.

The lines between unit and integration testing become blurred for many DevOps or Platform engineers. Thankfully, HashiCorp has seen this gap and has introduced Terraform Tests to help bridge this gap!

In this post I will go over practical unit testing strategies using terraform test to validate your Infrastructure as Code, improve code quality, and provide confidence when making changes to your IaC modules.

Build a MkDocs Site with Terraform and S3

Find the latest code for this project on my GitHub

Tired of paying \(50-200+ per month for WordPress hosting?** What if I told you that you could host a beautiful, fast, professional website for literally **\)3 per month?

Chances are you have seen a website or documentation that make use of MkDocs, and especially Material for MkDocs. In fact, this blog site runs using Material for MkDocs and I have to say it is a delight compared to typical blog or WordPress platforms!

This becomes really powerful - and incredibly cost-effective - combined with the ability to host a static website using Amazon S3.

Build Your Own GitLab Runners on EKS

As more and more DevOps teams adopt GitLab for internal development, and furthermore use GitLab CI/CD pipelines, finding ways to manage costs while still delivering highly available, scalable pipelines is crucial.

This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on building production-ready GitLab runners on AWS. In this foundational post, I'll show you how to leverage EKS Auto Mode with Terraform and Helm to create a robust, scalable runner infrastructure.