Tom Oram

YouTube video by Kai Lentit Interview with Cloud Architect in 2025

“Every year we get personal thank you letter from cloud provider for hitting Q1 revenue target…their Q1 revenue target”

It’s funny, but it’s also seems tragic to me how much many larger companies are willing to spend unnecessarily on cloud resources.

youtu.be/xIk0_uFV-rU?...

Technology migrations can be quick, simple and straightforward if you discount all the other things that are integrated with it and the people who use it.

IntelliJ IDEA Moves to the Unified Distribution | The IntelliJ IDEA Blog We are excited to announce the next step for IntelliJ IDEA: we are moving to a single, unified distribution. And yes, before you ask, our commitment to open source remains as strong as ever. There

Good move by JetBrains: blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2025/07...

This will benefit experienced developers, beginners, and students who get introduced to the tool early on as well.

The basics of OpenTelemetry are nice clean and straightforward, however, wading through the piles of information around which specific attributes to include isn’t a whole lot of fun (not least because 90%+ of them are marked as being in development).

Today has been a day where the LLMs have been a hinderance rather than a help.

OTLP: Open Telemetry Protocol

OLTP: Online Transaction Processing

My brain, tongue, and typing fingers dislike the fact that both of these abbreviations exist.

Giving Claude code a try. I tried to be ambitious and create an iOS app for my first attempt, it’s not gone too well so far.

Often Haskell projects have code which can look quite daunting, but Hadolint has done a great job of being clean, simple and accessible.

Two parenting tips for people with a 4 year old:

1. Get construction toys with real tools like screwdrivers. Real tools are so much more fun and engaging than plastic toy ones.

2. Don’t let your child have a real screwdriver, they will take things apart!

Not personally, but I’ve seen posts on Reddit from people claiming they have been pulled up by management (who have been tracking their usage) for not using their LLMs enough.

My general rule is that if there's a certificate in it, it's not Agile. The very notion of a certificate is based on a faulty premise: that Agile is a fixed process, and if you learn and do that process, you will be Agile. That's just wrong.
1/5

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

I extracted two sub packages out of a larger one today. I only did it to improve code organisation, however, it had a very positive effect on the overall design because the new boundaries made it much clearer where things weren’t quite right.

I had to bail on Podman and revert to Docker because its performance (on Windows with WSL) was much worse when using the Azure EventHubs Emulator. It may have been fixable but I don’t have the time to look into it atm.

Time to look at the Manning MEAP page and make a FOMO induced purchase.

Trying to install Podman Desktop on Windows for the first time. The onboarding process is pretty nice so far, with clear guidance on what you need to do to enable required features.

Lost an hour today bashing my head against why the Flink Kubernetes Operator was failing to create a deployment; it turned out that I had deployed a newer version of Kubernetes which I guess isn’t currently supported.

Having event properties in C# that throw when you try and add more than one handler with += seems like a weird choice.

Being an event suggests that you can add multiple handlers but then you can get caught out unexpectedly at run time.

Playing with data streaming technologies with a focus on exploring different architectures to build real-time data products.

(and because it’s fun 😉)

A day of intense redesigning of an Azure EventHubs integration has left me with no energy left for tinkering with my own stuff.

A challenging problem is bait for a software engineer, however, when a book says:

“Here is a big long list of all the complicated problems you might eventually need to solve, but first start with a simple solution and get it working first.”

That last part is the most important.

Nothing says productivity like a surprise forced major OS update in the middle of a piece of work.

The modules:

1. registry.terraform.io/modules/arma...

2. registry.terraform.io/modules/arma...

Codifying learning into simple utilities that you can use later is a great time saver. Having not set up GitHub actions + OIDC with AWS for quite some time, I didn’t really remember how to do it. But y hanks to a couple of simple Terraform modules we built, it only took a few mins to get it working.

Just now I have switched to using Windows Terminal on the machine I’m using for work; it has this very responsive feeling to it and what a fantastic improvement it is over using the standard PowerShell one.

The snappiness also makes them feel more stable - it seems to remove some underlying worry that the minute delay might indicate something is about to fail.

It’s amazing how noticeable the performance of the new breed of responsive apps are (often GPU accelerated). I kept reading that Zed was fast but didn’t believe it would make much difference compared to VSCode for example - I was wrong.

I current have 3 folders in my terraform repo:

1-storage/
Registry and buckets that I don’t tear down.

2-kubernetes/
The cluster itself - this is the expensive bit so I kill it as soon as I’ve stopped playing.

3-kubernetes-config/
Some Helm charts and config which gets deployed into the cluster.

A nice way to achieve this with terraform is to split the different parts of infrastructure into separate terraform projects and use the terraform_remote_state data source to pass values between the projects.

Wanted to optimise the start up time of my dev cluster so decided to keep some of the cheaper resources around (these are things like the container registry so it also saves re-pushing images).