Corey Quinn

When you let the tech you’re skilled in become the cornerstone of your identity, you limit future career possibilities. Here’s what to do instead

S3 has insanely generous data durability guarantees. Even so, read the fine print, and you’ll realize that S3 doesn’t remove the need for backups.

Machine Learning is a Marvelously Executed Scam I’ve joked periodically that machine learning (or “ML”) adherents claim to be able to sort through vast quantities of data and find absolutely anything except a viable business model. I’d like to revisit that with a clarification: They also apparently can’t tell a story around what they do […]

Once upon a time when I was a fledgling Linux systems administrator, the distribution you used Really Mattered. You used Gentoo or similar if you didn’t value your time, you used Ubuntu (once it came out) if you valued community, you went with Debian if you enjoyed having the crap kicked out of you in […]

Last week, someone behind the @AmazonNews Twitter account took a fistful of pills, washed them down with a handle of Old Grand-Dad, and started tweeting. They picked fights with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They also argued with Wisconsin’s congressional Representative Mark Pocan. And while all of this is embarrassing and highly cringey, my problem […]

A recurring theme has arisen recently: I find myself wishing for a version of an AWS service that charged me less in return for being actively worse at what it did. This isn’t me hoping for a Chaos Engineering region that breaks intentionally so I can shore up my application’s durability. Instead, it’s me wishing […]

…and I assure you, I’m no happier about it than you likely are. Basically, all new developers use VScode (or better, its in-browser equivalent GitHub Codespaces), a Microsoft product. They write code of varying quality and then stuff into GitHub, a Microsoft product. If they’re lucky / unfortunate enough to have a production environment, they’ll […]

With my bizarre re:Invent lounge pass (read as: Cloud Practitioner Certification) expiring later this year, it behooves me to take another AWS certification exam to keep the lounge goodies flowing. This year I opted for the “beta” Sysops Administrator Associate exam. I give it the scare quotes around “beta” because—when you’re charging people money (in […]

I begin this week with an admission. A while back, I opined on Twitter that a site I ran, stop.lying.cloud, was unacceptably slow. To save you a click, that site retrieves the AWS status page, applies some transforms to clean up part of the “endless sea of green,” and returns the result. It did this […]

“There is no story about AWS that can’t be awkwardly and ineffectively rebutted in the most unsympathetic way possible.”

AWS does a terrible job at marketing their products to users. We know how to fix it.

A primer on the history of AWS, how it developed, why it’s been so transformative, and how it’s easy to make fun of.