Gareth HughesThoughts on software engineering, leadership, and technology.
How I build and releasd Squirrel Notes with Claude Code and Copilot. Use it for free at Squirrel Notes. !Squirrel Notes My first foray into AI-assisted software development Background As a currently hands-off engineering leader, I haven't had much real time during work hours to stay on top of AI software development — something that was starting to make me feel quite uncomfortable. The problem —…
In this post, I will outline processes that I believe will enhance your interviewing procedures. This is based on 20 years of experience, 10 of which have been in leadership roles involving interviewing. Keep it Short Unless you are Google or Amazon, candidates may not be specifically eager to work for you, so let's not pretend this is a prestigious opportunity. They are likely interviewing at…
The year 2026 marks my 20th anniversary as a Software Developer. I started in 2006 at a company called TechnoPhobia in Sheffield. My interview process there was interesting, to say the least. I was hired from a set of 2nd-year university students because I was one of the nerdiest-looking ones. I don’t actually remember much about that interview other than being warned by my housemate at the time…
Predicatably I haven’t blogged much in the last year. Just pushing this update on a small side project I recently completed - https://musictutorsofsydney.org/. It’s suprisingly easy to create a fairly complex website entirely free with Jekyll on github pages. The only thing you actually need to pay for is the domain name. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll
This was originally going to be a presentation I put together for work, but I shelved that for now and decided to create a blog post with roughly the same content. Images are, of course, courtesy of ChatGPT. My company (prior to me joining) embarked on the journey of trying to rebuild the core platform, and it did not go as planned. Here, I will outline why this is so often the case and suggest…
I previously worked for A-League and during my time there we launched aleagues.com.au and migrated all the club websites to a Wordpress platform developed by a third-party. The system we inherited had a set of APIs deployed into AWS. Games, Teams, and Competitions are imported from a third-party provider via Event Bridge and a series of Lambdas. The data is stored in MongoDB, then surfaced via…
Continuing my usual routine of blogging, where I write an entry then come back 6 to 12 months later, the first thing I do is try and get my Jekyll blog to work locally and then waste several hours wrestling with Ruby only to then repeat the process in Github actions when it inevitably fails to deploy. I decided to just switch to a hosted platform, I spent some time dabbling with wordpress.com…
The previous post on this topic didn’t quite work, the resources were deployed into the API however the deployment didn’t work correctly and update the stage. As we hadn’t gone far into the dev process I didn’t test the API calls outside of the API Gateway console. CDK Currently in CDK there’s no way to reuse a stage when deploying into a stack. So this code doesn’t work if the dev stage is…
We wanted to have a shared Cloudfront Distribution and API Gateway and deploy multiple resources from potentially different stacks as endpoints on this API Gateway, this way we can control access and authenication at a centralised location. This assumes you already have an API Gateway and a VPC deployed and CommonVpcId, CommonApiGatewayId and CommonRootResorceId available in SSM. This first class…