Blog
Thoughts on engineering, design, and building great products.
Migrating & Upgrading GitLab 15.6.1 to 19.2: New Box, Going Private, Cutover Behind Production
One long night migrating GitLab EE 15.6.1 to 19.2. Build a new box, restore, step-upgrade through a dozen required-stops, move GitLab from public (Cloudflare + ELB) to private (NLB + PrivateLink + Transit Gateway), then cut over with split-horizon DNS — all without touching the old box. With real upgrade bugs, speed-up tricks, and seven post-cutover issues and their fixes.
Deploying ReadEase on AWS with ECS Fargate and Terraform
Bringing ReadEase — a platform that helps children who struggle with reading — onto AWS with ECS Fargate, RDS PostgreSQL, S3 and Terraform, in a Single-AZ architecture tuned for a portfolio/demo.
From Messy Bank Statements to AI Insights in 48h: An AWS-Native AI Money Coach System Design
The real-world AWS architecture story behind BudgetBot, an AI Money Coach for Vietnamese users: upload a statement or payment screenshot and the AI auto-classifies transactions, computes budgets, and advises spending. Async pipeline, 4-level deduplication, ~$30/month cost optimization, and financial-data security.
AWS-native Observability for EC2 with the CloudWatch Agent
A hands-on lab building an observability pipeline for EC2 with the CloudWatch Agent, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Metrics, Alarms, SNS email and a Dashboard, across two real cases: installing the agent on an existing EC2 instance, and bootstrapping the agent at launch time on a brand-new one.
Things GitHub Actions Tutorials Tend to Skip
After Part 1's first pipeline, this article covers 9 things basic CI/CD tutorials skip about GitHub Actions: concurrency control (with the github.ref gotcha), the branch rule for reading YAML on external events, the workflow_* family (dispatch, call, run — with the head_sha gotcha), cache dependencies, matrix strategy, Docker Hub instead of building on the server, GITHUB_TOKEN permissions, OIDC for AWS (no more long-lived SSH keys), and environment + required reviewers.
CI/CD Concepts and Your First Pipeline on AWS EC2
A step-by-step guide to deploying a React + Node.js web app to AWS EC2 with Docker, then wiring up an automated CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions. Walks through CI/CD fundamentals, the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, the standard pipeline stages (Source → Build → Test → Quality Gate → Package → Deploy → Verify), GitHub Actions terminology, common deploy strategies, then builds a first end-to-end pipeline. Aimed at DevOps newcomers.
What's New in AWS: a re:Invent 2025 → Early 2026 Recap
The opening edition of a recurring AWS digest, catching up on six months from re:Invent 2025 to early 2026. The features worth your attention: Lambda Durable Functions, EKS Capabilities (managed Argo CD), DynamoDB multi-Region strong consistency, Bedrock's 18 new open-weight models, S3 Vectors, Security Hub GA, plus the list of services being retired. Every item is grounded in the AWS docs; whatever can be demoed is run for real, then cleaned up.