Asimov had the three laws in his fictional robots stories to protect humans and robots, but what about in non-fiction? Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI The Asilomar Conference was organised by the Future of Life Institute and took place in January 2017 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds (California), with many researchers, experts and thought leaders […]
Automatic Preview Environments with SST and GitHub Actions
Learn how to set up automatic preview environments for Next.js apps using SST and GitHub Actions, similar to Vercel’s preview URLs but on AWS infrastructure.
14Jun/25
GitHub Codespaces: Creating A Codespace
I generally use a Raspberry Pi as my home Visual Studio Code server, allowing me to code in a dedicated developer environment. Sometimes though I might be away from home on a device that can’t connect back. So what’s a geek that wants to code to do in those circumstances? GitHub Codespaces GitHub Codespaces provide […]
Artificial Intelligence: What is the Gorilla Problem?
Professor Stuart Russell used the term “The Gorilla Problem” in his book, “Human Compatible” (Penguin, 2019), to describe how a super intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) could be a threat to humanity. Russell poses the problem “of whether humans can maintain their supremacy and autonomy in a world that includes machines with substantially greater intelligence“. At […]
29May/25
Good Bye Linux Format
Issue 329, available now (May 2025) in the UK, is the final issue of Linux Format (LXF). The magazine lasted for 25 years and that is an amazing achievement in the modern age of websites delivering information and answers 24/7 – but before “always on connectivity” and broadband speeds it was a little different. It’s […]
AI For Good – Book Review
As part of my ongoing CPD I am learning more about Artificial Intelligence (AI), and as someone who enjoys reading that gave me another reason to read “AI For Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health“. Published by Wiley in 2024, and edited by Juan M. Lavista Ferrers (PhD, MS) and William B Weeks […]
Mocking (Python)
When I write code I like to include tests. Tests help me to reduce the risk of code breaking changes and give me the reassurance that what I have coded does what I need it to do. I’m currently writing a backend (Django/Python) that serves some APIs and a frontend (Flask/Python) to consume those APIs, […]
15May/25
Terraforming Proxmox
A blog post looking at using Terraform to deploy a container into Proxmox.
Case Study: Building Enterprise-Grade AWS Infrastructure for Accolade
Case study detailing how Towards the Cloud partnered with Accolade to build a secure, scalable, and SOC 2 compliant AWS landing zone.
Validating CloudFormation Templates in AWS CodePipeline with cfn-lint
Learn how to integrate cfn-lint into your AWS CodePipeline using AWS CodeBuild to automatically validate CloudFormation templates and enforce standards.