The Newton Lab

Modernizing my blog, as a practice run

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 22:00:00 +0000

This blog ran on WordPress on a Lightsail instance for years. It’s now static HTML in an S3 bucket behind CloudFront, and if you’re reading this, you didn’t notice the switch. That was the goal.

I know the tools involved, so I wasn’t trying to learn S3, CloudFront, Terraform or GitHub Actions. I wanted to practice the process: assess, decide, build, prove, cut over, decommission. Those are the same steps you’d follow for an app that matters, done on one where a mistake costs me a broken link instead of a pager.

Say no go

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:42:49 +0000

My agent’s prompt says “do not skip steps.” AWS just made that a state machine’s job

There’s a line in the driver prompt for the agent that writes the first draft of these posts that I’m not proud of. It says, in so many words, that the notify step “must actually run, not just be narrated.” I wrote it after a run where the agent cheerfully described sending me a notification instead of sending one. Above that line there’s a numbered list of nine steps and a polite request not to skip any of them.

Building my own replacement, one permission prompt at a time

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:11:35 +0000

I spent the weekend enjoying the fall weather, watching college footbal and building something that is, depending on how you squint at it, either a nice bit of automation or me quietly training my own successor. It’s a weekly agent that reads tech news in my usual lanes, picks one thing worth writing about, and leaves a draft in this very WordPress install for me to edit or bin. If you’ve seen a post show up here with “blog-news-agent” as the author from now on, that’s it, not a new hire.

AI Agent Eye-opener (Or: How I built my first iOS app with AI)

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:52:23 +0000

As part of my daily work, I use AI a lot — asking the chat bot various questions, getting code snippets, general information searches. Until a few days ago, that covered my use of AI. I’ve taken several different AI/agentic coding classes but hadn’t had a real need or desire to build anything using AI. Until recently…

My plan was to build an AWS exam question generator that used AI to craft questions similar to those found on the actual exams. This sounded like a quick and easy project to get more familiar with development with AI.

A simple way to secure your home network’s external DNS queries

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:04:12 +0000

I watched an interesting YouTube video today and got inspired on setting up a DNS over HTTPS (DOH) server. The idea was to put a new DOH server as the forwarder/next hop for my network’s DNS. So heres the quick breakdown:

While watching some SEC football I installed Ubuntu as a VM on my Hyper-V setup. It was setup to use the minimal config so not much was added. First add dnsdist.

The new AWS Managed AD Hybrid Edition

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 06:32:11 -0500

I needed to ramp up on the new feature of AWS’s Managed Active Directory (Hybrid Edition) and so it’s good opportunity to share my experience.

First off the use case – much like the original version of Managed AD, the Hybrid Edition is ment to allow organizations to extend their on-premises AD to the cloud and leverege it to access cloud resources. Previous to Hybrid Edition, the options were to use Managed AD and create a trust or use the AD Connector.

On My Silver Anniversary In Consulting

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:10:57 -0500

January 2025 marks a couple of milestones. It will be my 3rd year at Slalom and is my 25th year in technology consulting. Wow time flies…and so I thought I would share some reflections on this journey I’ve been (and am still) on.

For those who have known me long, know that my path to IT was a circuitous one. I am a graduate of the Grady School of Journalism at UGA and while still in college my brother inspired me to get into computers as hobby by showing me his 286 running Xtree Gold. This started my love of the PC and all things “tech”. My professional career started in TV production (WNGC TV in Athens), then advertising sales, then to sales for a small IT shop, followed by becoming a PC technician in that same IT shop. I earned my first MCSE certification in 1996. In January 2000 I stared my first role as a consultant. In my 25-year career I’ve consulted for the smallest of “mom and pop” shops, some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies, a US government agency, and a major league sports team.

My go to Kubernetes tools

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:03:39 -0500

After working with the popular and still growing container management platform, I’ve had the opportunity to use several different management tools. Here’s my current favorites.

OpenLens

A GUI and open source K8s management tool. Works well with a small number of clusters (10 clusters can be added/pinned to the “hotbar”).

This tool has the ability to connect to pods and view logs, but needs a extension installed. My process to add is to press command+shift+e (Mac) or control-shift-e (Windows) to get the extension UI and add the @alebcay/openlens-node-pod-menu to the list and click install. (note: I usually have to close OpenLens and re-open)

My answer for complex aws filters with terraform

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:44:49 -0500

Hello again friend. It’s the heat of the summer and I’ve been on a rather long engagement helping a client automate the build of EKS servers. One item I was keen to automate was the target subnet where the cluster gets installed and where to place the node group(s). So I turned to the aws_subnets data source object, which returns the all subnets in the vpc. It is up to us the humble devops to create a filter to return only the objects desired. The environment we were working in had two dev subnets that were non-standard named and thus throws off any simple filters. The solution for me was to use conditional filters. The code sets the filter value based on the “environment” variable. Each filter’s default response of is “*”, which means don’t filter. With the handy yet long-winded code it can return just the subnets needed.

An easier method to deal with AWS Security Groups via Terraform

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:08:16 -0500

As I continue my Terraform journey, I am always trying to find better ways to deal with the complexities of the code and the resulting resources built from the code. Security Groups are no execption.

I did some web searching and found some code to parse a CSV and create a security group rule set. I took that idea and expanded on it. The idea is you pass a CSV with all the rules and the code is designed to create the Security Group (SG) and add the rules within the given SG.