akuszyk.com

Welcome to my blog 👋

I’m Andy Kuszyk, and I work as a Software Engineer. I’m based on the South coast of the UK, and enjoy writing about my experiences.

I currently work with Golang, Terraform, AWS, and Kubernetes. I also have experience in .NET, Clojure, and Python. And that’s not to mention Elisp! 🤓

📓 If you’re looking for my CV, you can find it here.

💬 If you’d like to get in touch, please reach out on LinkedIn.

Debugging phantom 400 responses

I recently spent an entire week debugging an unusual situation involving unexplained, intermittent 400 responses to seemingly well-formed HTTP requests. Throughout the week, I tried a variety of things to debug the situation, pulled out more than a little of my hair, and finally stumbled across the solution.

Published: 11th October 2024.

Where do all the senior engineers go?

Earlier in my career, I wondered where all the senior engineers went in technology companies. There didn’t seem to be that many in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Now I’m a little more experienced, I think I’ve spotted where a lot of them end up.

Published: 4th October 2024.

Editing encrypted files in Emacs

I routinely store note files in Git repos, and use Emacs’ native GPG support to encrypt and decrypt sensitive files. In this post I explain how I create and distribute GPG encryption keys, and how I configure Emacs to make the process as ergonomic as possible.

Published: 3rd September 2024.

A practical checklist for building distributed systems

During a period when I was designing a new payments system, I worked with several teams of engineers to design new components in a highly distributed system. As we iterated on our design process, we created a checklist of ideas to consider when designing a new part of the system. In this blog post, I talk through each of the items on our checklist, and why we thought it was an important topic to consider when designing new distributed systems.

Published: 2nd September 2024.

A simple guide for writing good acceptance criteria

I recently shared some tips for writing acceptance criteria with a team I’m working with, so I thought I would re-post them here in case anyone else finds them useful.

Published: 28th June 2024.

Securing environment access from day one (4/8)

This is the third of my follow-up posts about bootstrapping a successful engineering organisation. In this post, I go into more detail about one way to secure engineering access to your environments from day one; in a way that will scale with the size of both your team, and your estate.

Published: 29th May 2024.

Using multiple SSH keys for git authentication

Although I’ve been vaguely aware this was possible for many years, I only recently had the need to authenticate with multiple GitHub accounts via SSH from the same machine. In this post, I summarise how to make use of multiple git SSH identities from the same host, with some easy-to-manage configuration tips.

Published: 27th November 2023.

Visualising data analysis in Emacs org-mode

I recently wanted to perform some data analysis and visualise the results in a similar way to using a Jupyter Notebook. This post shows a couple of tricks for doing so directly from within Emacs org-mode.

Published: 23rd November 2023.

Decision-making and design in growing engineering organisations (3/8)

This is the second of my follow-up posts about bootstrapping a successful engineering organisation. In this post, I discuss the importance of documenting decisions from early-on, and describe a framework I’ve found useful for structuring problem-solving and design discussions as engineering teams grow.

Published: 17th May 2023.

Yet another guide to Mermaid diagrams in GitHub pages

I’ve recently published my first blog post on GitHub pages using Mermaid diagrams as plain text in the markup. It was surprisingly difficult to find the annoyingly simple way to do this, so here is yet another guide on how to include Mermaid in GitHub pages.

Published: 3rd May 2023

Secrets management in build and deployment pipelines (2/8)

This is the first of my follow-up posts about bootstrapping a successful engineering organisation. In this post, I discuss some practical ideas for managing secrets in build and deployment pipelines which will scale well as an engineering organisation begins to grow.

Published: 3rd May 2023

Bootstrapping a successful engineering organisation (1/8)

I’ve been reflecting on the most important things to get right when bootstrapping a new engineering organisation, particuarly by thinking about what must have gone well when Form3 was founded. This is the first of several posts describing what some of the major challenges might be, and how I think they can be solved.

Published: 15th March 2023

Remapping modifier keys on a Mac, for Linux

A description of how I remapped some modifier keys on a Macbook Air running Linux. I swapped cmd and ctrl, fixed right alt, and made hjkl behave like arrow keys when caps lock is held.

Published: 19th February 2023

Migrating project v2 boards in GitHub

Migrating issues from one project v2 board to another in GitHub can be a little painful. In this blog post I explain how I did it recently using the GitHub GraphQL API, and a smattering of Bash and Python.

Published: 1st February 2023.

What I learned from starting a new project

I have spent almost the last two years working on a large, greenfield project first as the lead engineer, and now as the head of engineering. I’ve learnt a lot about how to grow engineering teams, and build complex systems in this time. This blog post summarises some of my key learnings.

Published: 19th October 2022.

PKI certificate management

I have a rough understanding of PKI certificates, how they work, and what TLS is in general. However, I’ve always struggled to understand the details, particularly from the point of view of an operator. How do I check if a certificate is valid? How do I check who issued it? What does it even mean to “issue” a certificate? In this blog post I try to cover some of these details, and lift the shroud of confusion that has always surrounded these topics for me.

Published: 6th July 2022.

Linux fundamentals

The Linux kernel has always held a mystical place in my mind. It’s the inner sanctum of computer magic which makes programs work. Somehow. In this post I try to suummarise some of the big ideas about the Linux kernel, including what the kernel does, user/kernel space, and the syscalls API surface.

Published: 20th April 2022.

Network Address Translation and Proxies

I’ve always found NAT, forward proxies, and reverse proxies to be somewhat mystical, and I’ve never understood the fundamentals of how each technique works. This post tries to distil each idea into a simple form, and provides Go code examples where possible.

Published: 16th March 2022.

Tracking time and TODOs using Git

I’ve recently finished a small project that allows me to track my working time and keep track of a simple TODO list using a Git repo’s history. Here’s how I did it.

Published: 26th May 2021.

Understanding Prometheus Histograms

Prometheus histograms have always left me feeling a little confused. I recently used them to instrument a distributed system and this post covers a few of the things I learnt in the process.

Published: 15th August 2020.

A LaTeX Deployment Pipeline

A run-down of how I organise, build and deploy my personal fiction projects, written in LaTeX.

Published: 19th May 2020.

De-mystifiying i3

I’ve been using Linux for a couple of years but have always struggled to understand i3, Compton and how some Linux users make me feel like I’m still using Windows! Having finally made the switch from Gnome to i3, this post explains each of the technologies in turn as I understand them - in simple terms!

Published: 18th February 2020.