James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

This is just a super simple post to encourage you to check out Ventoy, a fantastic open-source tool for creating bootable USB drives. With Ventoy, you can easily create a multi-boot USB drive that can hold multiple ISO files, allowing you to boot into different operating systems or utilities without the need to reformat the drive each time.

A new class of cloud providers is already here, and they’re called “neoclouds”, but you’ll be forgiven if this is the first time you’re hearing about it. You see, unless you’re in the AI space, these could have passed you by, that’s because ’neocloud’ refers a new class of cloud providers that are specialised in AI. A neocloud provider specifically focuses on the infrastructure services that are needed for AI, such as GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS), or bare-metal-as-a-service (BMaaS), that are optimised for AI workloads.

Many people are familiar with the concept of using markup languages to develop diagrams, like GraphViz’s dot Language, or PlantUML. These languages allow users to define diagrams in a text-based format, which can then be rendered into images. If you are not familiar with these tools, check them out - they’re seriously faster for diagram editing and updates than manually drawing boxes in diagramming tools, like some sort of neandertal!

I hate writing documents about myself - CVs, promotion applications, or even just long documents in general - like my dissertation. However, I do love coding, so I can trick myself into writing these documents by using using a markup language. What better language to use than LaTeX? LaTeX (pronounced “Lay-tech” or “Lah-tech”) is a document preparation system and markup language, widely used in academia for writing papers, theses, and books.

One of my favourite topics to talk about with anyone is self hosting. Some people refer to home automation, some people call it homelabs - I have both, and many other systems, in a fairly vast environment where everything is self hosted. I truly believe that self hosting is the best way to really understand lots of aspects of technology, privacy, and how to efficiently build and secure systems. “So, what do you self host?

I didn’t start with Nginx, but it’s become my standard for open source load balancing now-a-days. I started with HAProxy - I remember first hearing about it in my first job, in 2008, when our CTO at the time was raving about it - “HAProxy rocks”, he would say. I didn’t get a chance to use it until several years later. It was when I first started load balancing services properly - somewhat of an improvement than having many services listen publicly on various ports.

This is a very quick blog post, intended as a note to look back on, or to share with with people quickly - a snapshot of my AI usage in November 2025. It’s likely that this will change rapidly over the next few months and years, so I want to capture a moment in time. 80% of my queries now land in AI, 20% in traditional search engines. It will be interesting to see how this changes over time!

I fondly remember this quote when I first heard it - and it made me chuckle. However this is such a good reminder of “GIGO” (Garbage In, Garbage Out) that is so relevant in today’s world of AI and especially Vibe Coding. ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ Charles Babbage Garbage In, Garbage Out is a principle of systems design, and also common sense, that simply means that if you feed in the wrong questions, clearly you will get the wrong answers.

The problem statement When you’re young, single, without family and with a job that you love, it’s easy to give that a lot of focus and energy. When I was promoted to Principal Solution Architect at work, I was about 12th in EMEA, and the youngest by a long way - in March 2019 at age 32. Soon after that I got married, started a family, COVID happened (!), bought a much nicer house and I would say life got a lot more complicated!

It is often said that there are two hard problems in computer science; cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. This post is about the approach I’ve taken over the years to name things - how I’ve named my projects. The very first project that I ever really created is also one that I released - called technowax. It’s actually still online today, in a fashion; http://technowax.net/ . I’m ashamed so say now, after all these years that the name was not original - and it was actually a distant family friend who had a web design company, I think it was, called TechnoWax.