Martin Raag

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I write software, take photos and run.

Recent posts

Boring Wins

January 6, 2021

Awards are stupid, but that doesn't mean you can't get a kick out of them. So I did from reviewing the Web Technologies of the Year. To give them credit, the winners were selected from survey data of the top websites on the internet, rather than the opinion of self self-appointed arbiters.


Running transient servers with serverless

September 26, 2019

It would seem to me like the writings on serverless making rounds on the web recently are quite polarising. On the one hand there are countless tutorials on building web apps around FaaS offerings, that promise infinite scalability and reduced cost, but seldom delve into the reality of developing and operating such systems. Critical posts too can be short sighted, decrying the deficiencies of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. In my experience serverless tools are not an all-or-nothing proposition. To demonstrate this, I decided to write about a real world example of using AWS Lambda to optimise running periodic jobs on EC2 instances.


Hello World!

September 12, 2019

It must have been about 19 years ago that I was gifted a children’s book about the internet. It was my first exposure, if not a particularly deep one, to the protocols and languages that drive so much of the world around us. Little did the 11 year old me know he had just had a glimpse of what would become his career and hobby for years to come.