Nicholas Whittaker — developer focused on cloud platforms, DevOps, web development, and automation. On this blog, he writes practical, experience-driven posts about infrastructure, CI/CD, tooling, and modern ops workflows, with the occasional dive into music and gaming.
15 articles from this blog
A DevOps engineer explains how they replaced hardcoded hostnames with dynamic inventory groups using Tailscale tags and Ansible for better infrastructure management.
A developer details fixing a blogroll's XML/XSLT styling issue across browsers by properly declaring ID attributes in a DTD.
A developer details using XSLT to transform an OPML blogroll into styled HTML, integrating it dynamically with Hugo and Nginx.
A technical guide on integrating Buildkite's OIDC tokens with Hashicorp Vault for secure, credential-less CI/CD secret management.
A guide to signing Terraform provider releases using a local Buildkite agent and a personal GPG key, avoiding CI exposure.
A technical guide diagnosing and fixing a slow SSH connection over Tailscale by adjusting firewall rules to enable peer-to-peer networking.
A developer investigates a suspicious Cloudflare email, uncovering a potential account takeover vulnerability using persistent API credentials.
A technical guide on backing up and restoring a self-hosted Plausible Analytics instance using Docker volumes and command-line tools.
A guide on using iOS Shortcuts to migrate iCloud reminders to a Fastmail CalDAV account, covering limitations and steps.
A developer's cautionary tale about a security vulnerability introduced by a seemingly minor change to an Nginx alias directive configuration.
A guide to managing secrets and API keys in a Rush monorepo using the Pass password manager and GPG, including handling parallel build issues.
A developer's musing on discovering aesthetically pleasing or interesting patterns in Git commit hashes, like sequences and palindromes.
A guide on using Cloudflare Tunnel to create a live, web-accessible preview of a Hugo static site during development.
A developer shares their automated workflow using GitHub Actions to create and manage preview deployments for website changes via pull requests.
A developer explains how to opt a website out of Google's FLoC tracking trial using a simple Nginx header configuration.
