Neil Carson - Neil Carson

Europe: Asleep at the wheel

Europe has been missing the economic plot for quite some time now. It has been eaten away by America at one end since World War II, and it's getting eaten by China at the other end. It's been eating itself everywhere else with a focus on

AWS

How Kubernetes halved our cloud spend, saved $3.9M/yr

We were burning about $6M/yr across AWS, Azure and GCP. We immediately cut this spend in half by repatriating workloads into a new Kubernetes-based private cloud, then saved even more as the private cloud grew.

Politics

The end of democracy

A government of the elite and corporations, by the wealthy, for themselves? Democracy and the Right to Vote are not the same thing. Most of the electorate don't really realise that their democracy is already broken. What really matters is how far a government strays from representing its citizens.

Cantonese

Superior stock and derivatives

Below are instructions for making a basic superior stock; refining it into a crystal-clear consommé; and using the leftovers to make a white concentrated stock.

Snowflake breach? Privacy!

At the end of March, security firm Hudson Rock claimed, according to a conversation with a threat actor, that Snowflake had been breached by stealing an employee's credentials to log into ServiceNow and then access and download data from potentially hundreds of customers. Snowflake's lawyers no

Business

Tesla, BYD and the EV market

The global EV market is moving at a million miles an hour. From trips to Australia and China and discussions with a significant Tesla investor, I’ve been fascinated by what's going on.

London

Cryotherapy: London chill

Brass monkey weather is nothing compared to what happens inside a cryo chamber.

Cooking

Wok burners, WOKits, BTUs part II: Reviewing the WOKit Gen3 and an induction wok

Finding the best wok burner isn't just about BTUs or Watts. Updated with a review of the WOKIt third generation and an electric induction burner.

Business

Taiwan: The kitchen making tasty chips

China will only reclaim Taiwan by force if their leader goes mad. Sometimes that happens to lifelong leaders and dictators (sometimes I worry about my own sanity).

Woodwork

Custom kitchen cabinets, eh?

Perhaps as the next venture, instead of doing this incredibly complex software engineering and architecture combined with years of stress and poor sleep to get to products with high gross margins, I'll just start a panel cutting shop instead.

Cloud

SaaS: How AWS Graviton moves money from Snowflake customers' wallets to shareholders' pockets

...a 76% product gross margin - up from 70% just over a year earlier. Furthermore, they announced approval for a $2bn stock buyback programme. Much of the savings from Graviton isn't resulting in lower prices for Snowflake customers and instead is going to stock buybacks

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse for data apps

Data applications' needs are different from traditional enterprise data warehouses.

Hong Kong

The Lion Rock (獅子山): HK urban hike

In Hong Kong, in half an hour one can go from a cosmopolitan metropolis surrounded by international shopping malls to a mountain, listening to the sound of bamboo blowing in the breeze, a rich green vista of mountains, lakes, beaches and ocean, with wild monkeys, pigs, birdsong and butterflies.

Engineering

Why we don't want just hardcore programmers anymore

Today's software developer can't just have an interest in the machine, like what fascinated me when I grew up programming. He or she must be interested in understanding and solving actual problems for people and businesses, and be able to join the dots back to the underlying technology.

Travel

Making and drinking mezcal

I spent a couple of hours at the Jimenez Mendez distillery, chatting to the 5th Generation distiller. The distillery is in a small shack along the side of a road at the back of a family garden, but their spirits are amazing. The distillation process is described below along with photos.

Travel

Death and remembrance in Oaxaca

I've been incredibly fortunate to spend three wonderful days (only about half of which was spent working!) with friends in Oaxaca, Mexico, seeing firsthand the celebrations of El Dia de los Muertos — the day of the dead — and what an eye-opening, culturally rich experience it was.

Data Warehouse

Being outcompeted by suppliers

It's long-term trouble to be running a business where your competitors control the cost of your product. This didn't end well at my previous employer, and won't end well at some cloud data warehouse companies either.

Hong Kong

Taiwan and US politics

It was interesting watching the foreign support for the Hong Kong riots three years ago. The riots on the surface were in protest at a new extradition bill that the government was trying to pass, but in practice also speak to the lack of opportunities and progress felt by so

Travel

On my quick Amsterdam visit

Comparing Amsterdam to other cities in Europe, the US and Asia, it appears on the surface that the Dutch have got a number of things right—and some of those things would be very controversial in other countries

Snowflake

Comparing to Big Dog Snowflake

It's impossible not to be impressed by the stunning success of Big Dog Snowflake, but it sucks to be compared to them all the time. However there are recent signs that Big Dog is starting to lose its bark, and there's some howling.

Cooking

Perfect poached chicken - back cheat guy (白切鸡)

A recipe, based on sous vide principles, for perfect poached chicken. This recipe is based on the Cantonese preparation, but simplified and modified for temperature-accurate cooking.

Hong Kong

Covid in HK & China, part 2: Where do we go from here?

I've had a "taste of Omicron" myself recently: Having been repeatedly exposed to different forms of Covid at work and outside for the last few months, the virus finally took hold and infected me. I had one night with poor sleep perhaps due to a mild

Woodwork

Hand-made dining table and tips for working with live edge slabs

I built dining tables out of live-edged walnut and maple slabs, with pegged mortise and tenon bases that can be knocked down and flat-packed.

Yellowbrick

A start-up with global gumption

The first code of Yellowbrick was written in Hong Kong, the USA, the UK and Estonia.

Hong Kong

The covid plague in Hong Kong

As a resident of Hong Kong, I have to say the territory is having an absolutely rotten time recently. Unlike most of the world which has chosen to live with covid-19, mainland China still continues to run it's "dynamic zero covid" policy. This is quite effective