ラーメン

As an avid lover of ramen, I made it my personal mission to stop at as many ramen shops as I possibly could while I traveled through Japan. There are several regions of Japan known for incredible cuisine. Osaka has a reputation for being a foodie’s paradise. Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, has perfected a specific style of thick, creamy bone broth called Tori Paitan that is difficult to find in other places. And Tokyo has enough varieties and reinterpretation of the dish to keep you occupied for a decade or more.

I’m finally content with this site. For now.

A few weeks ago, this site was an extremely basic blog with no content. Now it feels—dare I say—world class. Even if nobody reads it yet.

Featuring:

• A (mobile-friendly!) UI I’m not embarrassed to show off
• Basic Search Engine Optimization
• A CMS so I stop hardcoding everything
• A Staging Environment, so I can break it safely
• Integrated Search. And it actually works
• Some almost-tolerable content
• Fancy CSS (please clap)
• Sagas (ongoing series)
• A Custom Email Domain (to impress potential employers)

It looks pretty good for something built by a backend engineer. It’s relatively polished. It has all the essentials. And best of all, I don’t hate it.

The Ouroboros

The modern internet is a museum of broken mirrors. Content feeds models, which then generate content, and we call it progress because there are tensors involved.

Human creativity is no longer a prerequisite— if anything, it’s a liability. Blog posts? Why would you, say, write a tech blog yourself when an LLM trained to write tech blogs can do it better and exponentially faster?

If you’ve ever tried pulling your iPhone photo library onto your PC, you might’ve noticed two things:

1. Apple stores images in .HEIC format, which is something you’ve never heard of and don’t want to deal with
2. They nest photos inside a directory structure that looks like it was designed by a random number generator

All you wanted was a bunch of normal JPEGs. But instead, you’re stuck with mystery folders full of files your software can’t open. Neat.

You’ve heard the call to adventure. You’ve plotted a course and purchased the tickets.

Excitement and trepidation overtake you. Only a few days until you embark.

But before you leave, you need the right equipment.

This is an essential list of gear for serious adventures.

Must Have

Heavy Duty Backpack

Your mobile base of operations. Internal frame, weather-resistant, preferably with lockable zippers.

Weatherproof Jacket

Lightweight, breathable, and actually waterproof (not just “water resistant”).

All I wanted was a small web service. Nothing complex. Just something that:

• Pulled data from a few sources
• Cobbled it together
• Saved the results somewhere
• Exposed it via a simple REST API

That’s it. I didn’t need a UI. I didn’t have users. I didn’t even need a custom domain.

Naturally, I created it with:

• ECS on Fargate
• RDS (Postgres)
• Multiple Lambda functions
• API Gateway
• CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
• Terraform to orchestrate all of it
• And a decent chunk of time figuring out IAM

Total spend? About $600 in one month.