Posts on richardboydii.com

2026 New Year'sResolutions

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:28:34 -0600

I’ve never really done a great job of tracking my New Year’s resolutions. Like most people, I make them then slowly give them up after a few weeks. This year I really want to make a change in the way I approach them. So, why not write a blog post about them in order to hold myself accountable? If I make it public, maybe it’ll provide the extra oomph that I need to stick with them.

My Resolutions

I’m going to be a little ambitious and try to accomplish multiple resolutions this year. I’m honestly not happy with a lot of the things in my life and feel a deep need to make real changes. I’m approaching 50 and want to make sure that the last several decades of my life are meaningful and fulfilling. I think I have at least 20 more years left in the tank and want to make the most of it.

Get Down to 220 lbs

I currently weight 283.5 lbs, the heaviest that I’ve ever been in my life. A few years ago I was able to get down to 220 through diet and exercise. Due to a thyroid condition, I can’t use all those amazing weight loss drugs that are all the rage now, so I have to do this the old-fashioned way. My plan is to hit the gym six days a week in the mornings before work, then ruck at least two miles per day. I’m also going to get back into calorie counting as that was a super important part of my previous success. If I can average losing 5 lbs per month, I should be able to reach my goal by the end of the year.

Read a Poem Every Day

In junior high and high school I would write poetry at least once a week and enjoyed reading other poets. I feel like that was a meaningful part of my life and was both intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. I have a ton of poetry books in my library so I plan to pick a random one each day to read and reflect on it. I’ll also try to periodically write my down those reflections and post here occasionally if one really impacts me.

Reach 1k in Total Sales for ATX Spices

My side hustle, ATX Spices, has been doing well without a lot of effort, but I know that I can definitely push it further if I start hitting the local craft fairs and farmers markets more consistently. Everyone that buys from me loves the BBQ dry rubs and I have ideas to add two additional spice blends to the product line. I also want to get better at marketing and see if I can’t get into some of the local shops in the Austin area.

Launch My Own Tech Conference

As an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and KCD Texas, I have over a decade of experience in organizing conferences. I’ve done pretty much every job there is and know how to manage the different functional areas. I think that what’s missing is a conference that’s focused on AI and how poeple are actually using it. To that end, I’d like to launch the conference by March with a projected conference in September or October.

Getting Into Vibe Coding

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:41:59 -0500

I’ve been toying with some ideas for websites and apps for several years now but never really felt like I had the time to invest in building them. The dream has always been to create web applications that not only help me learn something new but that I can potentially use as a revenue stream. That’s all changed with the advent of agentic-powered software development.

What is Vibe Coding?

(Header suggested by Claude). Vibe coding, according to good old Wikipedia is:

It describes a chatbot-based approach to creating software where the developer describes a project or task to a large language model (LLM), which generates code based on the prompt. The developer evaluates the result and asks the LLM for improvements. Unlike traditional AI-assisted coding or pair programming, the human developer avoids micromanaging the code, accepts AI-suggested completions liberally, and focuses more on iterative experimentation than code correctness or structure.

Or, in my experience, driving the AI through prompting and using a light set of rules and context. I’ve had some great success so far creating several Python click-based CLIs for work that have turned out really well with minimal input on my part. Liberally trusting the AI to write quality code can be dangerous if you don’t understand what its actually creating. Doing this in production is not necessarily something I’d recommend.

A Simple Framework for Vibe Coding

I’ve been experimenting with several iterations of AI prompts based on some of the prompt engineering best practices from Anthropic. I’ve found that building an Architecture Decision Report helps me better articulate what I want the agent to build and keep in on track with the feature at hand. I’ve found that interrupting the agent doesn’t derail it too often, but you want to be careful about leading it on a tangent while you’re in the middle of developing a feature.

The ADR format that I’ve been using is also fairly simple but does a decent enough job of focusing the agent and developing incrementally. I tuck these away in a docs/adrs subfolder in my project along with a rules.md file that has my AI prompt rules.

# ADR 001 - Name of ADR

## Status

Planned | Accepted | Implemented

## Date

YYYY-MM-DD

## Context

Detailed description of what we are building.

## Consequences

### Positive

- Benefits of the new feature.

### Negative

- Downsides of the new feature.

## User Stories

Filled out by the agent.

## Tasks

Filled out by the agent.

Next Steps

I just learned about a new way to run multiple agents in a project, the BMAD Method. On first look it seems to create a whole team of agents that are specialized in different tasks. An orchestrator agent then manages the team of sub-agents in order to build software. I feel like software developers are slowly transforming into engineering managers and product owners at this rate. I’ll make sure to write up another blog post on what I learn from this new method.

Planning Devopsdays Austin 2025

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:26:22 -0600

We decided to kick off planning much earlier this year compared to previous years; we had the website up, CFP and sponsor prospectus up and online by mid October. Our goal was to try and go after end-of-year marketing dollars and get ahead of the game.

Even though we launched early, we didn’t really see any traction with sponsors. We did get a ton of submissions to our CFP, which is great, but the lack of sponsor movement late in the year was a bti disappointing. So far, in the new year, we have managed to land two Gold Sponsors and have invoices out to a few more, so we are still on track to be fully funded again this year.

As the newest member of the core team, sponsor handling has fallen on my shoulders. I must admit: I suck at asking people for money. It’s not something I’ve ever done in my life and learning the art of marketing and sales has been a challenge for me. I think I’m getting better, time will tell.

Tidying Up

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:40:56 -0600

I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I had planned on blogging. This past year has been a pretty busy year. I attended the DevOpsDays Organizer Summit and presented on how to do a venue search (something near and dear to my heart). I also presented at DevOpsDays Philadelphia (still wishing that I had taken ane extra day to explore the city). I was lucky enough to attend Kubecon North America this year and have decided to go after my Certified Kubernetes Administrator Certification.

Going into the new year, I want to try and blog at least once a week and increase my BlueSky and LinkedIn posts as well. I’ve never made a concerted effort to grow my social media following, but I really need to, especially if I want to make it as a speaker at more conferences.

Getting Back Into Blogging

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 13:00:01 -0600

It’s been way to long since I’ve consistently blogged. Years of working at Amazon made me cautious about what I publicly put out there on the interwebz. I have so many things on the backburner in my personal to-do log that I’ve just not found the time to get around to.

Among my various side projects are:

Setting up a local k8s cluster on the numerous Raspberry Pi’s that I have in my home office
Getting Home Assistant setup to do all kinds of home automation tasks
Scanning my vinyl collection into Discogs so I can quit buying duplicates of records I already own
Updating my Synology NAS and getting Plex running in my house
Losing 50 pounds and getting back into shape

It’s early to be making resolutions but I need to get motivated and start accomplishing things instead of wasting time playing games or binging content on all the streaming platforms I subscribe to. There’s a lot of things that I want to write about, I just need to get back into the habit of writing more consistently. Hopefully this isn’t another false start to blogging.

Getting Well

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 15:04:58 -0500

I have struggled with mental wellness most of my life. I think the first time I realized that I wasn’t like other kids must have been Kindergarten. I seemed to be more sensitive than other kids and was plagued with self-doubt. I also seemed to have stronger emotional swings, mostly towards anger and sadness. What I didn’t realize then is that other kids didn’t have the same chaos at home. I was different because my environment was different, and I adapted to survive it.

You Don’t Choose What Happens to You

Everyone, at some point, has something bad happen to them. Whether it’s through their choice or just because the universe can be cruel, something gets through the bubble of optimism and lands a blow. If they’re lucky they get a scratch that heals up, or a bruise that goes away as the memory fades. But some wounds leave scars, leave sore bones that never recover. Those are the things that mark us, change us into someone slightly different. The more traumas like these that we live through, the more scar tissue we carry around with us.

Scar tissue is the best comparison. Tumescent, an over-reaction to an injury by the sub-conscious engines of the body, it grows without our control and then covers us. For me it resulted in a lifelong battle with depression, anxiety, and anger. For others in my family it left similar marks. The killer is that none of it was my fault, but I was left to deal with it, as were everyone in my life.

You Choose What You Do with It

A decade ago I started therapy just after I was married. My wife realized after being around me more than she ever had that something was off. I could normally hide these things so I would limit the time that I was around people. But marriage changed that. I could no longer hide, nor could I act on my best behavior all the time. And so my journey with therapy started.

A few years in to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) I became frustrated by my overall lack of progress. Some of that was down to me; in a therapy session I’m on my best behavior and I’ve become quite adept at psychologically denying that I had outbursts or was in a depression. The next step was Psychiatry, and for that I’m grateful, though it wasn’t easy at first.

Most of my life I clung to the “crazy artist” rationalization: smart people are a little crazy, I’m smart so I get to be crazy. The reverse is that if I stop being crazy I’ll stop being smart. This is stupid, but the mind can do powerful things when it wants to rationalize something. Over the past several years I’ve had my medication switched up in an attempt to find something that works.

If you’re new to Psychiatry, I reccomend having a close friend (or wife) play the role of Watcher. Trying to be objective about how you feel and act can be incredibly difficult. Especially when you’re altering your brain chemistry. So having someone to be a neutral observer of your behavior, to help you know if you’ve gotten better.

Last Thoughts

Men still have a stigma around mental health. My father struggled with mental health and very rarely talked to me about it. I think he felt it made him look weak to admit he had PTSD from his time in Vietnam. I rationalized my own mental health as a necessary evil. The truth is that we owe it to the people in our lives, the people we work with, the people we love, to be as mentally healthy as we can.

Hugo vs Gatsby

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 16:37:44 -0500

For the longest time I’ve wanted to build a proper website using all the fun JavaScript and CSS tricks that full-stack devs do (and that I’ve been jealous of). As a platform / systems / operations engineer, my speciality is in using code to build systems. Front-end design, UI and UX, accessibility, and so many more things are just not part of my day-to-day activities. I think tha they are all incredibly valuable, but my career is hard enough to keep up with technological changes happening in my own tech field, much less those happening in fields that are far outside of my speciality. So I gave it a shot and tried out Gatsby when I started to redesign this site.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a React-based web framework that uses GraphQL to render content from a variety of sources. The advantages are many. Using various plug-ins you can pull content from many types of data sources, including S3 and WordPress. Plug-ins can also help you render data in different formats, like Markdown or JSON. The philosophy of the framework emphasises reusability and components. This makes designing flexible layouts and page components easy to do. Top this off with the ability to generate a static site that you can host pretty much everywhere and you can see why it’s so exciting.

To my non-developer brain, it feels something like functional programming for the web. Put another way, Gatsby is to static site generators as Troposphere is to CloudFormation. Gatsby can render different content types from different sources, from S3 to other content management systems. This is all fused together and rendered as web content in a holistic fashion. Another interesting aspect to Gatsby is it leverages a GraphQL data model to drive all the different plugins and processors. There’s even a built-in GraphQL workbench you can access to query content and play around with. Lastly, Gatsby Tutorial is very well thought out and provides a gentle ramp for inexperienced developers.

Why I Stuck with Hugo

The reason boils down to choosing the right tool for my needs. At the end of the day I’m writing a blog with some static content. Hugo already does this quite well and the ecosystem is constantly growing. If I were making a true webapp or building something more complex, I would absolutely choose to go with Gatsby. I have a side project I’m working on right now and it may be a perfect fit. But for this site, and for what I’m doing here, Hugo is still the best choice.

Starting Over Again

me@richardboydii.com (Richard Boyd II) — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 19:55:45 -0500

Blogging is something that I’ve attempted and failed numerous times over the past ~~years~~ decades. My first attempt at my own webpage happened in High School in 1996 with an Angelfire site. Later I moved onto Geocities along with the post-AOL crowd. Next came Angelfire, then a dynamic DNS setup pointing to a page hosted in my dorm room at college. For most of the 00’s I was radio silent while overseas. When I finally got back to the states I tried to get back into it, first on Facebook, then running my own static site on Bluehost. For the past five years I’ve been hosting static sites on AWS, which is where we are today.

I always wanted to blog. I’ve had an itch to write most of my life and even aspired to write my own book. But writing is a habit, it’s work. You have to commit to it or it just becomes another thing that you start and abandon. So that’s why we’re back here once again.

During the past few years I’ve thought to separate my “landing page” from my Blog. There’s no privacy reason for that, it just sounded like a good idea; in reality it’s premature optimization. If people want to get to know me, read my words, or just see the other platforms I’m on, they should only need to go to one place to do so. Time to retire all the clever domain names I’ve registered over the years and stick with one.

What I’m Writing About

My work and personal interests are closely aligned. I’m a builder, self-taught systems engineer, and journeyman coder who loves to tinker with things. I have a whole backlog of projects that I’ve been wanting to work on and COVID-19 has freed up more time in my life that was normally spent stuck in a car. I’m also going to write about being a father, about personal development, about trying to be a good human being. And technology, lots about that.

Above all, I want to be able to express myself and become a better writer. At my current job we have a heavy narrative culture. Ideas are rigorously interrogated to make sure that when we decide to act that we have a clear end-state and we minimize as many unknown-unknowns as possible. As I’ve been a participant in this new work culture my own writing has subtley improved, as has my speech. At 41 years of age, knowing that you can still improve yourself has been a welcome surprise.

What We Won’t Be Doing

This is less about self-promotion and more about emptying my mind. One of the principle barriers in my life to gettng things done is holding onto things in my own head. I have a prety good memory, so I can tuck away all sorts of to do’s. Over time this builds up into a wall of things to get done that I never get around to; the pebbles of turn into a mountain of procrastination. So writing about the things I’m doing necessitates doing things so this blog is also an attempt at getting off of my fourth point of contact.

I’ll probably post new articles on LinkedIn and Twitter, the two platforms that I think are least-bad of all social media, but that’s more to make sure that people read what I write. Beyond that, there’s going to be no SEO strategy, no marketing campaign, and I am definitely not interested in becoming an influencer (why is that even a thing?).

Closing

So, writing. That’s what we’re doing here. Putting words on the screen about the things that I do, the things I think and feel, and maybe even some experiments in technology as well. I can’t promise that it will be particularly good but this time it will be consistent. Once a week (at least) I’ll put something new up to share with the world.

P.S - I’ve also included an RSS feed to the site if you’d like to subscribe that way.