Simon's Blog — LetsBuild.cloud

Let's Build

Hi! I'm , a Consultant and Software Engineer from Perth, Western Australia. I work for GovConnex, and in the past worked for Mechanical Rock and SEQTA Software.

I've been developing software and helping teams with their practices and products for over 15 years. During that time I've built an interest in writing, learning, and solving challenging problems. This blog is a place for me to share my thoughts, experiences, and learnings.

Latest posts

  • March 1, 2025 - The world's simplest Static Site Generator in Go

    A look at how this blog is generated using a custom-built static site generator written in Go.

  • June 21, 2024 - How to re-organise commits for code review

    How I clean up commits by squashing and creating new logical commits before opening for code review.

  • February 22, 2024 - React anti-patterns that lead to unnecessary complexity

    Where we look at common React anti-patterns such as unnecessary use of useEffect, unnecessary state, premature memoisation, and large inline functions.

  • July 21, 2023 - Scaling out test jobs in GitHub Actions

    Distributing your test suite over concurrent jobs in GitHub Actions isn't as straightforward as it first seems.

  • July 20, 2023 - Are manual gates always bad?

    Waterfall and manual gates bad, agile good, as the industry wisdom goes. But is that always the case and are we glossing over some nuance?

  • May 18, 2023 - Remembering the important bits to log

    Explore a useful mnemonic for remembering the essential information to log in code for supporting debugging, without overcomplicating it.

  • May 17, 2023 - Ship the thing — what's getting in the way?

    What's stopping us from shipping the thing? Are there friction points or waste getting in the way?

  • March 23, 2023 - OpenTelemetry and the future of monitoring and observability

    I share my personal thoughts and experience with OpenTelemetry in 2023 — the benefits, limitations, and impact on monitoring and observability by this game-changing, vendor-agnostic framework.

  • February 9, 2023 - Analysing AWS VPC Flow logs with Python and Pandas

    Where did the datas come from, where did they go? AWS VPC flow log analysis with Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks to understand AWS network costs.

  • June 14, 2022 - Creating A Robotics Simulation Pipeline With GitHub Actions And ROS

    Creating A Robotics Simulation Pipeline With GitHub Actions And ROS

  • March 8, 2022 - Doesn't look good to me — a requiem for thorough code reviews

    Do you give a cursory review and slap the trusty "LGMT!" on pull requests? Read this to find out how you could bring more rigour to your team's code review practices and improve the software delivered.

  • December 20, 2021 - Managing Missing CloudFormation Support with the AWS CDK

    AWS CloudFormation support for services is patchy. Using Custom Resources to poll-fill them can be prone to error and messy. In this post I introduce a module that the AWS CDK provides to make creation of Custom Resources easier, safer and less messy.

  • December 20, 2021 - Applying DevOps Principles to Robotics

    How can you accelerate your robotics development without compromising on quality and safety? DevOps gives us the DORA metrics, which can help serve as a guide for choosing tools to integrate into our delivery pipeline.