Micah Walter

📍 Port Washington, NY

Notes on configuring Amazon CloudWatch to monitor my Mastodon server

It’s day 2 of running my own Mastodon server. It’s been going pretty well so far now that I am have something working and I’ve migrated my account over. This morning I woke up to a feed filled with posts from the “fediverse!” I realized that I

Notes on running a Mastodon server on AWS

I’ve been pretty Mastodon-curious for a couple weeks now, and after spending some time tinkering with an account I set up back in 2018 on mastodon.social, I decided to explore setting up my own instance. These are my notes.

AssumeRole Compatible S3 Clients for MacOS

There are many, many excellent client applications available for connecting to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Bucket from macOS. Over the years, I’ve used plenty of them. But, I haven’t been able to find a good one that is also compatible with connecting via temporary credentials issued

Calculating Server Capacity for High Availability

Today I was studying for an upcoming AWS Certification and I had a chance to learn a handy method for calculating server capacity for high availability. It’s easy! First, you need to know how many Availability Zones are available in the region you are working in. And, within that

Transferring Amazon Glacier Deep Archives from one account to another

I recently decided to re-do my personal AWS accounts using AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO) and AWS Control Tower. For reasons mostly having to do with house keeping, I decided to start from scratch with a new parent account and migrate things in while cleaning up others. It’s pretty

Today I Learned

I’m starting a new mini-series on here. It’s called “Today I Learned.” I was recently reading “What to blog about” by Simon Willison, where he talks about writing his own TIL posts, and it occurred to me that this is what I should also be doing. Like Simon,

What to do if you throw your back out in the middle of Hong Kong’s Central Station

On each visit, I’d get to see the museum’s construction advance, get delayed, advance some more, and on and on. I dreamed of arriving one day to a finished, opened, bustling cultural center, but COVID happened, and our stories diverged.

A Tactical Approach to Landing a New Job

For me, it felt like standing at the edge of a diving board, overlooking the deep end, in the middle of the night. You more or less know what’s down there, but it sure would be scary to jump in.

The Super Simple Serverless Image Processor and Website

I wanted my thing to be super simple, and cheap, and easy to use, but smart and opinionated.

Are You Happy, or Not, or Not Sure?

It’s not just about making sure the tech works, it’s actually about designing the experience in a way that highlights the people on the phone in a way that replaces something they would ordinarily experience in person.