Aaron Batilo's newsletter

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Initial impressions on Tesla full self driving beta

I was recently accepted into the Tesla full self-driving beta program. This was about 2 weeks ago and I probably been in the driver seat while the car is been driving for about 300 to 350 mi now and I wanted to share some initial thoughts that I've had with the behavior of the car.

Firstly, I'm not officially affiliated with Tesla in any way but I do own some stock with Tesla. I definitely identify as being a fan of Tesla overall for what it's worth, so keep that in mind as I share my opinions.

#4
January 15, 2022
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Pushing big docker images more quickly using docker buildx and your EKS cluster

Building containers is easy when your applications are small. I’m usually doing projects in Golang, but at work we’re a monolithic Django application and after we install all our system dependencies and application dependencies, we end up with a 4.5GB container. It takes a while to build and even longer to push the container. Because of that, I started re-reading any literature that I could find about improving your Dockerfile usage.

It comes as no surprise that the first thing everyone tells you to do is to try using multi-stage builds. It makes sense. In a language like Go, you can download all of your dependencies in one stage and then copy your binary out to the stage that’ll actually be your container image. Unfortunately, Python ecosystems don’t work quite like that. You can install everything into your virtual environments, but there isn’t quite the same concept as a single binary. There’s a project called pex which does something close, but building a pex artifact just reduces everything into a single file which can help but doesn’t actually reduce the size of anything. This is kind of an over simplification but the pex format can be thought of as simply zipping up the virtual environment. You still include everything.

#3
August 21, 2021
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GitHub Actions for Pulumi

I just recently created abatilo/pulumi-composite-actions which is an adapted version of the official pulumi/actions.

They’re largely the same in terms of end result but with some minor changes.

#2
April 13, 2021
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Hi, I'm Aaron

I didn’t have anything interesting to say for a first post. I more just wanted to say hello! I do have a couple of draft posts already though.

For a while, I’ve had a pretty dead “blog” on my website. I’ve opted to make my website more focused on what I’ve done and about me, and I want to use a newsletter format for longer form writing. Since I want to keep the newsletter archive available, it’s kind of like a blog anyways. It did always feel weird to have my blog post drafts just be available on my blog’s GitHub repository anyways.

#1
April 10, 2021
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