Securing a Self-Hosted AI Agent
I’ve been experimenting with Hermes Agent, an open-source AI agent that can execute commands, browse the web, manage scheduled tasks and interact with external services. The idea is pretty simple: have an assistant running 24/7 that can handle some of the boring administrative tasks I would otherwise have to remember to do myself. The problem is that an AI agent with shell access and the ability to execute arbitrary code isn’t something I’d be particularly comfortable running alongside my personal files, banking credentials or other services....
Running Golang on ARM Lambdas
In 2018, AWS introduced its initial lineup of Graviton processors, and since then, they have continued to evolve and improve. The latest iteration of Graviton processors showcases impressive enhancements, including “25% improved compute performance, up to double the floating-point performance, and up to double the speed for cryptographic workloads when compared to the previous generation…” You can note they don’t compare to Intel or AMD. Thats because in a brute force workload usually the x86 processors win out....
Link Shortener using RocksDB
Update (9 November 2026): The SRTL service at srtl.ie is no longer live. This article remains as a write-up of how the project was built. I built SRTL as a small link shortener. srtl.ie was the shortest domain I could grab. It stands for Short Link, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I recently saw a post on Medium about RocksDB that sparked my curiosity. It’s a high performance key value store using a LSM tree....
Scratch Docker Golang Images
The default golang image is great! It allows you to quickly build and test your golang projects. But it has a few draw backs, it is a massive 964 MB even the slimmed down alpine based image is 327 MB, not only that but having unused binaries and packages opens you up to security flaws. LETS GET BUILDING! Multi Stage Scratch Image Multi-Stage Using a multi-stage image will allow you to build smaller images by dropping all the packages used to build the binaries and only including the ones required during runtime....
Certificate Verification
This will be a quick one, recently had to order a bunch of certificates and unfortunately it had to be handled by a different team which meant the time between when I ordered the cert and got it was… significant. Needless to say I didn’t have a lot of confidence that my certs-csrs-keys all matched up. So here is a quick way to validate you have the correct key-cert-csr combos....