Hi, I’m Tyrel.

A software developer constantly learning new skills and technologies. I work for Giftbit building great web services. You can see some of my work below as well as on my Github.

Articles

Building deployment automation piece by piece
October 16, 2026 23 Minute Read
I've now built the same continuous deployment pipeline three times, for three pretty different projects. This is how the pipeline is put together and what changed each time I built it.
#github-actions#cicd#devops#continuous-deployment#automation#platform#slack
AWS access that revokes itself
May 9, 2026 20 Minute Read
How I built a system that automatically revokes access to AWS Roles after a period. This replaces me having to remember to manually revoke access when it's no longer needed, reducing toil.
#aws#iam#security#lambda#python#terraform#infrastructure-as-code#access-control
Shipping ECS Fargate logs to Datadog with FireLens (and what broke)
October 20, 2025 10 Minute Read
Getting logs out of ECS Fargate and into Datadog with FireLens took about twenty lines of Terraform and worked on the first deploy. Then every log arrived as INFO and I couldn't find our tags anywhere. A week to sort both out. One was a real bug, one was me, and for months I gave the credit to the wrong fix.
#aws#ecs#fargate#datadog#firelens#fluent-bit#logging#observability#platform#infrastructure#terraform
AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification
June 20, 2025 7 Minute Read
After abandoning an AWS cert prep course in 2020, I came back four years later with five years of hands-on AWS experience and passed the Solutions Architect Associate on the first try. Here's the course, the exam format, and the three technical failures that nearly derailed my remote test.
#aws#certification#solutions-architect#udemy#infrastructure
Markdown based Code Block Syntax Highlighting
Dec 24, 2024 4 Minute Read
I wanted to add syntax highlighting to code blocks on this site. I use a markdown renderer to convert my markdown articles into html, and I wanted a solution that would work with that system and let me use React components. With syntax highlighting code blocks are far more readable now. Read on to see how I built my system using marked-react and react-code-blocks.
#static-site-generators#nextjs#javascript#typescript#markdown#react#code-syntax-highlighting#marked-react#react-code-blocks#marked
Static Site Search Part 3 - Optimizing the Index
April 18, 2024 8 Minute Read
This is the final part (for now) on the search functionality for my site. I implemented some optimizations that I alluded to in part 1 & 2. I was able to get my search index for my 20-ish posts from ~700kb down to ~22kb!
#static-site-generators#nextjs#javascript#typescript#search
Static Site Search Part 2 - Search Component
April 10, 2024 7 Minute Read
This is the followup to Part 1 in this series on building a Static Site Search for my website. In the first part I built a search index of my articles for quick searching. In this part I'll import that search index into my Next project and create a UI to interact with it. The search component described here is live on this site!
#static-site-generators#nextjs#javascript#typescript#search
Static Site Search Part 1 - Preprocessing Articles
April 3, 2024 15 Minute Read
In this series of articles I discuss how I created a client-side search for my static website. After looking at a few options out there for static sites and Next.js projects, I decided the challenge to build my own search from scratch would be more enjoyable. This first article discusses how I preprocess my articles into a search index.
#static-site-generators#nextjs#javascript#typescript#search
Next.js Tag Pages
March 25, 2024 6 Minute Read
My goal with this project was to make the tags I'm already displaying alongside articles to be clickable links that filter my posts by that tag. Try to click one!
#nextjs#javascript#typescript#webdev#static-site-generators
Book Notes: DevOps Handbook, The
August 27, 2023 8 Minute Read
Here are some point-form takeaways from my notes from reading The DevOps Handbook by John Willis, Gene Kim, and Patrick Debois.
#book-notes#devops#automation#testing#continuous-integration#continuous-deployment#cicd#infrastructure#infrastructure-as-code#git#feedback-loops#continuous-learning#platform
How I use my Synology NAS as my personal cloud
August 15, 2023 10 Minute Read
This is a follow-up to my previous post describing what a Synology NAS is. In this post I describe some of the more interesting functionality that I use every day.
#synology#nas#data-ownership#hardware#photos#note-taking#obsidian#plex#lightroom
Deploy a Next.js Static Site to GitHub Pages
July 23, 2023 8 Minute Read
I cover the config and deployment steps necessary to easily deploy a static site built with Next.js to GitHub Pages.
#github-pages#nextjs#react#static-site-generators#typescript#javascript#cicd#platform
What is a Synology NAS?
July 18, 2023 3 Minute Read
I recently got myself a Synology NAS. What does that even mean? In this part one of two, I talk a bit about what a Synology NAS is. In part two, I'll talk about the cool things I do with mine.
#synology#nas#data-ownership#hardware
Resources I Found Valuable in 2022
Jan 20 2023 2 Minute Read
Here are the resouces I got value from in 2023. Topics include kids, devops, web dev, and some hardware stuff.
#devops#nextjs#hardware#raspberry-pi#synology#kids#webdev
What is DevOps?
April 10, 2022 7 Minute Read
In my role as a software developer at my day job, I’ve been getting more interested in DevOps as a career trajectory. But what does that even mean? Do I even know? This is a brief exploration into what DevOps is and how I see it relating to a small development team.
#devops#automation#github-actions#platform

1
2

Tags