The dutch coast of the North Sea makes for a beautiful and relaxing bike route. In this article I share some impressions from a bike trip from Amsterdam to Harlem to Den Helder at the north point of the peninsula.

Scheveningen is the most popular beach resort in the Netherlands. It is also a district of the Hague (the capital of the Netherlands). As a foreigner, I had no idea it existed. In this article I share a few impressions from my visit to the 2022 International kite festival hosted there.

With a job based out of Amsterdam secured, Dyan and I made the move to Amsterdam. Moving to a city for an extended duration is quite different than renting an AirBnB for a month in a given country. In this article I share my experience of securing the basics and getting setup in a new city.

Many years ago on my first visit to Western Europe, Amsterdam captured my imagination. The beautiful architecture, the bikes and lively culture generated a feeling of aesthetic fulfilment, none of the other European capitals I visited did.

I've been using GCP lately for a toy project. Today I got a warning from GCP that my tiny bills had increased four-fold. What happened? It turns out that even a toy instance of PostgreSQL is rather pricey compared to other cloud providers.

As part of exploration of Google Cloud services, I set up an automated build and deploy process for this website. In this post, I look under the hood and see how the simple getting started wizard I used, wires everything together. Over the past 14 years Google Cloud has build up over 100 services on offer. Unfortunately, there does seem to be a lot of duplication that confuses things.

A quick tutorial on an easy way to configure an automated build and deploy pipeline with GitHub and Google Cloud Run. Bonus: hosting is free for small projects.

As part of spinning up this blog, I decided to check out google cloud and get a basic feel for how it works. The TLDR is that even after 14 years on the market it feels relatively unfinished and can be confusing for new users. A lot of the basic features are either duplicated or have some variety of "beta" state around them, which makes them more difficult to use than needed (especially for first time users).