In the quest to move everything to a pay-what-you-use model and maintaining my enthusiasm for serverless, I was inspired by Nathan’s post over on DevOpStar about creating a chatbot using Facebook’s messenger platform. With my past as a town planner, I’ve been wanting to mix my two skills with programming/devops and town planning to help make the community better for a while, but been struggling to find some inspiration for an idea.

For some time, I’ve run my fun side-project site, Secret Santa on Heroku. In fact, it’s been over three years that I’ve had the site there. Heroku is great for developers wanting to test out their ideas as they have a wonderful free tier of web servers, which has served me well over the past few years. Having spent the last 18 months with my feet firmly planted in the DevOps side of things, I wanted to experiment and test out some things I’ve learned along the way and get…

Following on from my post over at the Mechanical Rock blog, I thought I’d add in another post on how to leverage cloudbuild and GCR Google Container Registry to reuse docker layers to get fast feedback cycles.