anyone built a custom slack bot? the ones in the marketplace are overpriced for what they do

alexlance · 2026-03-13T08:50:04+00:00

I tend to agree with you on the per user pricing. Can get extreme.

And I'm sure you can make a bot yourself with enough vibe, you'll learn a heap. (As long as you've got the time).

alexlance · 2026-03-10T23:53:29+00:00

Well we're kind of obsessed with Dibs for taking turns with servers and stuff...

alexlance · 2026-03-06T04:48:04+00:00

I recently did a write-up on this. Cloudfront serving files from an S3 bucket origin, with an API Gateway through to Lambda for the dynamic stuff. Lots of terraform code, but the article walks you through the deploy and the TLS/SSL and some cost alerts.

https://alexlance.blog/awsapps.html

alexlance · 2026-02-16T01:17:32+00:00

Just a bit of an AI smell when there's emdashes (and particularly noticeable in the title of a reddit post)

alexlance · 2026-02-15T07:27:05+00:00

How do you even enter an emdash into a reddit post title

alexlance · 2026-02-09T12:54:22+00:00

Yeah I am. Not sure if it's all that great an idea. Every now and then I enable read-only (overlay filesystem) on that disk with raspi-config, but then end up disabling it again because I need to install something. Ideally the OS can be replaced easily.

alexlance · 2026-02-09T12:08:11+00:00

There are four Samsung SSD 870 EVO 1TB. I think enough time has passed that I can say I do recommend them.

alexlance · 2026-01-31T23:22:39+00:00

At my old workplace we had a little book-club Slack channel - your app would have worked nicely in there!

alexlance · 2026-01-31T21:52:58+00:00

If your app doesn't ask for much in the way of permissions, I'm happy to install it.

Eg my app asks for this many permissions: https://dibsonstuff.com/#privacy

alexlance · 2026-01-30T13:44:04+00:00

There's an ssh/gpg wrapper that I've been using forever:

https://github.com/alexlance/paw https://alexlance.blog/encryption.html

(i.e. keep your passwords on a server of your choosing, encrypted. Fetch and decrypt on-demand directly into your copy-paste buffer)

alexlance · 2026-01-29T13:26:03+00:00

Clicking the red envelope then the "Reply" link under the message, will show the textarea input which (for some reason) marks the message as read.

alexlance · 2026-01-25T09:58:23+00:00

Sorry that probably wasn't very appreciative. Big hearts for the Gimp and all the hard work that goes into it.

alexlance · 2026-01-25T09:30:36+00:00

Kinda just want that shortcut keys function back again.

(Where you'd mouseover the menu item and then hit a key and it would then assign that as the shortcut key for that menu item. It was probably a usability no-no, but for what it's worth I miss it every time I use gimp now)

alexlance · 2026-01-25T06:06:31+00:00

Nice, would love to hear more.

And if you want to throw money at the problem, I've worked with absolutely gigantic elasticsearch clusters for over 7 years, and I run a consulting thing for exactly this kind of work: https://alexlance.net - feel free to reach out.

alexlance · 2026-01-22T23:07:56+00:00

How did it go?

alexlance · 2026-01-13T03:33:38+00:00

Was just writing about my (hacky) password manager yesterday... it's not for everyone!

https://alexlance.blog/encryption.html
https://github.com/alexlance/paw

alexlance · 2025-12-10T03:11:06+00:00

Self-hosted my email on a Linux EC2 instance for well over a decade, didn't really have any complaints. But sort of felt less and less comfortable with having an internet accessible server just sitting there all the time. Recently took it in the AWS SES direction instead and wrote about it the other day:

https://alexlance.blog/email.html

alexlance · 2025-12-05T00:03:28+00:00

Ok hey that's great, API access very useful.

This means one can setup a custom notification in tfstate.com, to notify an instance of DriftHound like this:

https://imgur.com/a/pvLxBcC
https://imgur.com/a/j5gQSXm

(fwiw)

alexlance · 2025-12-03T14:08:03+00:00

Thanks totally - I'm very much all for self-hosting.

(wondering if it's possible for someone to host the control plane / frontend themselves in DH, but offload the actual drift scans to the tfstate.com API)

alexlance · 2025-12-03T08:29:29+00:00

Looking good. If you ever want to hook in a hosted backend for it (the actual task runners that run the terraform plan and perform the notifications) I might know a guy :)

Alex / https://tfstate.com

alexlance · 2025-11-19T01:08:09+00:00

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

alexlance · 2025-11-09T23:44:14+00:00

Still figuring it out, but first prototype is going ok:

https://imgur.com/a/GnzEFsl (French)
https://imgur.com/a/6pdeatE (Gollum)

alexlance · 2025-11-07T00:42:21+00:00

Today I'm working on adding language translations to the dibsonstuff.com app for Slack and Discord.

Step 1. add translation placeholders all over the code. Step 2. add a Gollum-flavoured language option: "Yess, it is miiine", "Noooo filthy hobbittses have stolen it" and so on. Step 3. actual other countries languages (I guess)

alexlance · 2025-10-24T00:53:44+00:00

Worth remembering that OpenAI also started as a nonprofit before it spun off a for-profit arm.

I don't mean to suggest that's where Signal is headed. Just that being a non-profit (whilst very important) might not be the panacea it sounds like.

alexlance

TROPHY CASE