misczak.com

The Consumer Tech Apocalypse

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly one week ago, Tim Cook broke the news that Apple would be raising the prices of its products due to the rising costs of memory and storage brought on by the AI industry’s insatiable data center demand and growth. Many in the industry thought that these prices would arrive when new iterations of each product shipped - for example, with the new iPhone during its annual September launch. We didn’t have to speculate long, however, as the other shoe dropped today, with Apple announcing price increases for Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and HomePods.

The Steam Machine

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Way back in November of 2025, Valve made several hardware announcements that seemed to build on its previous releases. A new Steam Controller which took a lot of notes from the popular but still niche Steam Deck; a new VR headset called the Steam Frame that could connect to your PC wirelessly; and their second attempt at cracking the home theater PC/console market called the Steam Machine.

Building Out The HomeLab: Photos with Immich

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my post last month about rethinking my personal tech stack, I had mentioned that I had been using Ente Photos as an alternative to Google Photos, but had also been evaluating Immich. I also mentioned that one day in the future I might move over to Immich after figuring out a better backup strategy for my HomeLab.

Building Out The HomeLab: Proxmox and Tailscale

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Several years ago, I bought a Synology DS920+ to use as a network attached storage (NAS) appliance in the house. I don’t work as a photographer or video editor so my work doesn’t really have any massive storage needs; rather, I wanted someplace to host media for the family that didn’t require an ongoing subscription service to access. For a few years, it served that purpose almost exclusively, both as a drive I could mount and as a Plex server.

Rethinking My Personal Tech Stack

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Like many people, I usually take the start of a new year as an opportunity to reevaluate some choices and habits I have and see if there is room for improvement. One such area up for review is the set of services, apps, and subscriptions I use outside of work.

About the Ruby Central Security Incident

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ruby Central, the non-profit responsible for maintaining the RubyGems package manager, suffered a security incident where they temporarily lost control of their AWS account. They have since published a post-mortem of this event that is ostensibly aimed at putting their community’s minds at ease. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect on me, causing me to come away with more questions than answers.

Recapping the Biggest Pre:Invent Announcements

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While AWS re:Invent doesn’t officially kick off until December 2, we are now officially in the lead up to the event, a time that often seea a flurry of new feature and service announcements. While these announcements are often overshadowed by new products that debut at the conference, they are often just as important (if not more so) to the work I do every day. This week has been the strongest example of this trend to date, with several announcements that made me genuinely excited. In the interest of processing that enthusiasm, I decided to write a recap of what I view to be the biggest ones.

An Easier Way to Enable IMDS Defaults Across All Regions

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
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EC2 instances in AWS can have access to something called the instance metadata service, which makes information (namely metadata) about an instance available to applications, services, code, etc. that runs on the instance. For example, a piece of code can query the metadata service to learn what region it is currently running in.

Google's Professional Cloud Security Engineer Certification

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
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Earlier this year, my team was provided access to a training budget for Google Cloud Platform that we could use in various ways to purchase classroom trainings or licenses to Google’s on-demand training platform, Cloud Skills Boost as well as a number of exam vouchers that could be used on various GCP certification exams. While I had previously worked almost exclusively with AWS (only using GCP for some testing of private service connect), I knew that I had some upcoming projects that required me to build services on GCP. For that reason, I jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of this training and hopefully prepare myself enough to write an exam at the end of it.

Automatically tagging resources in AWS with Owner Information

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Background
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One of AWS’ best practices for building and managing infrastructure in the cloud is to use consistent, accurate tags for the purposes of cost management, correct owner attribution (during operations and security incidents), and even attribute-based access control. This type of tag compliance can be easier said than done, however, especially when dealing with an organization that has a number of accounts owned by different teams with very different tooling and working styles.

Building on GCP

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I had to complete a project that involved running the open source tool Cloudquery to create an inventory of resources in a GCP organization. This assignment turned out to be a great introduction to learning how Google Cloud Platform works, as I had almost exclusively used AWS previously (with only minor trials in both Azure and GCP during that time). Throughout the project, I found myself often mapping certain concepts back to what they would be called or how they would be done in AWS. In doing so, I started to keep score of what I liked more than AWS and what I liked less - and now I’m finally sitting down to organize some of those thoughts.

AWS re:Invent 2022 Security Recap

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The annual AWS re:Invent conference has come and gone. As usual, there is an overwhelming amount of new product launches, feature enhancements, and other service offering announcements to parse through. You could spend several days just sifting through all of the information on ‘new stuff’. What I was interested this time, however, was some of the announcements for security-related services and features, especially those that solve pain points I’ve experienced in the past.

MongoDB World 2022 Talk: Look Ma, No Public IP!

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a lightning talk I gave at MongoDB World 2022.

As your application continues to grow and scale, you may choose to take advantage of powerful MongoDB Atlas features, such as multi-region clusters and sharding, in order to provide a good user experience. While these features are useful, they can also introduce complexities to your application’s architecture if configured incorrectly. In this session, we’ll look at common architectures when designing multi-region sharded clusters and walk through how MongoDB Atlas allows your team to securely connect to each of the clusters without exposing unnecessary components to the public internet.

Tracking Temperature and Humidity at Home with Time Series Data

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Sun, 29 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Background
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Several years back, I received a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ kit from CanaKit alongside this book. I spent some time doing the basic stuff with it (blinking LEDs, running a Linux server, etc.) but eventually turning it into a RetroPie and installing lots of retro games on it. After a while, I lost interest in tinkering with it and just let it collect dust in my office for a number of years.

Building Event Driven Experiences with MongoDB Realm and AWS

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most developers by now are familiar with MongoDB, a NoSQL database that stores data as documents instead of rows. MongoDB’s fully managed service product, MongoDB Atlas, comes with MongoDB Realm, which is a set of services that help facilitate mobile and web development by providing a scalable, serverless backend for your application. Realm offers a lot of services (more than we can cover in just this post), but today I wanted to focus on how to use two of them in tandem to help connect a MongoDB Atlas database into a distributed, event driven architecture that can be built on AWS.

About

blog@misczak.com (John Misczak) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m John Misczak and this is my blog where I (infrequently) write about some stuff I’m working on or topics I’m currently learning about.

I currently work in cloud security, helping secure applications and services across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Outside of work, I spend most of my time with my kids - but when they’re otherwise busy or asleep, I can usually be found out running or tinkering with my home lab setup.

misczak.com

The Consumer Tech Apocalypse

The Steam Machine

Building Out The HomeLab: Photos with Immich

Building Out The HomeLab: Proxmox and Tailscale

Rethinking My Personal Tech Stack

About the Ruby Central Security Incident

Recapping the Biggest Pre:Invent Announcements

An Easier Way to Enable IMDS Defaults Across All Regions

Introduction #

Google's Professional Cloud Security Engineer Certification

Introduction #

Automatically tagging resources in AWS with Owner Information

Background #

Building on GCP

AWS re:Invent 2022 Security Recap

MongoDB World 2022 Talk: Look Ma, No Public IP!

Tracking Temperature and Humidity at Home with Time Series Data

Background #

Building Event Driven Experiences with MongoDB Realm and AWS

About

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