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Showing posts from March, 2026

The End of Effective Antibiotics

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Imagine a future where a routine surgery or a simple infection becomes life-threatening—that is the risk antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses. Informed by warnings that antimicrobial resistance could become the next major global health crisis, I dug into WHO and Scientific American reporting to understand more... Introduction: The Shift in Modern Medicine Since the clinical debut of penicillin in the 1940s, modern medicine has operated under a luxury: the "guaranteed" cure. For nearly a hundred years, antibiotics have underpinned the risky work of routine surgeries, cancer therapies, and transplants. We have lived in an era where the primary risk of an infection was a week of discomfort, not a death sentence. However, we are now witnessing a fundamental collapse of these defences. As the historical record shows, there has always been a delicate "seesawing" balance between the drugs humans develop and the bugs that evolve to survive them. For decades, medical in...

Why I Still Maintain a Private Wiki in the Age of AI

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For a consultant, the most valuable asset isn’t the hardware or certifications —it’s the knowledge. Too often, that knowledge is left behind when you move between clients. You hand back the hardware, lose access to the Jira tickets, and the internal documentation you wrote becomes a ghost in someone else's machine. Years ago I adopted a private DokuWiki that travelled with me through firewalls, tech changes, and career moves. Here is why, even in the age of LLMs, it remains an important tool. The Consultant’s Dilemma: Firewalls and "Fading" Skills Consulting is a nomadic life. You spend months deep in a client’s infrastructure, often behind restrictive firewalls where online resources are a luxury, not a guarantee. I realised early on that I couldn't rely on the client’s internal systems to store my personal breakthroughs. I needed a knowledge base that moved with me. Whether I was troubleshooting a niche Git conflict or configuring a Linux environment on a lock...

Running Code in the Cloud: Comparing GitHub and GitLab

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Building a specialised tool such as a word-puzzle solver needs more than automated builds. The real value is letting users run the solver from their browser—enter letters, press a button, and get results without a command line. For example, given letters like "mitncao", users should find every valid word without leaving the UI. That requires a simple run method: press a button, type the letters, and receive results quickly. By implementing this on both GitHub and GitLab I learned how each platform compares in setup effort, input sanitisation, and user experience. Takeaway 1: GitHub is Fast and Simple An Easy Start: GitHub's Straightforward Setup For those who want to move from an idea to a working tool in minutes, GitHub is a strong choice. Setting up a manual start button for the solver was straightforward, largely due to the integration between the platform and AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Instead of digging through manuals, I could describe the required inputs (...