I replaced the AWS CLI completer with a datalake

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0500

I needed to tell someone in Italy my availability in their timezone, typed TZ= and hit tab, and discovered a completer that’s apparently been sitting in zsh since the Pleistocene. That made me finally look at how completion actually works: #compdef, the dispatch table, _files, the whole vocabulary kit I’d been leaning on for years without really seeing. And in the middle of that I remembered the thing that had made me write off tab completion in the first place: aws_completer, the Python-spawning hog that claims every argument position and still makes a mockery of my left pinky finger when it innocently asks for a filename, interrupting to say: but wait, are you sure you don’t want to marry one of my 428 eligible daughters first?

FinOps portfolio: 71 tickets over 5 years

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0500

My first finops ticket was called “Optimize the AWS infrastcuture.” The typo is still there. That was 2021 — a one-person infrastructure team at a startup that didn’t have the word finops in its vocabulary and didn’t know it needed one.

Five years later I went looking for every cost-related ticket I’d ever created. I expected maybe thirty. I found 71, spread across 8 Jira projects, touching every layer of the stack from EBS volumes to LLM inference spend. Nobody asked me to create a finops practice. I just kept looking at the bill and refusing to pay for things that didn’t earn their keep.

Duckdb on ferkakta.dev

I replaced the AWS CLI completer with a datalake

FinOps portfolio: 71 tickets over 5 years