Vantage acquires ec2instances.info

For almost a decade I’ve run a site that helps people compare Amazon EC2 instances called ec2instances.info. Yep, that’s a .info domain! It’s essentially a giant spreadsheet of data aggregated from numerous Amazon webpages and APIs.

In recent years I haven’t been able to give the site much attention, so was very excited when Vantage reached out about acquiring it. They plan to make improvements in addition to building their impressive cost monitoring dashboard. Check them out at Vantage.sh or read their launch post on Hacker News.

Additional coverage on the Vantage blog and Hacker News.

One for 2017

Haven’t posted here since the start of 2016, so here’s one before 2017 is officially over. Using Jekyll as a platform to power this site seemed cool at the time, but it’s a pain to update.

Here are my yearly ski movies for the past two seasons. Can’t top the 2014-2015 season with Japan and Alaska though. Did try AK one more time in 2016 but had terrible warm conditions.

2014-2015 Ski season video

My yearly ski season video took a long time to finish this year but is finally done. The amount of footage I captured was way more than in past years, and I lost interest in the project during the summer months. But in the end I’m happy with how it turned out. This makes 4 years in a row!

Last season was horrible for snow on the west coast but trips to Japan and Alaska helped make it an amazing winter. I ended up with 30 days on snow which is more than I’ve had since high-school days!

My favorite part about making these videos is being able to watch the ones from previous years and gauge my progress as a skier. With improvement in mind, here are three goals for this upcoming (in-progress) season:

  1. Be able to consistently land a clean 360. At the end of last season I was still having a lot of trouble getting keeping my weight forward.
  2. Ski bigger lines (like AK) with more speed and power. The Blizzard Spurs I just picked up should help give me confidence there unlike the jibby and playful Line Mr Pollard’s Opus that I’ve been using.
  3. No injuries. :)