Cert Addict!

Wow.  I cannot believe it has almost been two months since the last post.  That is a fair proportion of my two year target.

So to recap, it is interesting to look back on the last post.  For example, I did pick up AWS SysOps again and did this:

My very top secret project has progressed up to a point but stalled when it came to building a UI.  And also – guess what!  – I had another epiphany or lights-on moment, whatever you want to call it.  Given the nature of the application it struck me that that the whole thing would be best suited to a serverless-Lamdba-API Gateway-S3 architecture.  I am now a Certified Architect so I can do these things.  It is not that big a step.  Many of my Python routines can be pulled into Lambda as-is.

This does mean of course that I will be moving from EC2 to Serverless before serving any real customers.

It also means I cannot reveal the brilliant idea and name for the application just yet.

Certification Addict

I have decided to conclude my year of AWS Certification hoarding by doing the Associate Developer exam.  There is a lot to be leveraged from knowledge learnt on previous exams so not leaving it too late is an advantage.  I also think that the topics will support my various projects nicely.  In fact it was while going through API Gateway modules that I decided to rework my very top secret project.  Yes, I know I am a certification junkie.

After that, I think I will give AWS studying a rest for a while.  The next stage up hurts my head thinking just thinking about it.

DevOpsDays London 2018


I attended my first DevOpsDays in September.  Will definitely do it again.  Very chilled,  great talks – much more varied than I had anticipated.  I really enjoyed the Open Spaces too.  I will add links to my favourite talks in My Picks below.

I was particularly inspired by a lightning talk on how some deliberately over-engineered their profile web-site in order to learn as many technologies as possible.  This is a sentiment I share.  Most of the things I work on privately are done this way.

My Picks

I thought I had read and seen everything about the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey so was surprised to enjoy this book as much as I did.  

“At this point it dawned on him that the leopard had not seen him in the monkey suit before” was one go the funniest lines I have read in a while.  Well recommended.

I also saw Tina: The Musical which gives me an excuse to share gifs like this:

Finally, links to DevOpsDays talks I enjoyed:

Overengineering Your Personal Website – How I Learn Things Best – Jamie Tanna – here.

Neurodiversity and the Essence of DevOps – Jeff Sussna – here.

Why are Distributed Systems so hard? A network partition survival guide – Denise Yu – here.

Tickets and Silos Ruin Everything – Damon Edwards – here.