I don’t normally do week notes, but I felt the urge today.

Work

I’ve got 4 Jira tickets on the go this week:

  • Implement workflow change to enable applying changes to stopped RDS instance.

    As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, our CI/CD system is powered by Github Actions. I.E. Workflows. We run Terraform in many places, and, as we also shutdown RDS instances temporarily to save costs, we need a way to detect when a terraform apply is going to happen, and then call a python script to start them up.

    I’ve build ALL the code to do all this, from detecting the relevant changes in the Terraform plan, to calling the script with a list of RDS instances, but cursed Github just doesn’t like my script AT ALL. Even worse it just fails without any useful error. I got fed up early in the week and just took the ticket out of “in progress” back to “ready”. Will try again on Monday.

  • pre-commit to be implemented on all customer repos.

    Strangely, whist all our infrastructure code gets many pre-commit hooks run, our applications folder hasn’t. The ticket wants that fixed. That said when the trailing-whitespace, end-of-file-fixer, and mixed-line-ending ones are executed, they find over a thousand files to fix! FFS. So, I’m first raising PRs to correct that before I enable pre-commit.

  • Bump “collections” to v8.12.2 for all observability folders

    We’ve been working through a complex process of bumping Python from 3.8, which is about to go out of support, to a more modern 3.12. Most of the work has been completed by my colleague, but I inadvertently found a script actually pointing at the old version on the first (hash-bang) line. I replaced that with a more sensible #!env python and now I’m rolling it out across all the customers.

  • RDS Certificate Expiration and Rotation

    This is a fun one as I found, firstly, that it was on the OLD AWS account, and thusly NOT controlled with Terraform but nasty Pulumi. Or more accurately, simply created by it. Which mean, I could go manually fix it, and replacing an about-to-expire RDS certificate only requires downtime if it’s MySQL, which we don’t use. I’ll complete all 27 affected instances on Monday.

New Blogs Added to My Blogroll and RSS Feeds

Analog Office (Feed)

Time Away from Screens, with Old School Tools. You know it’s worth a look. I got a bit inspired and bought some kit from Lochby. Will show that off when it arrives!

Some Interesting Posts this Week

Analog girly, by Cassidy Williams

Following the theme above, Cassidy Williams talks about a longing? that I’m often thinking about. The internet’s my life and my trade, but sometimes it’s nice to just write on a piece of paper with a pencil.

Nazis Aren’t Protestors, They’re Wankers - by Joan Westenberg

You might have heard, we’ve had a spot of bother in the UK this past week, and yep, they’re wankers. Joan’s got this one’s spot on.

Google Search Speculation - by Jeff Triplett

On Monday, a US federal court judge ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. This was a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business. This ruling was a long time coming and Jeff speculates how that’s going to play out in the industry.

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Gravatar is enshittifying. They’re bringing in blockchain, ethereum, etc as if it’s still the 2010s and those technologies aren’t the abode of scammers, grifters, and fraud.