A Coincidence
I’d been needing to get the car cleaned as it was a mess - particularly inside. So, after our daily standup I quickly ran it into town, handed it over and went back to work from my favourite coffee shop.
Imagine my surprise after I bought a coffee and went upstairs to find an old colleague working there too - after putting his own car in. He was, in my last few weeks, at my 2nd-to-last permanent job - my boss. Anyway, we had a pleasant chat and then for a few hours we both respectively got on with our own pieces of devops work.
This got me thinking
I sometimes like to play “fantasy engineering” in my head. I’ve got so many ex-colleagues who, like me, are beyond senior now. Who would I pick to build an IT project if money were no object? What could we do in a month or a year? What would we build?
That last question is where the idea falls down. If I had a great idea, I could find some serious development engineers and equally impressive devops/platform folks and make us all rich. The ideas are illusive though.
Yet More Lambda Debugging
I’m about 2/3rds the way through the list of my client’s Python Lambda functions that I have to check and test to be sure they still work with our upgraded Python 3.12 runners.
Today’s function had been crashing since we upgraded in mid-April, but when I ran it with ANY version of Python it worked - at first. Then I realised it was a clever thing where, it was being triggered by an event, but would then re-trigger itself via an SNS topic, where it would crash. Also regardless of Python version.
A slew of print() statements inserted later, and I found it was trying to cycle through our list of AWS regions, and crashing when trying to assume a role in a very particular region. A quick chat later and I found a bit of Terraform code that was supposed to setup these new regions, but wasn’t dynamic - so - a few hard-coded region names later - and I’ll raise a PR tomorrow to get it all fixed.