I’ve been stuck on a bug that somebody before me last tried to fix at 2am. It is the kind of bug that compels you. It is the kind of bug that makes you sit up at 2am, convinced you’ve fixed it, only for it to remain stubbornly unmoving.

I have included a precis of it below, for anyone who knows about these things and would like to join me in the frustration.

So let’s start with that bug, shall we? And everyone else can skip ahead.

This seems to be a bug in AWS Quicksight. I’ve got a custom Role (for reasons I won’t go into right now) that is assumed by the Quicksight service to do whatever it is Quicksight needs to do. When it’s assumed, CloudTrail tells me that two session policies are applied. Those policies are, interestingly, also the policies from the base Principal. In short, it’s possible that it’s a feature and not a bug – but I still want to know what’s actually happening. Magic in my favour is still magic and I do not like it.

Is this the norm? If it’s not, why is it happening to me? I don’t have any code, as far as I can tell, that manages this role being assumed. I assumed it was just something that Quicksight did under the hood.

Answers to me in a comment, or whispered into your computer.

For everyone else, I assume you’ve just had this experience (source):

This has been the majority of my week, but I’ve also been busy writing. I am getting more and more obsessive over documentation and record keeping, almost to the detriment of doing. I have a file that’s now just a log of all the decisions that I’m having to take, and then hyperlinks to all the writing I’ve done about those decisions. The context, the why, the trade-offs. With luck, people coming after me will figure out why I’ve done what I’ve done.

Documenting these decisions, like weeknoting, is how I work out what I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve argued it out with myself, and tried to come up with a narrative that I can understand and support. It’s also how I gather support for ideas. I’m currently plotting three or four significant changes, and all of them are not plots at all because I’m writing out to everyone and getting feedback.

In the wonderful otherworld of the musical I am taking a little step back. Everyone has been so nice about it that my immediate reaction was to hurl myself back in, but that is the kind of emotionally confusing behaviour that I can’t stand in other people. I do desperately need the hours back. I’ve been cruising on my previous knowledge for this semester’s studies, but next session we go back to things about which I know only faintly more than diddly. I can’t cruise any more.

In some of the other work that I’m doing, things have calmed down a little bit. They’ve also taken a big shift sideways, and I’m trying to draft emails about quite complex subjects while on my lunch break. My whole job as a leader in this space is to communicate as effectively as I can with everyone around me. Something my friend John Peart says is that he is paid to have opinions, and while I don’t agree with everything in that post, I think that’s the most important thing. For me, I think part of leadership is synthesise, decide, and then convince other people. I’ve got privileged access to information, and I have to use that to make the best decisions I can.

It’s a wonder anyone chooses to do it, really.