This week I learned a lot about AWS, and I need to write it down before I forget it again. If you came here for high drama, I apologise; if you came here for information on the AWS Python CDK, you’re in luck (and a tragic minority)

This week: Finland were robbed; the MSc churned out new ideas; I wrote some code (that unwrote some code I’d previously written); and I serendipitously did not miss a train.

This week I figured out how Roles and Users and things are supposed to work in AWS. From that, I’ve done some fun work to clean up bits of our infrastructure that needed a spring clean. I’ve also on-boarded permanent staff and contractors.

Despite not getting that promotion last week, I seem to have got that promotion. You know what I mean?

This week I didn’t get a job I went for, and I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I’ve also got someone new on the team, and I’ve been catapulted into figuring out things that are interesting and should already have been figured out.

Gosh, this week has been busy. It’s been short, which I suspect is a reason why it feels so busy. But I’m also feeling the pressure of being the only technical person across many different places.

This week: two exams, one easy, one difficult. Work has become difficult, and I want to know what to think about that.

Wrote answers for mock exam. Thought seriously about code. Took on new student. Watched a play.

Lemons. Lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons.

This week I’ve been being serious and doing some reflective work on where I want to take my career, as well as asking for help. Asking for help is difficult, but rewarding. If you’re struggling with something, this is your sign to ask for help.

This week: I found out I didn’t get the senior role I applied for, I found out I probably passed my first two MSc modules, and I probably found out a third thing that I’ve forgotten. The universe should obey the rule of threes, otherwise it’s just a chaotic mess, and we can’t have that. No. I remain optimistic.

I have previously mentioned that our cat is currently in full design crit mode. Worse still, he’s not a collaborative design critter: he just pisses on things.

That’s not a metaphor. Our flat is…unpleasantly stinky right now.

And it’s making me reflect on the nature of unconditional love, and self-mastery, and trying to let go of mundane things. It is not easy. Curtains are just things and cats are beautiful and delightful creatures, and yet sometimes I find myself wondering whether the curtains are worth more to me. I don’t like feeling this way. But sometimes I do.

I’m also reflecting on how – honestly, how humiliating I find it for someone to damage my things and to then be forced to play with them. I’m yeeted back to childhood, having to make up and play nice with a bully who pushed me over. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel good. But I have to remember that, unlike the bully, Salem doesn’t know that what he’s doing has upset me. All he knows is that he’s trying to mark his territory – to guard against what terrifying creatures I dread to think – and we keep stubbornly removing the markers. He likely can’t figure out what the hell we’re doing. I like to imagine in his mind he’s the zombie apocalypse prepper and we’re stubbornly unplugging his forcefield and emptying all of his weapons, and he can’t figure out why and he can’t communicate with us. But he keeps trying nonetheless.

We love each other, it seems, but without communication we’re driving each other up the wall. There’s…probably a lesson there. Not for me though. I’m going to keep trying to convince him that he doesn’t need to put up a forcefield across the curtains.

Work

I had an interview recently for a senior role and I don’t know how it went. I never do. I hope I’ll find out this week whether I got it. I did get a lovely bit of recognition from a dear colleague though, and I feel really proud of myself for that. It comes with a little gift, and that’s nice, but it’s less important than knowing that the unseen, non-dev bits of my work are also being seen and appreciated. I built something quite cool recently, and it worked on the second try, and I got to talk about it at our fortnightly Show and Tell (which my partner lovingly tells me features a voice suited for gameshow hosting).

My side-project, my corporate objective, bustles onwards. This week I finished up some code that meets the outcome I’ve been trying to achieve for about seven years.

It is a process that identifies and pairs off people on our graudate development programme. It does so on the basis of weighted scores, and using last year’s anonymised data we managed to pair off 726 people with well-matched roles. Not everyone got what they wanted, but nobody got anything they really didn’t want, and that’s positive. You’ve never seen anyone so pleased to see a message this simple printed onto their screen:

There were 843 bids in total against 726 total candidates
Task completed in 12449.306011199951 ms

This process used to take about two weeks of staff-time, or about 266,400 seconds. I’ve managed to get it down to 13 seconds: an improvement of about 99.995%. In fact, I think it used to take two people two weeks of staff-time, so it’s really an improvement of 99.997%.

(This number has completely thrown me. Apparently after 99% improvements everything is marginal. I’m genuinely a little disappointed by that.)

Anyway. I hope this means it’ll get broader uptake, and I’m genuinely curious to see whether anyone else running a graduate scheme will pick it up. Are there conferences for this sort of thing? Can I get up on stage and say “Look, this’ll save you one week, six days, seven hours, twenty-six minutes, forty-five seconds every time you do this. Please…I don’t know, buy it?”

(It doesn’t work like that, which is why I’m not allowed to do sales. It’s complicated, and every use-case is slightly different, so you either have to change your process so that it meets what the software does or I have to build a bunch of costly customisations, and it’ll just be expensive for you, so why not just use the same process everyone else does?

Again, this is why I’m not in sales, but also why I’ve never had a developer quit on me.)

I also did something quite clever (and possibly quite over-engineered!) to encode this. Please, if you’re a Python dev, check it out and tell me how I can make it simpler.

Otherwise…tips for getting cat pee out of fabrics are most welcome.