Last week in Followsound 2022.14


We had our chimney swept this week, which was an experience. We don’t typically have this guy, but he was super friendly, and we had good conversation. I felt it was strange to talk to another human that wasn’t within my family or close-social group. It made me realise that we’re not getting out and experiencing things as we used to; I think the COVID-19 restrictions have more to answer to than we think.

I had to take D’s car in for MOT, and I discovered I may have forgotten how to drive a manual! Joking aside, having an electric (or automatic) vehicle does make you lazier. Saying that I totally wonder why we, in the UK, seem to love a manual.

At work, I have been looking into a new 3rd-party monitoring platform we are using, and I’m not liking what I see. I understand that we need to offload some of the overhead to other places, as this is what SaaS promises. However, we will be hamstrung by the limitation of our company credit card, i.e. cost. Even if you include the cost of two members of our team plus the AWS costs of running a logging platform, you won’t get to the cost of the complete platform that we don’t even have access to. Additionally, I discovered that logs into the new system can be delayed by up to 20 mins - great for debugging a live issue… Finally, I have found that metric tagging is all over the place, making the “automated dashboards” useless, as data is missing. Anyway, these decisions are out of my hands; I am trying to be more zen about this type of thing - I shall stay in my box!

Our team did have a good win: we’re supporting this new platform only through IaC and not manually fat-fingering configurations into a web console. That will have to do for now.

We had our monthly all-hands this week, and the team received positive feedback on the work we have been doing, which is always good to see.

D and I had some really early mornings this week, so we were cooking and then flopping on the sofa most evenings.


In summary:

  • Home care (chimney sweep) and some mental care too;
  • Car in for MOT;
  • New “platforms”;
  • All-hands;
  • Tiredness.