This is the seventh post of my series of monthly review posts for 2024. Other entries in the series:

Home and Holiday

There's always something that comes up after moving house. For me, it was the heating. I knew that the boiler only had a few years left of its shelf-life, but I hadn't expected that the whole pipework wasn't up to par. Fixing that meant moving out for a week while the plumbers had the run of the house, so we escaped to a cottage in Northumberland. It was nice to get away from the noise and enjoy some downtime with the family. It was also nice to come home to see the wildflower patch in full bloom! Several months of graft in the garden paying off - and the bees love it!

As the month drew to a close, I also took the opportunity to start on this year's Halloween decorations. I'm not going to spoil the theme, which this year was requested by my eldest. All the cardboard from last year's house move has been sitting waiting in the garage for this moment, alongside a ridiculous amount of accumulated packing paper. Over the years I've collected a large amount of Halloween decorations, although I get the most pleasure from building my own. It's nice to produce tangible things with your hands, after so long working on computers.

Work

July has passed by quickly at work. My head has been in the magic land of networking as we work to improve our hub-and-spoke egress proxy system from our AWS cloud accounts. This has involved getting down to the details on VPC routing, learning lots about Transit Gateway and Direct Connect, but also devising a route-table based solution to transition our network traffic in a non big-bang approach. It's required a deep dive into how we currently vend AWS accounts to our application developers - in terms of creation, setting up the VPCs, subnets, IP range allocation, core DNS, security, auditing, IAM roles - all of that good stuff. I have some ideas on how we can improve this too so that we can turn things around quicker but also detter deploy change across the platform. We have some very clever code that facilitates all this at the moment (maybe too clever for its own good) and next month I'll be workshopping the path forward with the teams. Exciting times.

Books

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

A swashbuckling, supernatural, sea-faring epic set on the Indian Ocea. This was a great read. Amina al-Sirafi, a retired pirate captain, takes up the mantle once again in search of a former crew-mate's kidnapped daughter. This is where the sorcery begins, Amina's (demon) husband gets involved, and the story becomes cosmic in scale. I appreciated how deep in folklore and Islamic culture this novel tread, providing a sense of authenticity to the work and suitably differentiating it from other supernatural pirate adventures, such as On Stranger Tides. It nicely sets up a recurring series too. Definitely worth checking out.

When McKinsey Comes to Town by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe

A horrifying expose of a half-century of management consultancy, hidden behind NDAs. This is the story of the largest management consultancy firm and the work that they've done for their clients. It's a (s)hit list of who's who - from authoritarian and theocratic governments, gas guzzlers, big pharma. More importantly, it's a story of a company who's proud of its values, but whose client list suggests that it hasn't always practiced what it preaches. It describes conflicts of interests, revolving doors, conflicts of interests and fairly clear unethical behaviour.

Games

For my holiday game I cracked out The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the Nintendo Switch. This is a remake of the Game Boy game, with modernised, cutesy block-based isometric graphics. Compared to other Zelda games this is relatively short, but it makes use of its original constraints extremely well. There's very little fat to trim from this game, everything has a purpose. The overworld map is well-designed, the dungeons give a good difficulty curve without becoming too infuriating. The boss fights are varied and require ingenuity. Secrets are aplenty, but not particularly difficult to find - which strikes the right balance between rewarding the player for thinking outside the box, but not cramming every nook and cranny with collectables just because. Indeed, the trading game of items is a fun long-running side quest that ultimately culminates in useful information for the finale. As part of the Switch modernisation, Nintendo added a dungeon creator function, using dungeon rooms visited and collected during the game. I 100%'d Link's Awakening over four nights.

The next Legend of Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom, follows the same graphical style. I'm looking forward to seeing what this style of Zelda can accomplish with the handbrake off.