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

Home

The nights are drawing in, the leaves are turning yellow. Spooky season is nearly upon us. In preparation for this year's Halloween build, I revamped (🧛‍♂️) the mini-site. It's actually just a subsection of this site, which is served by Eleventy, but was pretty much banged together with simple HTML <img> tags. Even on a WiFi connection on a modern, performant mobile device, I noticed that there was a lag in loading the images on the page and a flash of unsized content, as the space between borders expanded to make room for the image. I replaced the manual HTML with a list of images (and their properties) in a list within the page's front-matter, so that I could use the static site generation engine to create the HTML. I explicitly added in heights and widths for the images to assist the browser, and added in deferred loading for later images on the page. Overall this now creates a smooth, yet screen-size-responsive viewing experience. Finally, I found out how to merge the two collections (my main site post and the Halloween posts) into the single main RSS feed.

As for the Halloween display itself, well, the decorations themselves are in progress. There's a lot of cardboard construction this year using last year's house move boxes. Although I have had to upgrade the cardboard floating candles that I've used the past few years, thanks to storm damage, I'm trying to do as much as possible with recycled material. I'm really looking forward to this year's event. Let's hope it's not a washout!

Work

I've been looking into a platform engineering tooling refresh, which I mentioned last month. We've a lot of bespoke Python code which provisions our AWS Platform, setting up all the guide and guardrails and managing access based on role-based entitlement. We use Cloud Custodian as a police officer within the platform to make sure nobody's trying to do anything untoward. The next step in this evolution is to use IAM Identity Centre, then AWS Control Tower, the latter of which brings in Service Catalogue. This should significantly reduce the amount of bespoke code that we have to work with, capitalising and leaning on what the platform as a service provider can do for us. It also puts us in a strong strategic position going forward, as new products and services are designed with Identity Centre and Control Tower integration in mind. My desired end state is a secure, safe, well-governed platform that can host cloud-native applications with minimal complexity.

Books

Introducing Infinity, the Graphic Guide by Brian Clegg

This graphic guide covers the 'discovery' of the concept of infinity to some of the more interesting properties of infinities, such as Hilbert's Grand Hotel Paradox, visiting the intellectual heavyweights such as Cantor and Mandelbrot along the way. You need a little set theory to understand cardinality and aleph numbers. It's a good read, but I think it's best viewed alongside some of the other introducing guides, such as Chaos and Fractals.

The Stress Equation by Marcus Lagre

This is a book about stress, by a techie for a techie. Remarkably, it doesn't talk much about stress as an individual failing, instead it talks about the organizational situations that bring about stress:

"the overall organizational complexity, something that is typically outside a single team’s or department’s sphere of influence, contributes to creating stressful situations. Changing these situations requires leadership commitment and alignment on a higher level."

Lagre identifies three contributing factors to stress: Pressure, Complexity and Security. All of these are necessary, to some degree, in an organisation. Pressure brings focus, so that we can work on the right things, at the right time. Too little pressure and that focus can be diluted, which could result in missing a window of opportunity. Too much pressure and complexity increases, as corners are cut and quality suffers. Complexity is a given, as the work of technologists is uncertain and emergent. What can be a problem though is unmanaged complexity, which slows down the ability to deliver:

"we waste that energy on things that could be made simpler, we reduce our ability to excel at harder problems."

Security isn't just about job security but about the culture in the organisation. How is work prioritized, and how often are those priorities rejigged? Is the culture one of learning, or blame? This gets to the crux of the book, conventional stress management techniques don't "focus on fixing the work environment, only the personal perception of it".

I highly recommend picking up this book, especially so if you're in a position of leadership.

Interesting Stories About Curious Words by Susie Dent

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an author who runs Dictionary Corner on Countdown, Susie Dent's book is essentially a dictionary, reporting on interesting words and turns of phrases in the English language, and their multi-faceted origins. Some of my favourite examples:

Stound - A pang of emotion that evokes a strong memory when you smell a familiar scent or hear a certain piece of music.

Meiosis - A figure of speech in which an impression is deliberately given that a thing is of less size or importance than it actually is. An example is the typical English understatement ‘rather good’, said of something that is excellent.

and, one that tickled me from a work context:

Sierra - The word is Spanish for ‘saw’ and is used for the name of a chain of mountains with jagged peaks, especially in the USA or Spain itself.

(What I don't know is if the word was chosen for the project based on the spanish translation, or for the USA location and it just so happened to have a serendipitous meaning).

The book itself was fun to dip in and out of over the course of the month, and well structured into logical sections so that it didn't feel like you were reading a dictionary, but as intended, a collation of curiosities.

Un/Sacred by Mirka Andolfo

A fairly raunchy graphic novel about an angel and a devil - the angel wants to wait until marriage, the devil… doesn't. The story unfolds over several small skits, which reminded me of that old Carry On-style humour.