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

Oh man, I hate Novembers. We had some early snow in the North East of England with an incredibly cold blast. Which turned out into a game of "let's find all the unexpected gaps in the house". Turned out that whoever had fitted the front door to the house hadn't actually sealed around the bottom, so cold air was coming into the house. Bit of expanding foam did the job.

November was the first month in which I'm now an employee of Barclays UK, following the acquisition of Tesco Bank. At the moment we're largely carrying on as planned with our programme of work, but it hasn't slowed down in the slightest. Within my area, the product manager and I have kickstarted a round-table working group across technology (app engineering, architecture at various levels) to determine our wider platform strategy. This isn't just limited to the immediate priorities - more on that later - but looking long-term about the type of application architectures that we want to promote: how to design, build and operate.

Gone-nivore

Since the death of Google Reader back in 2012 (I'm still not over this), I'd been homeless from a RSS feed point of view. I reluctantly settled on Feedly for RSS, with Instapaper coming along for read-it-later content from the web. Then more recently, I found Omnivore. What appealed me was the ability combine RSS feeds, email newsletters and read-it-later content into one app. There was a nifty browser extension for clipping content, plus the Android application fitted into the Intent-based system, so you could simply share content with the app for storage. This worked incredibly well, as such, it wasn't to last. It shut down this month out of the blue. For now I've reverted back to my Feedly setup, begrudgingly. Omnivore can be self-hosted, most easliy on GCP. I oughta figure out how to set this up.

Immersion Day

I visited the AWS offices in Edinburgh for an immersion day into Control Tower and IAM Identity Centre. As mentioned in earlier monthly reports, adopting these offerings within our internal AWS Platform is my current strategic focus as it simplifies how we manage IAM roles and policies, giving us the ability to vend new accounts according to a standard blueprint.

For the workshop I created a free trial of Entra P2, which I found to be absolutely awful to use. The sign-up experience for the free trial was horrendous - I had to create a new onmicrosoft.com account, which was somehow linked to my personal live account from my Xbox 360 days. But the sign-up experience is broken, once you enter your card details the 'Next' button doesn't work. In the background it has actually signed you up though, and you can log in using a new tab. It also wasn't clear how to clean everything up afterwards; I ended up manually deleting resources, groups, users. I really don't like this platform.

Back to IAM Identity Centre, though. They work well enough, but it's clear they're half-finished. The purpose of IAM Identity Centre is to simplify the rollout of IAM roles and policies across multiple AWS accounts - these are encapsulated in a higher-order construct known as permission sets: you define these permission sets centrally and the underlying roles are created in each nominated account on your behalf. If you're using AWS managed policies this is fine. If you want to use customer-managed policies, you still need to manually roll out the policies to each account, such as with CloudFormation StackSets. Apparently this is on the roadmap, it's just surprising it's not a live feature already.

Control Tower is a complex beast, it sets up a well-governed multi-account landing zone integrated with AWS Organizations, IAM Identity Centre and Service Catalog to drive this. It is possible to define your own customisations to the account creation process - which we'll need to do for networking-based constructs such as Transit Gateway, IP Address Management and DNS. I'm keen to get stuck in to this piece of work, it is going to be a significant, albeit worthwhile endeavour.

Books

I managed a decent amount of books this month!

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie

Climate change is such an important issue that it ought to factor into so much of our decisionmaking. There are negative headlines about the affects of climate change on almost a daily basis. We know that in years to come there will be significant upheaval as we scramble to stop and mitigate the damage already done. All this said, it can be exhausting to deal with folks in the Green movement; you know the ones, the ones who think we can't address climate change without checks taking down capitalism. As if anything else is pissing in the wind. They can leave you devoid of hope. Climate grief is a thing. But, as this book points out:

When it comes down to it, doomsday attitudes are often no better than denial. This option of ‘giving up’ is only possible from a place of privilege.

Dr. Ritchie's book is a proper skeptics book, admittedly with an optimistic take:

Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it’s having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference.

This isn't a book about denying climate change, or denying the effects of climate change. It's about looking at the data, analysing the trends, and challenging some of the myths. Is organic produce better? (Not really). Is locally-produced food better? (It certainly doesn't make it greener). Should we stop eating beef? (Yes, as soon as possible). Should we stop having children? (You do you, but doing so for climate reasons is misplaced). This book talks about the urgent need to reduce child mortality and bring people out of poverty. It challenges the narratives around 'degrowth' and 'depopulation' directly.

We do need to reduce our environmental impact, living sustainably is about being able to meet our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. On this, we're clearly failing. Over the last couple hundred years, living standards have massively improved in many areas of the world, driven through carbon-fuelled innovations. The challenge is to seize the opportunities of current technology, and economies of scale, to increase the standard of living globally, whilst decarbonizing consumption. If this book leaves you with a sense of hope, then it's done its job. If it's provoked you into action, even better. I recently spoke to someone in the Green movement who described it as "too optimistic", which tells you everything you need to know about the disparity between those in the politics of it, and those more interested in public engagement.

Lights Out by Navessa Allen

Discovered on Kindle Unlimited in the 'Occult Horror' section, this wasn't occult horror. It was basically smut for the first half of the book: a nurse with a thing for masked men social media accounts meets one for real. But then halfway through it turns into a mafia story, plus smut. Not that I'm the target audience here, but this wasn't great. I didn't find the writing enaging. The story itself doesn't really 'happen' until over halfway through, which leaves little time for any complication or true resolution.

Cunk on Everything by Philomena Cunk

The Philomena Cunk character is portrayed by comedian and actress Diane Morgan, who first appeared in Charlie Brooker's Wipe series, as a misinformed talking head. Cunk has since branched out into her own TV "documentaries", typically asking silly questions to genuine experts ("What is clocks?"), and now into a book. This is an A-Z of topics from Cunk's brain, delivered in the renowned Lancashire conversational style. There were moments that genuinely had me laughing out loud. A great toilet book.

The Owlmen by S E England

The Owlmen is a follow-on to The Father of Lies trilogy (comprising The Father of Lies, Tanners Dell and Magda), set in a Yorkshire village harbouring a dark secret. It's the home of a Satanic cult, which was supposedly rooted out at the end of the trilogy, but alas, was not. New character Ellie Blake, with her husband, purchase the aforementioned Tanners Dell property. Spooky stuff happens almost immediately. The property and surrounding woods are haunted by malevolence. Meanwhile, an ex-police officer from the trilogy returns, with a vengeance. Sarah England is excellent at atmospheric horror. The strong setting and worldbuilding from the earlier books helps move the story along. That said, compared to the trilogy, this felt rushed. I would have preferred more time to be spent on Ellie's journey, more time to be spent exploring the powers of Ida and more of a threat from the Owlmen themselves - who only show up sparingly.

How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F Walter

Well, given what's happened, this seemed appropriate. How Civil Wars Start is an accessible insight into Walter's research - that factionalization (rather than just polarization) is an indicator of the conditions in a country being prime for a civil war. By factionalization, Walter means:

Countries that factionalize have political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology, and these parties then seek to rule at the exclusion and expense of others.

Further, these characteristics are strong in anocracies - countries which aren't outright autocracies, but don't have liberal democracies either. In particular, the transition from autocracy or liberal democracy to anocracy has historically been troublesome. Walter cites Iraq, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Myanmar and the January 6th Capitol attack, among others, on their journeys to more or less democratic societies and the flashpoints that have occur. What is notable, and cause for concern, is how even in highly-democratic countries there has been a downwards trend on this scale. This has occurred in the UK through the weakening of institutions, cultural clashes over European Union membership, Scottish independence and far-right rhetoric over immigration. This book serves as a warning, with some US-specific suggestions on how to stop the erosion of democracy.