I just spent a happy year in the AWS free tier, experimenting with new things, building POCs and trying things out. In the process I made a mess. Now I have to clean it up.

The Problem

All happy messes are alike, but every unhappy mess is unhappy in its own way. My own mess had the following characteristics:

1. Some of it was valuable
2. Some of it wasn’t
3. There was some resource tagging but it was not applied consistently or thoroughly
4. The principle of least privilege had largely been jettisoned in favor of the principle of just opening things up as wide…

Introduction

Music, literature and cinema are temporal arts. To understand a work in any of these media, you need to move with it through time. Perhaps because of this, these art forms are well suited to illustrating aspects of time, through editing in cinema, temporal jumps and flashbacks in literature, and rhythms and sequences in music.

Painting and sculpture, being static works, may seem less suited to depicting time. …

Introduction

This post looks at how to apply probability to Lambda functions on AWS using version weighting. It’s a useful idea for any scenario that introduces random logic into a serverless set up.

Schrodinger’s cat is a feline of absolute probability. The cat is in an indeterminate state, both dead and alive, until an observation is made. It is part of a thought experiment designed to elucidate indeterminacy in quantum physics. For our purposes, all we need to consider is that the cat has two possible observed states. We can then model a serverless cat as follows…

AWS Lambda

I like AWS because it’s like playing the world’s greatest modular synthesizer.

Modular synthesizers are composed of separate units or modules with different functions that impact on sound. These modules can be connected together with patch cords (basically wires), a matrix patching system, or switches by the user to create a patch. A ‘patch’, basically, is some kind of unique sound that the synth can make once the modules are wired together under a specific configuration.

This article examines the existential issue of working from home — how to focus, and how to fill the hours.

In February and March I published two articles on remote working:

A Potential AI Solution to Flexi-time and Remote Working — written pre-Covid, and discussing how AI can best allocate remote working and flexi-time to employees based on their personality profiles

Flexi-time and Remote Working: Part II — written post-Covid and discussing the probable impact on remote working and flexi-time practices globally.

This article follows on from those two, while also standing alone.

The Standard Solution

When Covid first broke there was a…

Introduction

Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the largest cloud platform providers in mid 2020. I am a solutions architect who has worked with both and has certifications from both. This article will discuss the question of which to choose, if such a choice were necessary, and whether it should, indeed, be made. It is largely based on my more subjective impressions, but this is, as will be shown, a large factor in making any putative choice, as the service offerings themselves are currently quite similar and cost roughly the same.

In February 2020, I published this article on flexi-time and remote working. I think it is safe to say that since then, things have changed. Merely a month later, much of the developed world has embarked on the biggest ever remote working venture. The situation has changed so radically and so suddenly, that people are questioning the foundations of how we work and of how we may work in the future. I want, therefore, to consider what I wrote a month ago and reflect on how that compares to what I understand now. …

This article will discuss the pros and cons of both flexi-time and remote working. It will proposes a HR decision support solution, supported by AI, for improving productivity.

Flexi-time

I will define flexi-time as the ability of an employee to choose the specific hours in which they work given a certain number of fixed working hours in a day. For example, full flexi-time would be the ability for an employee to choose exactly which distributed 7.5 hours in any 24 hours period that they use for working. Partial flexi-time might be the ability for an employee to choose which 7.5 hours…