So this is not a good news post (the sort that says “I added features”) but this is not a bad news post (the sort that says “I’m giving up computing and going to live on a remote island with Aishwarya Rai”), it’s a just a post to tell you that despite all the evidence, I’m not dead and Extended Stats is still on my mind.
I’ve been trying to solve a problem connecting two bits of AWS together. Two years ago I would not have understood the problem, so I will not try to explain it to you. In fact two years ago I had a similar problem that depressed me so much that I stopped working on Extended Stats Serverless for about 4 months – that was before I announced anything, and I was doing a proof of concept, and I could not prove the concept. So I knew that it might be difficult, but really if I want to do AWS development I have to be able to work through these things.
Anyway, the good news is that with a lot of research (i.e. even checked sites other than StackOverflow, and I read documentation), and a lot of daydreaming, I have fixed this particular problem.
Daydreaming is an important technique in computer programming. When something doesn’t work, and it damn well should, my approach is to do something else and dream about what stupid thing might be happening. So I dream about how one bit probably works, and what its concerns are, and how the other bit probably works, and what its concerns are, and what might be missing in the middle. I find it’s best to do this in the shower, so all development offices should have showers :-). However today I figured the problem out while cooking breakfast. I wanted to watch Peaky Blinders, but once I thought of what might be going on I had to turn off the TV and try it out!
Anyway, that’s good news. I am very conscious that the old site is still down (I need a case fan. There is one computer store I know of that I can drive to, so after dropping my wife at work on Wednesday I went there, and they didn’t open till 10am. It was 9:30am and I’d already spent enough time not doing what my boss was paying me to do. I gave up and ordered a fan on-line.) and I need to address that. The new site is all people have at the moment, and it still doesn’t have the content people want.
This is why I need to move the site into the cloud! The fan in my server has gone out of balance or whatever they do, and started making a weird grinding noise. My wife and my niece, who both work in that study, complained about the noise. I had to shut the machine down, because if the fan dies in the middle of the night and the machine overheats, everything is dead, which would be bad.
Come to think of it, that study is not air-conditioned, and I’m expecting summer to be hotter than ever. I’m not sure the machine will be healthy. I might have to consider doing a lift and shift, and putting the old site into the cloud as well. As long as I use a local database (on the virtual machine, not managed by AWS) it will only be a little expensive. Hmm… I’ll go have a shower and think about that…
