Available for NED/Advisory * Climate/Tech/CTO/Strategy/Data/Govt * Started @PollinateHQ * AWS and GDS alumnus * @pauldjohnston@mastodon. green * Christian
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Jan 12, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
@CarrieGrant1 @educationgovuk @AFNCCF We pulled 3 ND kids out of school because the school puts attendance above everything.
One school sent a letter to say we shouldn't do it if it was to avoid prosecution.
The long term mental health of our ND children is our priority, not some nonspecific attendance stats.
@CarrieGrant1 @educationgovuk @AFNCCF That's not even mentioning how we couldn't access CAMHS for one child because we were told that they were overwhelmed.
We were told that unless a child has actually *tried* to kill themselves they wouldn't be put on the waiting list.
Oh and te waiting list for ND assessments...
Jun 10, 2023 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
The last few weeks I have not been sleeping much at night. This often leads to not being able to do a full day of work.
Why? The leader of the church my family and I attended for over a decade (we left 10+ yrs ago) has been in the news over allegations.
(1/n)
"We wanted AWS to grow its ... functionality, and to continually eat away at the bottom of the thin layer of rapidly evolving Netflix specific ... code that we had built"
This. This is what serverless is all about.
(2/n)
Feb 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
We took the decision to take our 9y/o out of school over a year ago now. We don't do (yet) a formal curriculum at home, partly because she struggles to sit still if it's not something she's interested in.
She does like playing computer games.
So I try to give her good games.
She likes playing Minecraft and Roblox. Roblox is not so good because of some of the games that are on there, but minecraft she has got better at. She just likes making houses and little towns for her and her friends to play in.
She names all the animals.
Feb 10, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I've got a Scottish grandfather. Everyone other grandparent and parent was born in England. Scotland becoming independent would at least give me another option for citizenship. I have no issue with any of Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales wanting independence if they so chose.
I've never really understood the arrangement if I'm honest. We are separate nations but... one single entity... somehow?
It all seems very strange to me.
And all this wanting our "sovereignty" back a few years ago? Seems really weird when we've got the arrangement we have.
Oct 23, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
If I offer an opinion saying that I think that it's a team failure, and not a technology failure, I'm not saying that I think the *people* are "failures". I'm saying that the structures and processes are wrong/bad/insert synonym here for not correct. People are just people.
It's almost always the people that get things wrong. Sometimes it's individuals being absolute ****s and trying either to be nasty and do bad things, but it's generally just people trying to do a good job and getting it wrong.
Oct 23, 2022 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I want to highlight this thread because it's a classic of its genre.
Blaming a "word" and their understanding of it for what are clearly team, architecture, design and process issues.
Lots of people who do serverless at scale coming in and telling them they're wrong (inc me).
What I'm trying to get at here is that I've heard this story before many times.
Replace serverless with microservices or kubernetes or monoliths or agile or lean or something else and replace kubernetes with monoliths or serverless or agile or safe.
Technology adoption is hard!
Oct 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
What is the most useful programming language to learn right now?
JavaScript/node/typescript is fast becoming my language of choice for everything...
... And yes in my head it's the same language with different characteristics whatever anyone says.
But I'm interested in what the future is.
Cloudflare seems to be betting the farm on workers and that's V8 so... see previous tweet.
I have to say I have a lot of time for that view.
But what about new languages? Compiled languages?
Any created for small distributed systems?
Oct 21, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
So, I've been working in the area of Identity Providers for... a while now, and one of the things that is *not* easy is understanding Cognito.
I've wanted to try to do OIDC/OAuth the "right way" on AWS for a while.
This gist is my starter.
Cognito isn't the easiest of AWS's services. As an ex-AWS Developer Advocate for Serverless it was part of my job to go out and promote Cognito, and even I found it hard.
The thing is... Identity is hard.
Really hard.
So, I'm trying to make it a bit easier.
Jul 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
AWS/Serverless people:
How do you handle it when someone comes to you and says "we're concerned your system design has all Lambda functions outside VPCs and we can't restrict data egress" so they mandate all functions must go in a VPC?
The context here is that Lambda functions are run by the service and have access to the internet.
Lambda function IAM permissions control access to data within your own accounts which is great.
If an attacker finds an exploit, they can egress data via a Lambda to internet.
Jul 21, 2022 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
RDBMS are really the best solution for applications where the decision is to only use one data storage solution for the entire application.
There is no longer any excuse when building anything in the cloud for using RDBMS.
You have so many better options.
Note:
"RDBMS" - Relational Database Management System. Manages tables of data and the relationships between them, and uses SQL (or a variation) to store, retrieve and manage data.
"data store/data storage solution" - an element in the data layer of an application
Jul 20, 2022 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
Just in case anyone thought that the UK heatwave was in anyway "normal"... it wasn't.
There is ** no way ** that any due diligence would have told any investor that an investment in a solar farm project at scale would yield an investment beyond a few percent.
The reason is that subsidies had significantly changed.
There were some opportunities but not many.
Jul 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
At what point should a company director/investor be sanctioned or liable in some way?
This is not a political question (certainly not party political) but a hypothetical/ethical question.
Should a director/investor be able to extract any wealth without liability?
I say this as someone who has a limited company with a turnover which is sometimes over 6 figures annually, but often not.
I am thinking more about PE/VC level here.
Invest others money/your own and "business model" is irrelevant so long as wealth is generated.
Good or bad?
Jul 13, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There are some people whose opinions will always be intentionally or maliciously misconstrued for *reasons* and there are some real possibilities of harm exposed being ignored because of that person and the perceived harm they bring.
Nobody is always bad, or always good.
I'm so bored of people simply jumping onto a situation and "agreeing" because it's easier than actually reading the information and forming an opinion that might be more nuanced.
Jul 9, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
For most of my adult life, most of my weekends have had a decent element of needing to rest.
It used to be that I'd go and play football and it would take the rest of the day to recover.
Last few years it's recovering from the week of work at the weekend.
It's a running joke in the house that I basically sit down and don't do anything at the weekend.
I try to, but if I do too much I get headaches and migraines. If they are too bad they impact my ability to work.
Rarely been an employee in my life.
Don't get sick pay.
Jul 8, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
AWS Lambda Functions are like the energy source in a car (e.g. petrol/gas/electricity).
The energy source is a given when you're creating the car since the car won't run without it.
It is an enabler.
How many seats, how fast, how efficient... up to you.
Same with Lambda.
You could create a car without batteries, or petrol/gas. You could use solar panels for example, or water + electrolysis.
Then you have to make all sorts of other compromises and that affects what other choices you can have with the car.
Fewer seats? Shorter range? Slower?
Jun 13, 2022 • 33 tweets • 4 min read
Serverless systems aren't software systems.
If you don't understand why this is, then you're doing serverless wrong.
Mar 11, 2022 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
What is observability?
And how is observability different with serverless applications as opposed to microservice or server-based applications?
(Because it most *definitely* is)
So we know that DevOps is about efficient deployment pipelines, change processes, discoverability of errors and system stability and that they mostly human/social processes not tech choices...
