On the plus side, she writes her people-searching algorithms in Python. But c’mon Wonder Woman, you need to work on your variable naming!
I’m pretty sure this function could be further simplified with some basic mathematics; it’s far too long and complicated. Reminds me of the film I captured it from.
Automation is great and wonderful and everything, but it does provide ample opportunity to do damage quickly. Great power, great responsibility and all that.
Over the weekend I was working on a Python library to interact with an internal ticketing system. I was adding the capability to generate a bunch of tickets at once, and wasn’t paying attention to the folder I was pointed at. Let’s just say I heard from multiple folks first thing Monday morning about the 50+ emails in their inboxes notifying them of new issues that needed their attention. Whoops!
Lesson learned: double-check your inputs when writing automation scripts. Also own up to your mistakes, better to apologize fast than lead with an excuse.
This past summer my family and I took on a little project: we bought a house in Lake Arrowhead and listed it on Airbnb. Because it’s useful to both see and remotely control the temperature there, we had a dual-zone WiFi-enabled Honeywell thermostat installed. And because I’m a nerd, I wanted to track its settings, and the corresponding outdoor temperature, over time.
Behold the Temperature Collector. It runs in AWS Lambda and polls both the thermostats and a public weather API every 5 minutes, writing the results to CloudWatch metrics, where I can then graph them on a dashboard. Pretty nifty!
While I was at it, I added support for a Nest thermostat, which I have here in San Diego. And because I love writing automation, I have terraform code to deploy it all. If you need a simple example of how to create a Lambda that runs periodically, you’re welcome to steal it. That’s the beauty of learning in public.
I’m naming this truism in honor of the co-inventor of the spreadsheet:
Bricklin’s Law
The probability of a project’s success is inversely proportional to the number of status tracking tools used by its team members.
Also, I think this is the first time I’ve used “pull quote” formatting on this blog. Neat!
If you’ve been by the site recently, you might have noticed a new word cloud in the sidebar. On a whim, I read back though the entirety of my blog and tagged each post with a handful of relevant Amazon Leadership Principles. It was an enjoyable way to spend a couple hours, and who knows, it might be a useful resource. We take them pretty seriously at AWS, not the least of which during interviews. For mine, I had stories written out ahead of time that illustrated how I practiced each of these principles. This preparation proved invaluable to my success.