This week was a whirlwind of code and calls. Where did the week go? I feel like I was on auto-pilot until at least Thursday. Some interesting stuff though.

  • The consistent theme of this week has been death by 30m call. I feel like I’m spoken to most people in our organisation at some point this week on everything from Project-R, to vendors and portfolio to tech practices and managed services. While exhausting, and this happens to time-to-time, on reflection it feels satisfying to have helped a large number of people.

  • As part of continued work to consolidate some of our Sharepoint sites, I ran accidentally ran into the infamous 5000 limit issue, which killed one of our portfolio site. Sharepoint is clearly happy to store more than 5k objects in a library but don’t you dare to try search it or build a site page that queries it. Best part of this issue - is that it just silently fails and queries stop working and thus dynamic pages go blank. Quick fix - but damn was it annoying.

  • Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on enhancing the code we use for aws environment reporting. This includes everything from resources out of date, unused resources, compliance issues etc. All these help feed activities into our managed service teams. I’ve always found that learning about AWS services is best done by exploring the APIs and it’s also the way I refresh my knowledge after having spent a bit of time away from being hands on. This was a great activity and one of those not-critical-path ways that I can still code and add value without impacting our engineers.

  • As part of the code I was writing I discovered the endoflife.date service. There were a few things missing so I raised by first PR against this. I expect to contribute more to this in the future.