Note #1: Week 38 in Review

This week I've spent most of my free time studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam using the excellent courses from Adrian Cantrill.

However, my timeline for taking the exam is pretty tight (my choice), so I've had to switch up my study approach. Initially I was listening to each video, stopping it here and there, and taking detailed notes. This approach is probably better for retention, but it doesn't work with my timelines because the Cantrill courses have over 70 hours of footage. Also, a lot of the content in the course is on topics I already have some experience with, since I use AWS extensively in my day job.

So I've switched to more of a university-lecture style approach, where I listen to the videos at 1.25x speed and take notes only on what's not covered in the slides. I'm also planning to double my study time so that I have more time to study and review as the exam gets closer.

Cool Stuff from the Web

• Gartner published a report confirming that GenAI has passed peak hype, mainly due to underwhelming ROI in businesses. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, this will have on planned data center and chip investments. At the same time, it points to widespread use of AI for software development. Given rising token costs for the big providers are inevitable, I'll be interested to see if businesses start to run models in-house.
• In security, non-human identities seem to be trending as a topic. Long-lived non-human credentials are an interesting risk factor, particularly as many automated systems have elevated permissions compared to normal users. Also in security, software bills of materials have become a hot topic due to a massive increase in supply chain attacks, many of them through NPM.
• Finally, it's not new but I've found markitdown really helpful for turning HTML notes from my Kobo into a format that's easy to review and integrate with videos and images.

Project Updates

fd93.me

• Realized that I only needed to make some small tweaks to the site's theme to separate short articles from the main feed. This is exciting because it means I'm more able to write short notes on various topics than I have been in the past.
• Figured the site's theme was looking a bit dated and doesn't work great on mobile. Plagiarized Took inspiration from various sites around the web to come up with a new design, which I'll implement eventually.
• Fixed sitemap rendering after Google kept telling me they couldn't find most of the pages on the site. This is a long-standing issue but I didn't care about it until I noticed it meant some articles are totally invisible to search engines.

plainban

• Started refactoring the data model in a few different ways. The main change is keeping the order tickets are displayed in column metadata, which involves placing a data.yml file in each column / folder.
• Changed metadata in YAML header of tickets to use plainban prefix: e.g. name is now plainban.name. This should help avoid namespace collisions with other programs, like static site generators, that people might want to have a YAML header for.
• Added a feature to create a .keep file in each column / folder by default. This is a simple hack to force git to maintain column structure when committing kanbans to a repository. However, it will be made obselete by the new data.yml file.

misc

• Fixed restic backups on my home server. As with many backup and hosting issues this was a file permissions problem - restic wasn't allowed to read certain files in my git repositories. Actually, the backup was running fine, but my script assumed that non-zero exit codes indicated a failure. This meant I was getting failure alerts twice a day for a few weeks, but changing the file permissions and testing only took 20 minutes or so in the end.