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Weekend Play with Amazon Web Services, or, AWS Zero to 60 in 2 Days!

Well, this weekend was an interesting exercise. I got contacted Friday morning by a former employer who had kind of a one-off project they needed help with, perferably over the weekend.

The task was to build a fully-functional lab in AWS that would use a variety of services including their new AI services Translate and Polly.

How new are they? I don’t know, it’s not like I really keep up with this stuff, but I know no one had services backed by neural networks a few years ago. This is machine learning technology, “AI” for the layman. And because this is 2021 and Amazon, they make using it as simple as seemingly possible. Just a black box of magic. With an orange smiley thing on the front.

So like I said, I haven’t done much with AWS in several years, and the extent of my experience with it was setting up an EC2 instance and installing some open-source software.

But I feel more comfortable with it all now. The final solution, which I finished up at 6pm Sunday evening, wound up using Lambda, DynamoDB, Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), IAM (obviously, because everything has to be governed by permissions, policies, and roles), and S3. It took a bit for it all to click, how to glue it all together and make the disparate pieces work, but when I started getting it, it got pretty fun.

I’ll admit it took a few hours to get comfortable working in Python again, as well. I haven’t done much scripting or programming in the last few years. But it sure is a fun language to work with.

Now, the whole experience did wear me out. 

I stayed up too late Friday trying to Google for tutorials and things and basically flailing about a bit. 

Saturday I knuckled down and started getting some things working. It was enough to convince me not to throw in the towel. A couple hours out in the sun at my daughter’s soccer game was also a nice break in the middle of the afternoon, but I will say the sun + socials + stress of pushing for a deadline on a solution I was learning as I went kind of put me over the edge a bit. So I stayed up a little later than I should that night as well (wanting to “relax”, right?), and woke up Sunday morning with a bit of a headache and still half a solution to research and build.

So Sunday I was working through a growing tension headache, but started really seeing it come together. Sunday afternoon of course I had an epiphany that led me to rewrite the entire first half that I’d developed on Saturday, which was 10 times easier and more of a real-world solution than what we started with. By Sunday evening I was ready to present it and hand it off, but by the time I got off that call, I was nauseous and the headache was pounding. I started worrying I was getting sick or something.

My wife, a doTERRA essential oils lady for several years now, gave me a Symphony of Cells – this is a series of oil applications done on the back and feet where you pick a different recipe (set of oils) based on what you’re targeting. All I know is I went to sleep very quickly and had the deepest, best sleep of my life.

I woke up this morning feeling like a new man, got breakfast together and the kids off to school.

So the weekend was busy, but extremely satisfying to someone like me who has high adaptibility, learner, and input.

How did you spend your weekend? 

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