Notes for week 33 and 34 of 2021

I focused on moving around before the September comes. I bought a new bike and used it to catch-up with friends and family. The road bike makes a difference indeed: I was able to do 175 km stretch in a single day, which makes a lot of visits viable.

I also grabbed a friend and did a two-day Alpine hike. It was very educational for me as I do feel like I failed as a mountain guide¹. Everything went fine, but safety buffers were nowhere near of where they should have been. Lessons learned:

• I’ll make sure to know the exact physical capabilities of everyone involved
• Do not let other people reroute. Get accurate local information about what conditions are on alternative paths and what are viable abort points
• End of August is half-September². Conditions may prevent you from going forward with the original plan
• Austrian mountain paths are excellently marked even for near-zero visibility
• Bring spare gloves. Some ladders go through running water and soaked gloves are not fun when temperatures go towards a freezing point
• Put space blanket on the packing checklist

I finally started serious preparation for my talk. It made me realize how old the Apiary story is by now: this will probably be the last talk touching it.

Next week, I do resume normal operations and there should be more tech updates.

Random

• In the past two weeks, I’ve walked 66 km and rode 487 km. I’ve been active for 39.5 hours during 20 activities. The max speed was 79.9 km/h and I conquered 7859 elevation meters.
• I didn’t knew about the possibility to automatically number headings via CSS
• I’ve looked more into obfuscating IDs. There are Hashids - generate short unique ids from integers, but Obfuscating your Primary Keys reviews more options

Graveyard

• Certificates for CloudFront must be located in us-east-1, otherwise they not usable. It seems like that’s the case for all global AWS services. Snippet:

provider "aws" {
  version = "~> 2.0"
  region  = "eu-central-1"
}

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
  alias = "global_home"
}


resource "aws_acm_certificate" "cert" {
  domain_name       = local.domain
  validation_method = "DNS"
  provider = aws.global_home
}

• Terraform automatically reassigns region to us-east-1 for all global services (like IAM or CloudFront) under the hood
• Getting free certificates from Amazon using Terraform is pretty neat

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1. Technically, I am not one. But I was the organizer and the most experienced hiker. ↩︎

2. September in Europe above 2000 elevation meters is tricky. Thunderstorms are common and they may became snow storms. ↩︎