It feels like last chewed me up and spat me out. It’s not been the best past couple of weeks. I’ve spent way more time than expected battling a configuration change that would not die. But, along the way I learned a few things.

February Album Writing Month didn’t get much progress until the weekend either. But, I practice some productive procrastination. I’m trialing a different note taking approach, and I’ve started collecting song ideas. The FAWM forum has been some help there. I did manage to get a couple quick ideas down.

AWS Lambdas using Docker Containers

AWS have recently added support for Docker containers in Lambda. But the web is pretty sparse on information about these things. There’s some official documentation, which seems to be missing a couple of bits. And that’s about it. Searching “docker lambda” gets you how to run the AWS CLI from Docker, which is not what I’m looking for.

One of the sources of confusion is the difference between ROLLBACK_COMPLETE and UPDATE_ROLLBACK_COMPLETE when creating a Cloudformation Stack. With the latter, you can just retry. But if you have an error with the initial setup call the Stack ends up in a bad state and it needs to get cleaned up. These commands can clean it up.

aws cloudformation list-stacks
aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name $stack-name

FAWM and Process

JDO posted a couple blog posts on the writing process recently. One saying a book needs 70 ideas. Just collect them. And when you have the core of the book, you can write an investigative draft. Which is non-linear and impressionistic, but something you can edit and rewrite from.

I’ve posted two tracks for FAWM so far, and the first felt like pulling teeth. But a few hours coming up with ideas (and borrowing them from the forum), I’m looking forward to trying out a few things.