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Intermediary Representation In Dynamo-Browse Expressions
One other thing I did in Dynamo-Browse is change how the query AST produced the actual DynamoDB call.
Previously, the AST produced the DynamoDB call directly. For example, if we were to use the expression
pk = "something" and sk ^= "prefix", the generated AST may look something like the following:
The AST will then be traversed to determine whether this could be handled by either running a query or a scan. This is called “planning” and the results of this will determine which DynamoDB API endpoint will be called to produce the result. This expression may produce a call to DynamoDB that would look like this:
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Did a cleanup of all the half-finished posts I had lying around as drafts. Many of them have been cluttering up the Draft section for a few months now.
The original goal was to have a “bank” of posts that I could publish on days I had nothing else to say. I guess that didn’t quite pan out as expected. Since starting this idea, I think there were two banked micro-posts that I eventually published. The rest turned into ambitious, half-finished pieces of writing that became larger over time as I rewrote sections and added additional threads of thought. Eventually they became so large and overworked — without being anywhere close to finished — that it became too much of a hassle to keep them around.
I guess when it comes to posting stuff, I need to either publish it immediately, or at most a few days after it’s written. Keeping it around with the belief that I can publish it “later” means they’ll be little chance that it’ll see the light of day.
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Dinner at The Mint. This is my table, which is the same table I sat at last time I was here, in January 2020. Feels like a bit of a bookend in a way.
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Sunny day today. Might need to bring out the hat once again.
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Really tired this morning. Work up last night due to a production incident. Must say that nothing goes out to prod quicker than a 3 AM change you hope will just shut the damn PagerDuty alerts up.
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Letting Queries Actually Be Queries In Dynamo-Browse
I spent some more time working on dynamo-browse over the weekend (I have to now that I’ve got a user-base 😄).
No real changes to scripting yet. It’s still only me that’s using it at the moment, and I’m hoping to keep it this way until I’m happy enough with the API. I think we getting close though. I haven’t made the changes discussed in the previous post about including the builtin
Continue reading →pluginobject. I’m thinking that instead of a builtin object, I’ll use another module instead, maybe something like the following: -
I miss working on monoliths. Micro-services are just so painful to test. So many moving parts you need to get working before you can even start.
Then you’ve got serverless stuff. Go to test those, and wow, you’ll wish you were testing micro-services. 😟
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Saw someone at work use Numi to show some maths so I’m giving it a try. Only just started using it but I already like it. Feels very similar to Tot and Boop: a small MacOS utility that fits nicely in that middle-ground between Calculator and a spreadsheet.
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Absolutely incredible seeing how far AI image creation has come. I know this was years in the making, but with all the recent launches, it feels like the change has happen over mere months. Will need to give it a try.
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Discovered that I can use a URL shortener to grab a link from my Android phone and open it on my iPad. I guess that means I’m finally up to speed on the awesome ideas of 2007. 😀
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My whimsical side might be developing a little. I’m starting to come round to the wiggly seek bar in Android.
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The Australian Republic Question
With the passing of Queen Elisabeth II, the talk of whether Australia should become a republic will probably start making the rounds once more. I don’t consider myself a royalist, and when the last referendum on the issue came around, I voted in favour of becoming a republic. The idea of having the British Royal Family as the head of state of a country halfway around the world seem anachronistic to me, and I was disappointed when the referendum failed.
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Those worried about video-centric podcasts ruining the format can allay their fears. The killer feature of podcasts is that you can listen to them without having to pay attention to anything visual. Video may fill a nitch, but I can’t see it taking over the entire format.
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I’ve been tinkering around with Pico-8 game development recently. I like how limiting it is. Expectations are not too high, which helps given that I’m hopeless at the non-coding aspects of game design, like artwork.
It’s quite a joy. Reminds me a lot of making games in QBasic back in the day.
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And while we’re on the subject of tests: make it easy for me to launch tests quickly from the IDE. Refusing to run a test because a particular environment variable is not set is really annoying, especially when a suitable default value would work 90% of the time.
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The unit test I’m working on uses so many mocks it’s infuriatingly difficult to change anything. I wonder if a better approach is to just mock out external dependencies and use the actual services in the test. May not be as unit-ey, but would make it easier to move things around.
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Finished version 0.0.3 of Audax Toolset yesterday. The code has been ready since the weekend, but it took me Sunday morning and yesterday (Monday) evening to finish updating the website. All done now.
Now the question is whether to continue working on it, or do something different for a change. There are a few people using Dynamo-Browse at work now, so part of me feels like I should continue building features for it. But I also feel like switching to another project, at least for a little while.
I guess we’ll let any squeaky wheels make the decision for me.
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Drop in replacement for the github.com/pkg/errors package. The original package is archived as there’s a plan to change how Go handles errors. But not all of us are ready to adopt this yet.
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Detecting When GetItem On DynamoDB Returns Nothing
I was trying to remember how best to detect when a GetItem call to DynamoDB returns no values. That is, when there’s no item with that key in the table. This is in a project that is using v2 of the Go AWS SDK.
After poking through some old code that did this, it looks like the way to do so is to check that the returned
Continue reading →Itemfield isnil:
