jswam

Jul 2015 · age 33

What it was

Jeff's Static Website Account Manager: a two-day Java command-line tool on the AWS SDK. The README's goal was a classroom of about thirty students, each picking a subdomain, pressing a button, and getting a real, live website to edit. What exists is the infrastructure half. register-domain registered a domain for a year through Route 53 Domains, with privacy on every contact. setup-domain ensured a hosted zone, created apex and www buckets, decided which should be the site and which the redirect by inspecting what was already there, and linked the apex with an alias record and www with a CNAME. Every step checked before it acted, so a second run did nothing harmful, and each stage narrated itself to stderr with elapsed milliseconds. The classroom half, handing out credentials, was never started.

Wins, for the age

• At thirty-three, in two days, Jeff wrote a provisioning workflow that was idempotent by inspection from end to end, the property that makes a workflow safe to retry.
• Classified before configuring: the tool adapted to what a human had set up earlier instead of overwriting it.
• Gathered a region's scattered constants into one enum and used an alias at the apex, following AWS's documented recipe and sparing the digging anyone who has aliased an apex knows.
• Found out, in a commit titled "wow, registering a domain is easy", that the ceremony was all in the account setup.

What it taught

• Writing workflows as check-then-act is cheaper than writing rollback.
• Credential distribution is the hard part of any "give people infrastructure" product, and it is why this one stopped.
• A call that spends real money deserves a confirmation gate, even when the only user is the author.
• Pagination left for later never arrives, and an existence check should never download the object it is checking.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Career S3: years of knowing how buckets, website endpoints and regions behave. Descendants: Goat Bot: a one-operator AWS console, with S3 holding the deployment state.

Epitaph

Here lies jswam. It registered a domain and stood up a website in one command, then learned that the hard part was never the website.