Finances Friday Again
Also, a review of improvements to the system
2026-01-16, by DrFriendless AWScostsfeatures
The good news from Finances Friday is that there is no bad news from Finances Friday - the system is running smoothly and at low cost.
I’ve also made good progress on my observability dashboard. As mentioned previously Grafana couldn’t get metrics from my AWS without me spending a whole lot of money, so I wrote some code to get the data I wanted cheaply. That code then stuffs the metrics into the database, whence I can retrieve them for display in the Grafana UI. It’s not perfect, but it’s working and I’m going to leave it there until I have a problem it can solve for me.
Other than that, what have I been working on? I asked GitHub this question, as that’s where I put the code when I’ve finished writing it, and GitHub doesn’t know. It says I haven’t been doing anything.
The reality is I commit changes at least 5 days a week. GitHub doesn’t like to talk about work on branches, but I don’t use branches. This is one of those mysteries I really couldn’t be bothered figuring out. In my opinion, it’s just wrong, and whatever justification there is for it is wrong too.
So after trawling through the repositories, it seems this is what I’ve been doing:
- add the plays by year table, including improvements requested by users
- hunting for bugs in the downloader - there seem to be some files which are never processed
- bring the metadata file back into the new system
- trialling using AWS SNS (Simple Notification Service) to send myself emails about errors in the downloader
The last is working well - I now have 18 emails that I’ll need to check. I was very impressed with how simple it was to set up using the CDK - I just say I want a topic, I want that topic to have a subscriber, I want the downloader Lambdas to be allowed to publish on that topic, and hey presto I’m receiving junk mail.
OK, that’s enough meta jibber-jabber, back to work.
