The Prairie City Monroe district school board invited state senator Ken Rozenboom to their board meeting Monday, January 16th to discuss his support of the “school choice” bill currently making its way through Iowa legislature. The superintendent started off asking some tough questions of the Senator, who is the chair of the education committee. As he puts it, “school choice is in his lap”. He’s worked on different forms of the bill for seven years.

I realized today that it’s been ten years since I dedicated an entire post to complaining about enterprise software. In that ten years not much has changed, unfortunately. Enterprise software is still crap, and it’s still more of a hassle than it’s worth. It’s best to avoid whenever possible, so when you find yourself evaluating software or services for your company, here’s a few easy markers to identify the products you should let pass by.

Dropbox apparently saved a boatload of money by moving their infrastructure off of AWS and building out their own data centers. Taken at face value this might seem like a strike against AWS, but the way I see it this was the only way Dropbox was going to be able to differentiate themselves as a service. Their job is to provide cloud storage, something AWS can do easily, but if that’s the only thing you are getting from AWS, it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. This news once again got me thinking about the industry as a whole, my place in it, and how I think about cloud services.

This is a bit silly, I’ll be the first to admit. The contraption I’ve built to host this site is clearly unnecessary, especially when I could host the site on Github for free, with very little effort, but I was curious, so down the rabbit hole I went.

Today, the team I’m a part of at TargetSmart is releasing our first open source project, a bit of Python I like to call “cloudchain”. cloudchain is designed to make it easy to store and retrieve secrets using AWS. cloudchain relies on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Key Management Service (KMS) to securely store and manage access to encryption keys, and stores the encrypted secret in a DynamoDB table.

The re:Invent conference was fascinating.