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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, it’s about working on something that will be useful quickly and you can polish after you’re already using it every day.

E.g. I got really fed up with how clunky the AWS assume-role workflow was at work with multiple AWS accounts so I wrote a little tool using Lispworks’s CAPI for a GUI that would handle authentication and embed a webkit browser so I could control the cookies more precisely. I got an MVP that improved my workflow working in a weekend and I’ve been iterating on it over the last several months. I find this sort of process works much better than spending months working on something that I may eventually use.

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I’ve also just decided that it’s ok to have a dozen incomplete projects I work on occasionally over the course of several years.

I'm in the same boat but the problem with that approach is the technology stack and/or the problem the project solves become obsolete in the meantime.

It’s a matter of picking slow-changing technologies: so, not the latest JS framework or whatever, but something like Clojure or Common Lisp that has a track record of maintaining backwards compatibility. And then learn to solve problems in ways that can easily be adapted to solve related problems.

Yes, this a thousand times. I couldn't find the right way to articulate but you did the job.

I'm sure many of us want beauty, conciseness, and every other quality in our writings but it's 99% of the time a neverending rabbithole.

On side projects a little bit of quick'n'dirty is extremely valuable to progress in assembling the bits of a system and see it operate for real.

It's a hard balance because no one wants to come back and fix things later but the fact that you walked forward into building the system means you have more concrete knowledge of what is required and this will make it a lot more clearer and motivating to adjust and fix the previous modules.

There's also a different kind of pleasure involved. I can be proud of super clean code in a project that is never done.. but the feeling of having finished a tool that is actually useful is so much nicer. And it makes you want to keep doing it this way.

I would absolutely love a browser extension version of that. Current using Last Pass and searching for the accounts to switch to.

Are you signing in with AWS users or STS AssumeRole? My company does the latter: there’s a user management account and then each project gets their own account. To access a particular account, we have to use a user in the user-management account to assume a role in the account we want to access. This makes the AWS CLI tooling annoying and it also makes the AWS console annoying to access: you have to generate a sign-in link programmatically and use that link in the browser to sign in. However, if you’re already signed into an account, this pops up a page that says “you’re already signed in, please click here to log out before switching accounts”. Then you have to logout and regenerate the link before you can access the account you want.

My solution was an app with a minimal embedded webkit browser, so that I can programmatically clear the cookies every time I login to a new account: that way, the sign-in link works first try. Since then, it’s grown the ability to list Cloudformation stacks and their parameters and outputs.

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