Ongoing | November 2022

November 2022

AWS Roadshow

So at the start of the month, I was in Edinburgh talking at an AWS roadshow for NHS customers in Scotland. I was extremely nervous, as I hadn’t presented in a long time. Also, I needed to improve at using the microphone. The presentation was about how we’ve modernised our health platform using Amazon Web Service. The feedback was kind. I’m considering converting the content to a whitepaper, as there was lots of detail that I had left out due to nerves.

If anyone would be interested in reading the lessons learned in migrating an extensive health information exchange to Amazon Web Services, then please drop me a private message on Twitter so that I gauge how much interest there would be

The Mars Codex

I’ve started writing a short story called The Mars Codex. It still needs to be completed and is a very early draft. I’ll be revising it heavily over the coming months. I’m linking it here so that Google will start picking up the page for inclusion in the search results. It’s a story about first contact with aliens.

Health Alerts

At work, I had an opportunity to design a cloud-native solution for doing health alerts. The first use case is being able to automatically inspect Radiology reports and alert clinicians if specific keywords or phrases are detected within the report. Below is the architecture I came up with to solve this problem.

From left to right, the Radiology reports are saved to the primary health information exchange and then forwarded to Health Alerts. The first process logs and categorises all incoming reports by patient ID, accession number and exam type code.

Once logged, the text from the report gets forwarded to AWS Comprehend, a natural-language processing service that uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights and connections in text. Comprehend determines if the analysis of the text reaches the required threshold for an alert to be raised.

A notification rules engine would decide who should receive a given alert, generate the email, and send a copy to all relevant participants.

On receipt of the alert notifications, the clinician logs into a dashboard accessible via the internet. The dashboard allows them to read the full report and action on the outcome. They’d also be able to launch the full health information exchange to review other documents published by health organisations against the same patient.

The architecture would use AWS EventBridge, the serverless event bus, to schedule the generation of exception reports at pre-defined times. The exception reports would contain a list of all the alerts still requiring action. The platform would then send the exception report to a pool of Radiology secretaries, who could then action the outstanding alerts.

AWS Marketplace

As the cost of living increases & the UK government are about to announce higher taxes for everyone, I’ve started thinking about how I can get some additional income. Obviously, as a software developer it seems logical to develop and release a software product that enterprises would use. I’ve got a couple of ideas. I would just need an easy delivery and payment process.

Maybe that is AWS Marketplace.

As an AWS Marketplace seller, you can publish your software products into a curated digital catalog that customers can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services to build solutions and run their businesses.

To become a seller you need to:

• Create your public profile
• Provide your tax information
• Provide your banking information, which needs to be a US bank. Companies like airwallex can provide USD accounts for people living in the UK.

So I’m doing some extensive reading of using AMI machine images to sell a product and reviewing the best practices for building AMI’s for Marketplace.

Writing

This month I wrote more about the subjects I learned. From recompiling Lambda Functions for the ARM/Graviton Architecture to generating a CSR for a multi-domain SAN certificate. I also spent some time tweaking my Caddy web servers settings to improve the HTTP Security Headers emitted by the server.

Banding

It was an honour to play with Carlisle St Stevens Brass Band at the local remembrance service. Held at the main cenotaph, we played a couple of hymns, the National Anthem and the John Peel march. The Christmas music came out so we can start practicing for a busy December full of gigs.

Links

• Amazon Comprehend Custom Classification — Leverage AutoML With Custom Datasets
• Awesome Security Hardening — A collection of awesome security hardening guides, best practices, checklists, benchmarks, tools and other resources.
• Health Icons — free open source icons for use in your next commercial or personal project.
• Optimized Video Encoding with FFmpeg on AWS Graviton Processors
• Understanding System Design of Netflix — backend architecture and cloud services.

Reading

Still reading the 5th book in the Wings of War series, Of Sand and Snow. However, half way through it’s starting to get boring and I’m losing interest. So I’ve switched to reading The Silver Ships by S. H. Jucha.

Listening

Still listening to Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force, book 8 : Armageddon.

Watching

On Amazon Prime, I’m currently watching The Devil’s Hour and The Rings of Power. Watched a couple of films this month including Extraction, The Wonder, All Quiet on the Western Front and Enola Holmes 2.