Weeknotes: Dipping a toe into Amazon S3

I’ll be honest: I was incredibly distracted at work this week. I had a lot of goals for this week that just did not happen. But I was able to solve a couple problems and make some progress!

One of my goals for 2021 is to share what I’m working on more frequently, and I really like seeing Simon Willison’s Weeknotes posts as well as his TILs, so I’m going to try to copycat those this year.

Amazon S3 and Django

This week (really should be “for the last month” but this is a weeknote and not a monthnote) I made my first foray into configuring Amazon S3 for file storage in a Django project, and it brought me a lot of headaches! I wrote about my problem (unsigned URLs that I expected to be signed) in my first TIL post of 2021. Part of the problem was probably that I was adding to existing S3 configuration — I was adding the capability to do private storage as well as public storage — and since I don’t have prior S3 experience and I hadn’t been the one to set it up in the first place, I just wasn’t very familiar with the settings so even diagnosing the problem was a challenge for me. Luckily, a colleague with more S3 experience knew what was wrong immediately and everything is working now.

Pumpkin Py

This week’s Pumpkin Py newsletter was all about easy meals. If you like food newsletters, check out Pumpkin Py.