iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/12/2025

I’m no hardware engineer but watching the really nerdy hardware talks at re:Invent are really fun.

Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 03/12/2025

I’ve been radio silent on attending re:Invent this year, I was scheming the surprise some friends from the hospital. Mission accomplished last night at the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. (Amazing.) Best swag is the AWS BuilderCards deck to go with the @jeffbarr.bsky.social card he gave me last year. 😀

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 26/11/2025

This CVS can’t be stopped. Methinks the pharmacist is an OSU grad.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 26/11/2025

The whole Columbus X’s out any “M”’s before the Ohio St v Michigan game is serious business.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 09/10/2025

My lava lamp is giving off some real preserved Xenomorph energy here today.

Lava lamp where the wax looks like a preserved xenomorph from Alien.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 20/08/2025

Is this like the audio book "reading" equivalent of programming? Kiro is humming along while I focus on the more important task right now: lunch.

Screenshot of Kiro writing an AWS Lambda function.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 17/08/2025

Left Skyline coney with sword: New chicken chili. Right Skyline coney: Classic regular chili. Classic is still the best, but chicken was solid.

Two Skyline Chili coneys. Left one is chicken and right one is classic chili. The chicken one has a plastic sword in it.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 13/08/2025

I'm not sure why I even bother with sports anymore. 😂

A misery rating of 89 as a Bengals, Reds and Blue Jackets fan.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 18/07/2025

The Kiro thinking icon is adorable. The look on my face was not so adorable when I tried (and failed miserably) to login with Amazon Q Developer Pro.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 17/07/2025

One of the best things about my job is that we have dogs (with their own employee badges!) that hang out in the main hospital and you can stop and scratch their ears and call them the goodest dog ever.

Front of a trading card of a dog at Nationwide Children's Hospital named Kota.

Back of a trading card of a dog at Nationwide Children's Hospital named Kota.

A therapy dog named Kota at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 16/07/2025

I’m not saying I got beat in the work 2025 Cloud Cup video game tournament. I’m saying I got crushed, destroyed, killed. I never stood a chance against the younger guys.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 22/06/2025

I’m not sure if the fire extinguisher is for safety, window dressing or comes as part of a set.

Fire extinguisher in a fireworks display at the store.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 09/06/2025

At least it is a direct flight.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 22/05/2025

The lower left of the screen is reflecting my watch but it looks like a ghost in the transfer. Joke is on me, there actually was a ghost in the migration. Skunky extension caused a reboot loop. 👻

Apple Migration Assistant progress screen.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 28/04/2025

We essentially have a green space quad at work between the Research Institute and the Conference Center. I’ve been watching the guy mow it and it looks beautiful today in the nice weather.

Fresh cut lawn at the green space quad of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 25/04/2025

Loads of travel this week but I got to see my favorite part of Amazon’s HQ2. These are all pics of employee dogs and they have the title of their human (Software Engineer, Finance, etc) under them. 😂

Wall of framed photos of employee dogs at Amazon HQ2.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/04/2025

Dr. Strange, Adam Warlock and the Silver Surfer talking about current events.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 30/03/2025

The great spring break college tour is over. U of Toronto is the leader in the clubhouse but props to Waterloo for having the best thing to buy in the bookstore. #CanadianGoose

A stuffed Canadian goose from the University of Waterloo.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 19/03/2025

Channeling my inner @werner.social here. Half rimmed reading glasses are all warmed up.

Cover of “Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing”

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 07/03/2025

Fancy new VSCode Step Function Workflow Studio plugin is fancy. Related, using an ECS task to run a complicated bioinformatics ML container is a nice little pattern.

Screenshot from VSCode Step Functions Workflow Studio showing an ECS run task state and and EventBridge state.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 25/02/2025

They’d never let me, but I desperately want to drive one of these huge cranes that is building the second hospital tower at work.

Giant construction cranes building a second tower at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 21/02/2025

Live look at me working on cross-account AWS LakeFormation with an Apache Iceberg table. I have bent all these crazy permissions to my will.

Darth Vader saying "You are beaten. It is useless to resist."

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 19/02/2025

AWS Glue is being particularly obtuse here this morning.

Stack trace showing an Internal Service Exception when using AWS Glue Crawler.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 18/02/2025

NatGeo show about smuggling doesn’t disappoint. Gotta keep that beef jerky out.

Screenshot of tv show where US Border Patrol has stopped a driver trying to import beef jerky into the country.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 13/02/2025

Nothing like nearly 1am to learn that a fire detector somewhere in this house has a dying battery.

Screen shot of a power outage message for a house.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 10/02/2025

I love texting with my pals during sports games.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/02/2025

First @edjgeek.bsky.social and I compare AirPod Pros hearing aid settings and now this. #oldman #readers #fontdoeslooknice

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 29/01/2025

I'm not nearly as good at AWS Step Functions with JSONata as I am with the old way. Walked away for a bit, came back, and my browser window in the background has @edjgeek.bsky.social looking at me with disdain because of it. 😀

Video thumbnails of Eric Johnson watching me code in the AWS Step Functions console.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 27/01/2025

I think this is just an early days bug with the CLI though. The docs say it is just fine to include hyphens in the table bucket name, just like we've been doing with regular buckets since the start of time...

AWS documentation with a red arrow pointing out that table buckets can indeed have hyphens in their name.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 27/01/2025

Now I can query with Athena. All is right in the world. Well, except, the S3 Data Table version of my Iceberg table is *slower* than my regular S3 version. Like twice as slow. Regular bucket:

Athena query stats graph showing a query run against an Iceberg table in a regular S3 bucket.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 23/01/2025

In the olden days we'd sit and wait for C++ to finish compiling. Later we'd wait for Maven to download the internet. Then we'd wait for JavaScript do whatever the hotness is this week. They all pale compared to R, which makes us sit and wait for C++ to finish compiling. Time is a flat circle.

macOS Activity Monitor showing R pegging the CPU (single threaded) as it attempts to compile C++ library code.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 16/01/2025

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 09/01/2025

Deleting a DynamoDB record using the console has a confirmation popup now with an adorable little robot dog.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 28/12/2024

Hat tip to whoever does the staging at IKEA, all the stuffed animals were having a tea party. Notice the elephant with his trunk in the glass. Chef’s kiss.

A group of stuffed animals at IKEA sitting at a dining room table having a tea party.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 26/12/2024

Bought four random packs of Pokémon cards from the cool vending machine for stocking stuffers. My better half promptly pulled a shiny Charizard Ex. 🤣

Please Wait screen on a Pokemon card vending machine.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 21/12/2024

I’ve been able to get Dad’s 1953 Lionel train moving, but not very far or fast. Texted him asking the last time it worked, he sent a 2023 video showing it chugging right along. 🤦‍♂️

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 17/12/2024

slate.com/life/2024/12... That’s a hell of a good sentence.

It was the Y2K-adjacent midpoint between the door-to-door salesmen of the boomer era and the present-day dystopia of A.I.–enhanced robocalling—the last few years before American credulity (and disposable income) was decisively strip-mined by post–9/11 disillusionment, the emergence of the internet, an economy that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and, well, petty cheats like me, the bedrock of this nation.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 10/12/2024

Watching the Simpsons-cast really does help take the edge off being a Bengals fan.

The Simpsons version of Monday Night Football

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 07/12/2024

Vegas and #reinvent was a lot of fun but nothing is better than being at home wearing your slippers. #OldMan #DontCare

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 05/12/2024

I would pay actual money to see video of the planning conversation that got @quinnypig.com on stage. re:Invent PM: He’s hilarious let him talk. Billing PM: I’m going to need to see ALL slides. AND the script. Q PM: You’re gonna let him on stage? Are you mad?! 🤣

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/12/2024

I ran into @julianwood.com after his session yesterday and praised him for the number of words he said in an hour. (He was really flying to get through everything.) To quantify how many he actually said I used Amazon Q Developer to whip up a Python script to find out. 😀 He was spk_0: 7507 words!

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/12/2024

I almost witnessed an actual murder this morning. While he was taking a group picture @edjgeek.bsky.social ‘s unfinished Diet Dr Pepper was cleared from the table.

A very sad and thirsty man than is missing his Diet Dr Pepper.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 04/12/2024

Dad gave me $20 and said, “One pull.” He came really damn close.

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 02/12/2024

Always a treat to see my guy @edjgeek.bsky.social on stage in his element. His fans rush the stage for autographs like a Taylor Swift concert.

Eric Johnson talking to attendees at AWS re:Invent 2024

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Grant Lammi @grant.lammi.com · 02/12/2024

I love my re:Invent badge photo so much. It is from another AWS event where the lighting tattooed my bald head.

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