CQ / Hello World…

A quick introduction: by day, I'm a DevOps Engineer at Red Gate, a software company in Cambridge, UK. Outside of work, I enjoy both amateur radio (hence the callsign, M0VFC) and community broadcast radio at Cambridge 105. This blog aims to span all those interests - so feel free to ignore the posts that aren't relevant!

Feel free to get in touch on Twitter (@rmc47).

73 / Best wishes,
Rob

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Amazon Web Services - Scary good support?

Earlier this afternoon, I tweeted a question about Amazon Web Services:

I'm probably being paranoid, but is there any way of seeing whether an #AWS EC2 reserved instance is actually in use at the moment?

— Robert Chipperfield (@rmc47) January 9, 2014

Less than an hour later, I had an email from AWS support answering my question. But that's not the impressive bit. That email went to our office Information Systems team address - the account I'd used to purchase some reserved instances a little earlier. This means the support folks must have:

1. Spotted my tweet - which had the #AWS hashtag, but wasn't directed to them specifically. This is more than most companies do.
2. Looked at my Twitter biography and saw that I worked at Red Gate
3. Worked out which @red-gate.com AWS account had recently purchased some reserved instances
4. Open a support case and provide a useful reply

That's very impressive, both from a customer service and joined-up technology point of view.

At the same time, it needs care: when I got the email, it felt a bit weird. I'd asked a question, and had a reply via an unconnected route - it took a while for me to mentally unravel the steps they'd gone through, and it felt a little "stalker-ish".

It's something I've wondered about before - when I was working on a SaaS project, we could often see when customers were experiencing problems with the system, and had to trade off the opportunity to give great support with the surprise someone might feel when you email them unprompted and say "hey, I noticed you just saw this error message, and we're on the case already."

Resurrection!

After far too long since the last post, and far too long since Posterous closed down and took this blog offline, I've finally found the time to resurrect it. I'll try and get all the previous posts back up, but a few URLs may have changed. Let me know if you spot anything amiss and I'll do my best to fix it.

It's interesting to look back at the post I made at the start of 2012 and compare how things have changed since then:

• I finally achieved DXCC from home in April 2013 - 100 countries confirmed on Logbook of the World, and now around 140 worked.
• My CW is substantially better than it was - in 2012, I struggled in a pretty friendly contest. Now I'm relatively happy running a pileup from a semi-rare country like Ascension Island. Just don't try chatting - that'll throw me instantly!
• The Camb-Hams continues to progress as a club - both in contests, such as 160m AFS and several of the UKACs where we came first, and socially with new members joining regularly.
• Outside broadcasts with Cambridge 105 again wiped the floor on anything any of the other local radio stations were able to put on, including four days of live broadcast from the Cambridge Rock Festival.

Some things don't change. Finding time to fit everything in remains difficult, leading to plenty of half-finished projects. Hopefully some of them can get tidied up in 2014.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

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