What's Your Function?

What to do when you hit a wall with solving what would appear to be a simple engineering task?

Change languages.

Never in 1000 epochs would I have even considered that as anything but barroom scoff after a few pints. Staying stuck on a menial task for any amount of time longer than what's modernly acceptable would have easily warranted several pints, also prolonging any semblance of progress.

It took 25 years to make this decision.

Not every tool is a hammer, and not every simple machine is a wedge. For a very long time, my blinders were up as a "maxi" with one, maybe three "languages" that made sense to my deciphering. Those three are still etched into my LLLM (Living Large Language Model), two of which were evaluated to grok me through the unfinished wormhole.

I only needed one function.

From Software, to Platform, to Infrastructure as a Service; and then automating any/all of it has since become a trivial task and/or obsolete at the time of writing this. Let's not forget the quintessential "Function as a Service." This route was chosen to solve the problem at large. An isolated set of rules logically arranged to solve a well-defined (at the time) task, significant to the system and its constituent parts.

Don't write your own SDKs.

If you find yourself blocked, and spend more than an unacceptable amount of time writing code that does more than: "Hello World," and nowadays inclusive of integrating your engineering thoughts and opinions with AI in some capacity, there's a good chance you're not alone. Another brilliant mind, or a community of them have also hit this wall and are helping you either dismantle or transcend through it.

It's only code.

The joys of leveraging the Function as a Service model is that code assists with solving a problem, but also forces the unit of work mantra. Building an Application inside a Function box differs greatly from planning for your unit of work to be fault-tolerant and resilient. Both require a wealth of thoughtfulness, but one path will enable a self-induced: "you're doing it wrong" outburst at some point during your journey.

I chose Javascript.

Final thought: it worked. it shipped. it's doing well. I'm still not convinced that it's a final destination. Javascript, however, is not going anywhere. It's still a brilliant utility.