Past municipal elections I know who was good and who was bad. Who was naughty and who was nice. Who was straightforward and who was scheming and manipulative. This election for me is different because four of the current six councillors are just completing only their first terms in office. Bonnie Bryant is completing her second term as a councillor and generally speaking I'm not even sure about her. I am thrilled that our mayor Shantz is hanging up her hat and pray that she is not a good old Conservative that our Premier will anoint as the new appointed Regional Chair. That would simply be extending our environmental disaster with our groundwater and Creek ("Gig") further onto the regional stage. 

My problem is that I do not know how culpable all the councillors are with Woolwich's head in the sand, let's trust the good folks who have lied and deceived us for decades, and hold steady environmentally. Nathan Cadeau long ago exposed his biases. He got in good with mayor Sandy by accepting the Chair's position on TRAC from a position of total and complete ignorance.  I expect that when she asked for a Council volunteer everybody else wisely leapt backwards leaving Nathan front and centre. All council members were approached by CPAC (Citizens Public Advisory Committee) members very early in their start on Council and basically were ignored in the final decisions around TRAC. How much of that was the experienced mayor laying down the law I do not know. 

One proviso I have is that any council member or candidate being backed by local, powerful interests is likely no friend of the public interest. The local, powerful interests have been behind both good and bad developments in our community and their adherents would include Bill Strauss, Sandy Shantz, Mark Bauman, Pat Mclean, Bob Waters etc. If you know of any connections between them and current candidates than my recommendation is do not vote for them.

It is my understanding that Kayla Grant is not running again and if I'm wrong about that then apologies to her. Overall I have no criticisms of her efforts as a councillor.  Schwindt and Burgess also other than following suit with Sandy Shantz's willingness to support a false narrative being sold to Woolwich citizens and residents about both the overall regional water supply and about the failed "cleanup" of our groundwater and Creek, are neither in my bad books. Who is best for the public interest I honestly don't know but that is because I really don't know their backgrounds that well. 

Shantz is also no loss to a generally bad regional Council. She did nothing on the Police Board and mostly nothing for Woolwich as well. That is her legacy. One decision I applaud and that was putting the health/warning signs along the Canagagigue Creek. Other than that, good riddance. She served her local masters well, not the public.

♦

In April, Ontario proclaimed that October would be Hungarian Heritage Month.

It’s a notable month because in October 1956, Canada welcomed more than 37,000 Hungarians following the country’s student-led revolution that began in Budapest.

Today, Canada is home to more than 350,000 people of Hungarian and Magyar descent, along with Hungarian-speaking peoples from other areas of Europe, nearly half of whom live in Ontario.

Some of those Hungarian-Canadians are members of the Kossuth Hungarian Canadian Club, located on Kossuth Road in Cambridge, near Beaverdale and Brookfield golf clubs.

For more, visit Cambridge Times.

Check out my latest post Schnitzel and gulyas leves for Hungarian Month from AndrewCoppolino.com.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, the attendance link will be included in an email the day of the event.

Location: Online. Please ensure that your onscreen name matches your registration name.

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Bas Dijkstra

Topic:

Traditionally, teams have spent a lot of time writing, running and maintaining automated tests as a means to get valuable feedback about the state of their product, fast. Now that we have LLMs at our disposal, we can write and maintain those tests even faster. But what do you know about those tests? How good are they, really?

In this talk, we will look at mutation testing as a technique to help you find out how good those tests that you wrote, or that Claude wrote for you, really are. After a brief introduction on why it is important to test your tests, you will see a live demo of mutation testing in action, and I’ll discuss how to interpret the signals provided by mutation testing tools and how to use them to improve your tests and your confidence in their ability to capture problems with your product.

To wrap things up, I will give some recommendations on how you, too, can start using mutation testing in your team and project, right away.

Bio: 

Hey, my name is Bas Dijkstra, and I am an independent test automation consultant and trainer.

I have been active in the test automation field for some 18 years now, and have worked on software testing and automation solutions across a wide range of programming languages, frameworks and technology stacks.

I’ve delivered test automation training to dozens of companies and hundreds of conference attendees in the Netherlands as well as abroad, to excellent reviews.

I’m also the developer of RestAssured.Net, a library that is meant to make writing tests for HTTP APIs in C# a breeze.

I live in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, together with my wife and two sons. When I am not at work, I like to go outside for a long bike ride, or to sit down and play a game of chess or read a good book.

Spawning another AI agent can feel like an instant, almost free hire. The call is small. Another worker joins. Work begins in parallel.

That makes it very easy to confuse more active workers with more net progress.

I ran into a version of this with my own automated trends research. The workflow could gather headlines and candidate stories from several sources, but collection was only half the job. The material still had to become one useful daily digest. On some runs, plenty of research came in and the finished digest never appeared.

Adding another source collector was easy. Getting the existing work across the finish line was the harder part.

Once several agents are already working in parallel, I care more about what another worker would add, versus how many the system can run. What would it contribute that the existing workers could not already deliver with less effort?

So I treat another worker as a marginal investment:

The branch has to contribute something distinct, and that benefit has to be worth the extra context handoff, duplicated work, shared-state contention, verification, and reduction it creates.

This rule does not tell us how many agents every workflow should use. The stopping point moves with the task, the architecture, the tooling, and the cost of delay.

Which is less tidy than “three agents is optimal”, but gives me something concrete to assess before adding another.

“More capacity” is too vague to justify widening fan-out.

A new branch can absolutely be worth adding. It might carry a specialist capability the existing workers do not have. It might search a separate source space while the critical path continues. It might run an intentionally independent review where disagreement is itself valuable. It might explore a genuinely different approach in parallel because waiting for serial attempts would cost too much time.

Those are concrete contributions.

Using my trends workflow as an example, a new collector might have been worth adding if it reached a genuinely different source or uncovered something insightful that the existing research missed. Another collector gathering similar headlines would have been a different proposition: more material arriving at a synthesis step that was already struggling to finish.

But before I add another worker, I want to be able to finish this sentence:

This branch exists because it can produce this result that no current branch already owns.

If I cannot explain what the new branch would add, I have little reason to expect it to improve the result. I only know that I have unused capacity.

Unused capacity is not the same thing as unfinished work.

The worker itself is only one part of the cost.

Before it can do anything useful, someone has to decide what context it needs. After it returns, someone has to decide whether the result is trustworthy and how it rejoins the main line of work.

That is why I would separate coordination cost into several parts instead of putting everything under “overhead.”

What has to be copied, summarized, or rediscovered so the branch can work safely? A worker that can act from a compact brief is cheap to isolate. A worker that needs most of the parent’s state, exceptions, assumptions, and unresolved questions is already consuming attention before execution begins.

How likely is the branch to inspect the same files, search the same sources, or repeat checks another worker already owns? Deliberate independent verification can be useful. Accidental overlap is just paying twice for the same coverage.

Does the branch depend on shared state another worker is also changing? If two branches can race on assumptions, files, locks, decisions, or intermediate outputs, the system acquires a larger coordination surface along with the extra execution capacity.

What evidence is required before the result can affect the main task? Every new branch creates another output that has to be accepted, rejected, or qualified. On high-cost or weakly observable work, that review burden can dominate the apparent speedup.

How does the result come back? Several good branches do not automatically become one coherent next action. If each additional worker increases the synthesis and reconciliation burden, some of the fan-out gain is simply being deferred until the end.

A worker may finish its own task quickly, yet leave the parent with so much checking and reconciliation work that the workflow saves little time overall.

The trends runs made that cost visible. One run staged 255 candidate items and produced no final digest (sure, I could raise the tool call limits, but it’d stop being sensible at some point). Another staged 64 from eight sources, then stopped before completing synthesis. The research material existed, but the useful output did not.

The failures had several contributing factors, yet the practical problem was clear:

The system still had to filter, compare, deduplicate, and turn everything into something usable.

More collection would not have done that work for it.

The research supports this distinction, within the conditions tested.

A September 2026 paper, Rethinking Multi-Agent Collaboration: When More Is Less, models long-horizon work as a dependency graph. In its tested setup, collaboration is more useful when the task contains relatively independent regions that can be separated without carrying the full history of the task into every branch.

Tightly coupled sequential work creates the opposite pressure. If later steps depend heavily on earlier ones, decomposition adds coordination overhead and can damage the dependency chain the system needs to preserve. The paper also reports that simply increasing the agent pool or recursion depth did not consistently improve outcomes in its experiments.

Those experiments do not establish the best agent count for every workflow. Before widening fan-out, I would check:

Is there another unit of work here that is actually worth isolating?

A broader study, Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems, reaches a compatible conclusion across different benchmarks, model families, and architectures. Its reported results make task structure, coordination efficiency, redundancy, topology, and overhead part of the answer. Parallelizable work can benefit; sequential or tool-heavy work can lose enough to coordination overhead that more agents become counterproductive in the tested conditions.

I would not turn those benchmark results into a fixed production rule. They show how much the outcome depends on the structure of the task and how the work is divided.

Wider fan-out has more to offer when another piece of work can proceed mostly independently. When a new branch needs the same extensive context and keeps working on shared state, briefing and coordination become more demanding.

The current Hermes delegation documentation shows the trade-off cleanly.

A delegated subagent starts with a fresh conversation rather than inheriting the parent’s full conversation history. The parent has to pass the goal, constraints, files, findings, or other context the child needs. The child later returns a final summary rather than its whole working context.

Isolation protects the parent context and keeps the child focused.

If the child can solve a narrow problem from a compact packet, great. If the parent has to summarize much of its working context before delegation is safe, the branch is no longer as cheap as the spawn call made it look.

And if the returned summary is not enough to accept the result, the parent may still have to reopen sources, repeat checks, or reconstruct reasoning on the way back in.

This is a Hermes-specific implementation example, not a universal rule about every agent framework. But the operating question is portable:

What does isolation save, and what does it force you to reconstruct?

A fixed topology can become surprisingly easy to defend simply because it already exists.

If a workflow has four workers, the fifth can start to feel like the natural next step. If the runtime supports ten, using three can feel like leaving performance on the table.

I do not think capability should decide the count.

With my trends workflow, I considered splitting the sources into more parallel jobs. But that risked duplicate entries, weaker cross-source comparison, and more outputs to reconcile. I chose to separate collection from synthesis, with a clear handoff between the two. That gave the downstream work its own room to finish rather than multiplying competing digests.

The stronger stopping rule is empirical and local. Add the branch, then look at what actually changed:

• Did wall-clock time fall?
• Did coverage increase?
• Did the new branch find material the existing branches missed?
• How much duplicated work appeared?
• Did shared-state conflicts increase?
• Did verification effort rise?
• How much extra synthesis was required before the result became usable?

Those observations do not need to become one universal score. They only need to make the next scaling decision falsifiable.

If a fourth research branch repeatedly finds nothing new and adds review work, that is evidence to stop at three for that class of task in that setup. If the fourth branch repeatedly finds distinct evidence while staying cheap to brief and verify, that is evidence to keep it.

The number is local. The method is reusable.

That matters because a multi-agent system should be able to shrink as easily as it expands.

Otherwise fan-out stops being a response to task structure and turns into architecture for architecture’s sake.

Make the next worker justify itself with seven questions:

1. Unique contribution — What result or coverage will this worker add that is not already owned?
2. Separability — Can it progress with bounded dependencies, or will it keep waiting on and reconciling with other branches?
3. Context cost — What must the parent reconstruct for it to operate correctly?
4. State cost — What shared resources or assumptions can conflict while it runs?
5. Acceptance cost — What evidence is required before its output can affect the main task?
6. Reduction cost — What synthesis or reconciliation work appears when it returns?
7. Observed gain — What concrete result would show that the branch was worth adding?

None of these questions decides the answer alone. Their job is to prevent “we can add another agent” from silently becoming “we should.”

More workers can still be the right answer. Some tasks contain abundant independent work. Some genuinely benefit from independent review. Some are constrained enough by time that wider parallelism is worth paying for even when it is less token-efficient.

Before adding another worker, be clear about what it will contribute and how you will judge the result. Apply the same test across workflows; let the agent count follow the evidence.

From Dream Atlas: The Next Agent Had to Earn Its Coordination Cost — the original log behind this article.

I’m continuing to write about AI workflows, product work, and what I’m learning as I build, test, and tinker. If that sounds useful, follow me here on Medium. And if this piece earned a clap, I’d appreciate it ✨

Is One More AI Agent Worth the Extra Work? was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are things you think as a Project Manager & then there are things you actually say. These are not always the same thing. In fact, sometimes there is an entire internal monologue between the two.

“Can we please read the document before asking me what’s in the document?”

What I say: “Absolutely, happy to walk you through it.”
What I’m thinking: It’s three pages. I sent it three days ago. Just read it.

“Is anyone actually going to make this decision?”

What I say: “Can we confirm who will be the final decision-maker?”
Because apparently, if nobody owns the decision, it can live forever.

“That wasn’t a requirement when we agreed the scope.”

What I say: “Let me check the original requirements & understand what’s changed.”
What I’m thinking: Ah. A plot twist.

“Why did nobody tell me this three weeks ago?!”

What I say: “Thanks for flagging this. Let’s understand the impact on the current plan.”

Because “why are you telling me now?” isn’t particularly helpful. Even when it is extremely satisfying.

“NO! You cannot have all three.”

What I say: “Given the timeline, we may need to prioritise between scope, quality & resources.”
The project manager’s version of: Pick a struggle.

“That’s not a blocker. That’s an inconvenience.”

What I say: “Let’s see if there’s a workaround while we look into it.”

Because not every problem deserves a red flag. Some problems deserve a conversation. Some deserve an email. And some deserve approximately seven minutes of your attention before you move on. Knowing which is which is a skill.

“Please stop adding things to the project.”

What I say: “We can certainly consider that for a future phase.”
Because “future phase” is sometimes where perfectly good ideas go to wait quietly until everyone has forgotten about them.

“I need you to actually do the thing you said you’d do.”

What I say: “Just following up on the action from our last meeting…”

Again.
And again.
And again.

At some point, project management becomes an endurance sport.

“You don’t need another meeting. You need to make a decision.”

What I say: “Would it help if we summarised the available options and make a recommendation?”
Because meetings don’t solve indecision. Decisions do.

“I knew this was going to happen. I just knew it!”

What I say: “Let’s look at what we could have identified earlier and what we can do differently next time.”

This is probably one of the hardest lessons in project management.
Sometimes you are right.
Sometimes you even documented that you were right.
And when the thing you warned everyone about eventually happens…Nobody needs your victory lap. They need a solution.

“That’s not how any of this works.”

What I say: “Let me explain the dependency there.”
Same message. Different career outcome.

“ASAP is not a date!”
What I say: “Would it be possible to have this ready by…?”
Because apparently we have collectively decided that ASAP is an internationally recognised unit of time. It isn’t.

“Let’s take that offline.”

What I say: Exactly that.
What I mean: There are several things I want to say right now that would not improve this meeting & I will not say in front of the whole team.

And then there are the things you eventually learn not to say at all. Not because you don’t have the right to say them. But because you’ve learnt that being the smartest person in the room isn’t the same as being the most useful person in the room.

Your job as a project manager isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. You just need to be the most resourceful.

You can prove someone wrong, or you can move the project forward.
You can remind everyone that you warned them or you can help fix the problem.
You can point out who dropped the ball or you can figure out how to stop it happening again.

That’s one of the less glamorous parts of project management.

You learn to separate what needs to be said from what merely needs to be felt — and honestly, that’s not just a PM skill. That’s leadership. That’s a people skill.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing you bring into a difficult meeting isn’t the answer.

It’s the ability to think: “Oh, for God’s sake.” Take a breath. And then say: “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do now...”

Things I Wouldn’t Say as a Project Manager was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For many years I enjoyed reading Luisa D'Amato's public whipping particularly of our public Board, the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB). Today's Opinion piece by Luisa titled "Waterloo Region's school board races are... wild" hammers the Catholic Board as well so kudos to Luisa for being fair. Personally I believe that over the decades the Catholic Board generally has demonstrated more honesty, sincerity and Christian behaviour than the WRDSB by far.

 Over the decades far too many stupid and perverse wanna be politicians have used the public school board as nothing more than a stepping stone into "higher" politics. We need look no further than our very own, thank God she's gone, ,mayor Sandy Shantz. Not only was she elected trustee but she extremely shortly became the Board Chair (Board as in Board of Trustees). She did nothing remarkable other than do as she was told and not make waves. At the time and despite Luisa D'Amato's fine reporting the Trustees still had some public presence and respect making the jump to municipal politics easy. It was also helpful for Sandy that Elmira was a hockey town hence her support for two ice surfaces versus Pat Mclean's support for but one got Sandy into a councillor's chair. Then after a four year hiatus for personal reasons she had a slam dunk for the Mayor's position as then mayor Todd Cowan self-destructed due to a combination of arrogance and dishonesty.   

Perhaps after the public exposure of the school board as nothing more than proxy political left versus right ideological spats mostly irrelevant to children and public education; their usefulness as political springboards to higher office will be reduced. Of course the problem is that the local powers behind picking candidates whether for Trustee positions or Councillor positions never rests. They are always looking ahead for candidates who want to advance and are willing to go along to get along. When three quarters of the candidates running are in it for the wrong motives then democracy has already been defeated before the first vote is cast.  

Before we begin, let me ask you a question: Do you shop online?

If your answer is yes, how long does it take you to decide what to buy and, more importantly, who to buy from?

For me, the answer is embarrassingly long.

Not because I enjoy browsing endlessly, but because I am constantly trying to avoid being scammed or becoming the latest victim of the dreaded “what I ordered vs. what I got” experience. Between comparing vendors, reading reviews, checking social media pages, and looking for signs of legitimacy, shopping online often feels like a research project.

At some point, I began asking myself:

What if there was a platform where verified fashion vendors could showcase their products, allowing shoppers to browse with greater confidence and spend less time worrying about trust?

That question became the foundation of Topsy, a cloud-native fashion marketplace designed to connect shoppers with verified vendors.

Before writing a single line of code, I wanted to verify that I wasn’t the only person facing this problem. So, I conducted a small survey involving 18 women who regularly shop online. The results confirmed what I suspected: concerns about trust, scams, and product quality were common experiences among online shoppers. Their responses can be viewed here.

Over 57% had been scammed or nearly scammed while shopping through informal channels like Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok. Many spent between 30 minutes and over an hour searching for a single item across multiple platforms. And nearly every respondent said the same thing: they would use a trusted, dedicated marketplace if one existed.

The top features they wanted were not complicated. They wanted verified seller badges. They wanted buyer reviews. They wanted secure payment. They wanted to know that the person selling to them had been checked.

Trust was not a nice-to-have. It was the entire barrier.

As an Economics graduate, I immediately saw both a business opportunity and an analytics opportunity. Understanding customer behavior, purchasing patterns, vendor performance, and trust factors could help create a better shopping experience while generating valuable insights for marketplace operators.

At the same time, I had recently completed my AWS Cloud Practitioner certification and wanted an opportunity to apply my cloud knowledge in a practical setting. Rather than building another tutorial project, I decided to solve a real problem.

The result was Topsy.

What Topsy Is
Topsy is a serverless fashion marketplace built entirely on AWS. It allows buyers to browse verified fashion products across four categories (In-Office, Out-of-Office, Casual, and Spicy), select sizes and colors, add items to cart, and pay via Ghana’s mobile money ecosystem or card through Paystack. Sellers can list and manage their products. An admin analytics dashboard tracks marketplace performance, customer behavior, sales trends, and seller activity.

The marketplace currently features 15 products across the four categories, listed by three verified Ghanaian sellers: Abena Collections, Style by Ama, and Akosua Couture.

In this article, I’ll walk through the problem, the research, the architecture, and how I transformed a personal frustration into a cloud-native solution.

Every component of Topsy runs on AWS, provisioned across four CloudFormation stacks.

topsy-storage creates two S3 buckets (product images and frontend files) and eight DynamoDB tables covering products, orders, users, cart, reviews, inventory, payments, and market research data.

topsy-auth provisions AWS Cognito for user authentication, handling sign-up, email verification, login, and password reset. It supports two roles — buyers and sellers — routing each to the correct experience after login.

topsy-cdn puts CloudFront in front of the S3 frontend bucket, serving the site over HTTPS with an Origin Access Control (OAC) policy so the S3 bucket is never publicly exposed.

topsy-api provisions an API Gateway with ten REST endpoints and seven Lambda functions in Node.js 24.x — covering product browsing, cart management, seller product management, and order retrieval. Lambda runs code only when called, so there are no idle servers to pay for.

The deployment pipeline was set up separately from the CloudFormation stacks using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild. Every push to GitHub triggers an automatic build, S3 sync, and CloudFront cache invalidation. Push code, it goes live, no manual steps.

The buyer-facing side of Topsy is built in React and served via CloudFront. It includes a login page, a product browsing page with category and item type filters, individual product pages, and a cart with a full payment flow.

The payment flow was designed specifically for Ghana’s ecosystem. Paystack is integrated as the payment gateway, supporting MTN Momo, Telecel Cash, AirtelTigo, and card payments. This reflects one of the strongest findings from the survey, that buyers want payment to feel safe and familiar, not foreign.

Since Topsy is a new platform with no real transaction history yet, I simulated a dataset to power the analytics dashboard. Crucially, this dataset was not random — it was designed to correlate directly with the findings from my 18-person survey.

Budget tiers in the simulation match survey responses: 50% of simulated users have budgets under 50 GHC, 28% between 50 and 150 GHC, and the remainder above that. Payment method distribution reflects Ghana’s mobile money reality, with MTN Momo accounting for 48% of transactions. Peak shopping hours, lunchtime and evenings, are weighted to reflect when Ghanaian women said they browse most. The casual and in-office categories are weighted as the most popular, consistent with what respondents said they shop for.

The result is a dataset that tells a believable, research-grounded story about what a Ghanaian fashion marketplace might look like in its early months.

Overview tab — The headline numbers from the demo dataset: GHC 39,973 in total revenue across 383 orders, a 76% delivery rate, a 4% cancellation rate, and an average order value of GHC 108. Six business insight cards summarize the key findings in plain language — for example, that casual wear generated 52% of all orders between January and July, and that 80% of transactions were completed via mobile money.

Sales tab — A monthly revenue trend line shows performance from January to July. A category breakdown confirms casual wear and in-office styles as the top performers. A payment methods chart shows the dominance of mobile money. The top products chart shows that the Basic Crop Top at GHC 45 was the highest-ordered product — consistent with the survey finding that the majority of respondents have budgets under 50 GHC.

Behaviour tab — This is where the market research and the data connect most directly. A conversion funnel shows the journey from store visit to completed order. A retention curve tracks how customers return over time. Peak hour and day-of-week charts confirm the lunch and evening shopping patterns from the simulation. And two charts drawn directly from survey data show the most-requested platform features and the biggest pain points respondents faced — with vendor trust concerns topping both lists.

Seller's tab — Performance data for each of the three verified sellers, showing order counts, revenue, and average order value.

The analytics dashboard demonstrates something that goes beyond the cloud infrastructure. It shows how primary research data can be used to shape a product and inform a simulated dataset, which then powers a live analytics layer. This is the loop that data analysts work in — define the question, collect data, model it, visualise it, draw conclusions.

The survey said trust is the barrier. The product addresses trust with verified seller badges and integrated reviews. The demo dataset reflects the budget and behaviour patterns from the survey. And the dashboard lets you see it all in one place.

No project like this goes smoothly from start to finish. A few things that caught me out and are worth documenting:

API Gateway path conflicts. You cannot have two sibling variable path parts at the same level in API Gateway. Having /cart/{userId} and /cart/{cartItemId} as siblings causes a deployment error. The fix was to nest them: /cart/{userId} for fetching a cart, and /cart/{userId}/{cartItemId} for updating or deleting specific items.

Lambda handler naming. On Linux build servers, filenames are case-sensitive. If the Lambda function code file is named getProducts.js but the CloudFormation handler property says GetProducts.handler, it fails. Matching exactly matters.

CORS configuration. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) errors occur when a frontend on one domain tries to call an API on another. The fix requires two things: enabling CORS in API Gateway and making sure every Lambda function returns the correct Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in its response, including error responses, and including the OPTIONS preflight request handler.

CloudFront caching. After each deployment, CloudFront can serve stale cached content until an invalidation request clears it. This invalidation is now automated in the CI/CD pipeline, but it took a few debugging sessions to understand why changes weren’t showing up after deploying.

IAM permissions. Every time a new AWS service interaction was introduced; CodePipeline writing to S3, Lambda reading DynamoDB, CodeBuild invalidating CloudFront, a new IAM permission had to be explicitly granted. AWS’s least-privilege model means nothing is permitted by default, which is the right security posture but requires careful attention.

Topsy is a working foundation. There are several clear directions from here:

Expand the survey. The current dataset is drawn from 18 women. I am extending the same survey to male respondents to understand whether the trust and scam problems are specific to women’s fashion shopping or reflect a broader Ghana e-commerce pattern. The findings will inform whether Topsy should expand to menswear or remain focused.

Seller-side analytics. The seller inventory page currently uses placeholder data. Connecting it to the real API will allow sellers to see their own performance data. Orders, revenue, and stock levels, directly from the dashboard.

Bigger data infrastructure. The current analytics pipeline uses DynamoDB as the data store and a Lambda export function to write CSV files to S3. The natural next step is to replace this with AWS Glue for ETL processing, Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse, and Amazon Athena for SQL queries, the standard big data stack on AWS.

Topsy started as a personal frustration. It became a research project. Then a product. Then a cloud architecture. Then an analytics story.

The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam teaches you what the services are. Building Topsy taught me how they connect, why the configuration details matter, and what breaks when you get them wrong.

I Got Tired of Being Almost Scammed Online. So, I Built a Marketplace was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Gareth and I joined a long line this morning, Saturday October 10, to vote in the advanced poll for the 2026 municipal election. We voted for Mayor, 2 Regional Councillors, 1 ward councillor and 3 public school trustees.

What are the municipal issues in this election? In the line up to vote, we talked about skunks, coyotes and walking our dogs. Missing cats came up (see coyotes). People also want to be able to have fires in their backyards as is allowed in Kitchener. Should people be allowed to park on the street all night? My husband always hated when people parked in front of our house. I have no idea why. Higher taxes are always an issue. Finding that balance between taxation and services is always a chore.

Housing is always an issue, whether the cost of buying or renting to the lack of accessible housing for the poor. More public washrooms and parks. I would like to tell you which candidate talked about public washrooms, but I am trying to be neutral here. Read your literature or websites like I did! And don’t forget that Regional government and City have different responsibilities. Municipal Government Overview | Waterloo Region Votes

A big one is the question: Should the city raise taxes and shovel all the sidewalks for residences and businesses. Personally, I have advocated and had success with making sure the walk throughs are shovelled and sewer drains cleared. Regional roads like Northfield with houses backing onto it and paths should be cleared. My road being a secondary road can take awhile to be plowed after a storm so I am more concerned with that.

I was told earlier in the year that there were not enough people signing up to run. At the poll, I found that there were plenty of choices, so people must have signed up at the last minute.

This year, along with a ward polling station on election day, October 26, there are also supervote locations. You can go anywhere across the city and vote. You are no longer restricted to a certain polling station. The supervote locations are as follows:

The locations are open from 10 am to 8 pm on voting day.

There are also advanced polls :

• Oct. 16, 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. – Albert McCormick Community Centre
• Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. – Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex
• Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. – RIM Park

Supervoting locations

You must be a Canadian citizen and 18 or over to vote, live in Waterloo, or own or rent property in Waterloo, or are the spouse of someone who owns or rents property in Waterloo. You cannot be prohibited from voting.

You can not vote for the following reasons:

You are serving a sentence in a correctional institution

a corporation ( strangely, corporations are considered people)

voting on behalf of someone else, unless you are an authorized voting proxy under the Municipal Elections Act.

University and college students can vote in their school area and/or at home.

You will get a voter’s registration card in the mail. If you forget your card, like we did, you simply show identification.

Bring one piece of identification that shows your name and current Waterloo address.

If your ID does not show your current address, you can complete a declaration form at your voting location.

Accepted identification includes:

• Ontario driver’s licence
• Ontario photo card
• utility bill
• bank statement
• government-issued document with your name and address

You can get more information at Vote in the municipal election | City of Waterloo

Candidates have left literature for you to look at, have a read and vote for the person you think is the best!

Maybe a better question is "Do we want to emulate our southern brothers various wars...?" My hope is that Canadians are a little too smart for that. However how about a war on contaminated drinking water? Really why not? In one sense speaking highly optimistically maybe we already have started. Is it conceivable that all the bad old days of mass industrial dumping on their own property has ended? Are the Varnicolor Chemical, Uniroyal Chemical, Breslube, Northstar Aerospace, Canadian General Tower, Ciba-Geigy, IMICO, Sunar, Canbar, Borg, Nutrite, Kaufman, Budd, tanneries, textile mills, steel producers all in the rearview mirror? That is the first step. The Ontario MECP needs to be replaced with honest, dedicated and intelligent people both on the ground doing inspections as well as at the top. Real, unscheduled industrial inspections with full cooperation legally mandated must begin if it hasn't already.

The most egregious, blatant and toxic sites must be contained and if possible remediated. This can not be done by proven client driven, friendly to industry consulting companies paid for by the owners of contaminated sites whether active or abandoned. These sites can not wait a day longer. Municipalities can no longer be allowed to let these sites sit until a developer comes along who does a cost benefit analysis and determines that a superficial, quick "cleanup" can still allow him to make millions of dollars profit by redeveloping the property.

End of the pipe solutions are not wrong or nefarious. Yes water treatment is necessary whether to remove bacteria and viruses or gasoline components from service stations and trichloroethylene (TCE) from local Waterloo Region manufacturers. They however must not replace front of the pipe solutions. Source removal methods have improved and whether paid for up front by the guilty polluters or by governments with serious financial collection efforts afterwards, long term cleanups must be a significant part of the process.

Ministry of Labour inspectors are about as credible as MOE/MECP inspectors particularly in non-union companies. There are safety committees mandated by law for both union and non-union shops however there are very few non-union shops so stupid as to put on a former employees Record of Employment that they were fired for skin colour, religion, political attitude, gender, safety concerns or ENVIRONMENTAL concerns. I believe that all industrial employers including non-union must be mandated to have a real, functioning, informed Environmental Committee and that they must not be handpicked company loyalists on the committee. This too would require an overhaul of Ministry of Labour staff who have been conditioned to be non confrontational and oblivious to obvious problems. To those who believe that employers have an unconditional right to do what they want on their own property let me say the obvious. Do they have a right to release toxins to the air to be inhaled by their meighbours? Do they have a right to dump solvents on their property that end up in aquifers below them that supply drinking water to the community? Obviously no such rights exist other than when already existing laws are ignored and not enforced.

This is just the start for a war on contaminated water. Otherwise we will continue down the current path whereby our authorities continually, falsely assure us that our water is safe when in fact it is deteriorating year after year as long ago contamination continues to dissolve and spread while we pump more and more for our expanding populations.    

♦

Stepping inside Aiāna restaurant, a short walk south from Parliament Hill, your attention is drawn to curved banquettes that sit centrally beneath striking light fixtures. Adjacent is a large glass enclosure of wine bottles on one wall and windows onto busy O’Connor Street on the other. Bookending the dining room, an inviting bar near the entrance and chef and co-owner Raghav Chaudhary’s open kitchen, toward the back. are focal points.

Recipient of a 2026 VineRoutes “Vine Award” for Best in Distinction, Aiāna’s design and décor motifs serve to highlight the plates that are presented to diners at their tables, according to Chaudhary.

“We wanted to open up the space here with simplicity and elegance. Guests are immersed in and fully exposed to the food, the service, the experience,” he says … For the rest of the story on how Aiāna draws on Canadian ingredients, global influences and the voices of his team are all part of defining the restaurant’s identity, visit Vine Routes.

Check out my latest post Aiāna Ottawa is a Vine Routes award winner from AndrewCoppolino.com.

The post Halloween appeared first on Grand River Rocks Climbing Gym.

The post Halloween appeared first on Grand River Rocks Climbing Gym.

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Yesterday's K-W Record had an article by Bill Jackson titled "Development backlog cleared in Waterloo Region". I would describe it as a puffpiece designed to get the Record back in Waterloo Region's good graces after all the Record articles this past winter and spring truthfully describing and criticizing the Region's water management. Unsurprisingly the tail of the dog, Joseph Puopolo of Urban Initiatives is praising the reopening of business as usual for builders and developers in Waterloo Region. It is normal in this Region, just like in this Township (Woolwich), for the biggest beneficiaries of government expenditures to run the show. In fact here in Woolwich Township we even have the guiltiest parties (Uniroyal/Lanxess and the MECP) running large remediation efforts of which their incompetence and negligence has been the major cause.

Now regarding builders and developers it would be a major stretch to blame them for the state of our water systems. Yes they have always demanded more and better but mostly under the guise of reducing the housing crunch via higher numbers of new homes being built. The fact that the bulk of those new homes are grossly overpriced enriching everybody along the line including those buyers who are themselves making profits by flipping those homes and artificially increasing the demand. The general public are getting frozen out of home ownership. 

It has been mostly our soulless, degenerate industrialists and manufacturers who have profited here in the last one hundred years by cheerfully dumping their toxic wastes wherever they bloody wanted to primarily at little to zero cost to themselves. They have externalized those environmental costs onto the general public, the old, the young and those in vulnerable health. They have also externalized the health costs onto wildlife and the overall environment, Government oversight by the M.O.E. or MECP has been a joke at best and that's been intentional. Governments and political parties like financial support especially around election times and it's their biggest beneficiaries who give the most. I describe them as semi legal bribes. 

This spring and summer I have written here about all the industrially contaminated wells and wellfields throughout Waterloo Region. Most of these firms have walked without ever paying their fair share. Probably they figured their government "bribes" were less expensive than proper disposal costs. 

Now for my "mean and cruel" water solution. Put the new arrivals from now on in designated second class water areas. Tell them ahead of time that if they want to live here that's how it's going to be. Older residents get the best, most expensively treated water and new ones get the less treated, more contaminated water. That way we should have lots of room for growth while slowly developing an obvious group of second class citizens who might just spark the overdue political revolution needed in this Region and country.  

♦

The original Granite Club at 69 Agnes St. - our home from 1927 until
 2003.  

When Bibi shows up for her weekly shift as a volunteer at House of Friendship’s Neighbourhood Food Program, she has one goal – to make it easier for the people who come every week, looking for help to feed their families.

“When the participants come to you, they look so down,” said Bibi. “I like to cheer them up, by asking them questions: ‘How are you today? What would you like?’

♦

“I try to put some joy into their life, to make them feel like they aren’t alone.”

When Bibi first started volunteering just over two years ago, she was surprised by how busy the program was.

“I didn’t realize how many people need help. They show up early, waiting to receive their food. That was a whole new experience for me.”

Every week at Chandler Mowat Community Centre, one of the centres where Bibi volunteers, 220 households come every week to pick up food for their families. And this is mirrored at five other community centres in Kitchener and Waterloo where House of Friendship also runs community programs. With one in nine households in Waterloo Region needing food support, keeping up with the ongoing demand is a challenge.

But when Bibi volunteers, she also works hard to build a connection with the people who come for help, no matter how busy they are.

When one woman shared that her husband was struggling with his mental health, Bibi was able to let her know about free counselling services available through House of Friendship.

“House of Friendship has all these services, I didn’t even know about until I volunteered,” said Bibi. “I was glad to tell her about the services we offer.”

A few weeks later, the woman came back to Bibi, thrilled with the results.

“She gave me a big hug and told me with the service he had, he’s doing much better. I was so happy I could help.”

Bibi said that she looks forward to volunteering every week, glad to have a meaningful way to make use of her free time in retirement.

“I’ve learned that everybody has a story to tell,” Bibi said. “Sometimes all it takes is someone willing to listen. A simple conversation can help people feel seen, heard, and cared for. If you can offer a little kindness and encouragement, it reminds them that they don’t have to face life’s challenges alone.”

To learn more about volunteering at House of Friendship, visit www.houseoffriendship.org/volunteer.

The post Everybody Has a Story to Tell appeared first on House Of Friendship.

AI adoption is creating work nobody sees, measures, or values.

A recent briefing from All Tech is Human, in collaboration with the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, found that people are spending substantial time checking AI outputs for accuracy, hallucinations, compliance, and tone.

There’s also less visible AI office housework: training coworkers, managing anxiety about AI, encouraging AI adoption, and translating generic AI strategies into workable day-to-day practices.

And here’s something that caught my attention: participants reported that women are disproportionately asked to lead these cultural initiatives.

The briefing describes this work as being characterized as women’s work and devalued compared with more technical AI work.

Sound familiar?

We’ve long known that women often end up doing the office housework that keeps organizations running, but rarely gets recognized in performance reviews, promotions, or pay.

So, look around your organization and ask: Who is doing the AI housework? Who gets credit for it?

Then make the work visible. Recognize and reward it. And build it into someone’s role.

To further disrupt office housework, check out my five ideas for disrupting office housework.

Share this action on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Sponsor 5 Ally Actions and put your brand or business in front of 40,000 caring individuals in business, healthcare, education, and non-profits.

Or, say thanks to Karen and buy her a coffee ☕.

Have you ever received a calendar invite titled “Quick chat” and immediately wondered, “Uh-oh. What did I do?”

HR director Justin Jackson shared a great example in a viral LinkedIn post.

On a Friday, he sent an employee an invitation for Monday at 9 a.m. titled “Quick chat.”

She spent the weekend updating her LinkedIn profile because she assumed she’d be fired.

The actual reason for the meeting? He was letting her know that a schedule change she’d requested had been approved.

“She laughed, exhaled, and asked me to never do that to her again.”

Jackson said that was the last vague invite he ever sent. Now, every invite states what it is about. For example,

• Schedule request, good news.
• Benefits form, nothing’s wrong.

And when he needs to have a difficult conversation, he sends the invitation and has the meeting the same day.

I keep spotting social media posts that use emojis as bullet points. Index fingers pointing to the right 👉, light bulbs 💡, and so on.

But if you use a screen reader, those symbols can get in the way.

As disability advocate Holly Tuke has explained,

“[Emojis as bullet points] are a nightmare for screen reader users. Not only is hearing the description of each emoji being read out before every sentence annoying, it’s also quite distracting.”

I’ll admit it: I used to do this myself. At the end of my newsletters, I share a list of actions (follow me on social media, form a Better Allies book club, etc.). I used to introduce each action with a colorful emoji. Today, that list uses simple bullets instead.

If you’re tempted to use emojis as bullets, consider switching to plain bullet points, or just a dash if your app doesn’t support formatting.

It’s a small change, but one that will make your content more accessible and inclusive.

“It’s okay to take small risks because there are people out there who take big risks. What we all do matters.” Timothy Snyder

Now, I get that not everyone works in a place free of consequences for making mistakes. (More on this below in #5.) Not everyone has the privilege to speak up without fearing they’ll lose their job. Not everyone feels they know enough to be effective allies.

But, here’s the thing. When we stand by when witnessing non-inclusive behaviors, we send the message that we’re okay with it. When we don’t take action, we are complicit.

As allies, we don’t have to do it all or take the big risks. But, I urge you to do something to advocate, amplify, and support your colleagues from underrepresented, underestimated groups. Even if it’s a less risky action.

Here are some ideas:

• Amplify voices in meetings.
• Acknowledge people’s ideas.
• Stop interruptions.
• Endorse coworkers.
• Sing someone’s praises.
• Share unwritten rules.

After reading about festivals of failure in my September 11 2026 newsletter, Joe Imholte reached out to say that while he loves the concept, he has a concern.

Specifically, when a coworker makes an equity-related mistake, some folks can’t seem to let the person move past that mistake. Even when that person truly learned from it, authentically apologized, and did everything you’d hope a person would do after making such a mistake.

Imholte wrote,

“We have become a culture that is terrible at forgiving, if we ever were good at it.”

He pointed to an article by Arianna Huffington and this powerful quote:

“Forgiveness doesn’t suspend judgment, it doesn’t mean not holding people accountable or ignoring injustices or forgetting the past. It simply allows the offender the possibility of atonement and progress.”

Imhote encourages us to realize that we all play a role in creating a culture where people can feel safe talking about mistakes, owning them, and doing better. He wrote,

“Part of that role is truly forgiving someone, and seeing who they are now, today, not the person they were when they made the mistake.”

I heartily agree.

If you’ve taken a step towards being a better ally, please reply to this email and tell me about it. And mention if I can quote you by name or credit you anonymously in an upcoming newsletter.

That’s all for this week. I’m glad you’re on this journey with me,

Karen Catlin (she/her), Author of the Better Allies® book series

100% written by me. I use AI for researching a personal archive of my books and past newsletters, and for light editing.

Copyright © 2026 Karen Catlin. All rights reserved.

Together, we can make a difference with the Better Allies® approach.

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Value AI Office Housework, and Other Actions for Allies was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.