Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• The Problem
• The Answer
• The Answer

Introduction

DynamoDB provides an excellent way to store data in a flexible and scalable way. Add it to Lambda and API Gateway, and you have a powerful group of tools, which I have written about. It was for these reasons that I chose to use it for a side project I am building to familiarize myself with React. It was in these features that I struggled with an issue in how boto3, the SDK for talking with AWS in Python, implements their libraries.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• React Modules
• In-App Example
• Named Imports vs. Default Imports
• Conclusion

Introduction

The organization of your apps is one of the most effortless quality of life improvements you can make. Recently I’ve been deep-diving into React for a work project, and I was able to get a crash course in how you organize one such app. Including how React treats its files and how we’re importing them. So today, I’d like to get into how React handles modules and how importing is done.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• React Router Dom
• Setup
• Explainer
• Conclusion

Introduction

Implementing routing in React applications can be one of the first tasks you undertake in the coding part of the development lifecycle. This was true for my team when we sat down to a mob programming session to go through a couple of our stories for a project. We brought in some help from people who know React to help us get started. I am not a React developer, so this is the first time I had actual exposure to people with expertise, so I am grateful it was a group programming session. I don’t know what I was doing when the rest of the world learned React, but I can only guess it had something to do with playing the Sims. Regardless I use the right tool for the job, and I need to learn it now. The first thing we did was implement some routing, and I will implement a much more simplified version of what we did below to show what I learned.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Selenium WebDriver
• Setup
• Running Tests
• Notes
• Conclusion

Introduction

We are spinning up a new application for some end users to enter data, so we need to build a robust testing system. Unit tests are a must, but those only test to ensure that all the classes, methods, and functions do what we expect. On top of that, we also need to verify that the web app as a whole looks and behaves how we hope it does to have a complete end-to-end testing apparatus. My goal for these first few spikes in the project was to find a tool for system testing and see if we could make it modular and easily automate it to not interfere with our workflow. I believe I found the solution. Selenium is a suite of tools for creating and automating browser tests, and I think it is what I was looking for. Let’s dive in.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Shared Memory Device
• Use in Docker
• Conclusion

Introduction

Recently, I was experimenting with system testing on a new stack. While working with Selenium Remote Driver to create headless web browsers (more on that later) to run against my app, I came across a Docker option I had not known. This Docker feature allowed for easily accessible and fast file reading and writing between the host and the container. It was being used as a volume, but I learned it was much more. When I looked it up, it was referred to as a Shared Memory Device.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Amazon API Gateway
• Setting up an API
• Adding the Trigger
• Setting the Methods
• Conclusion

Introductions

I follow this movie podcast where they review and talk about well movies. It’s a fantastic podcast with a diverse set of people who’ve worked in the industry a long time, and I enjoy their opinions. At the end of each episode, they do a “Staff Pick” where they pick out a movie that shares themes with the movie they just reviewed or movies they think people should see. As I don’t have time to watch all the movies they suggest every week, I need to keep a running list of these films. They offer some good stuff.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Shaders
• Setup
• Shader Code
• Conclusion

For those of you who love rabbit holes, learning graphics programming is a pretty deep one. There’s always some new thing to learn, there’s a bunch of different new languages and toolsets to know, and on top of all that, there’s math. Like anything else in programming, you pick up momentum with each new thing you build, so I found a tutorial and started making shaders. I know very little about this. However, I’m writing what I’m learning, so don’t come for me if I’m off on anything.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• AMQP
• AMQP and Amazon MQ
• Serialization
• Conclusion

Introduction

How do software systems talk to each other? Back-end systems can scale into giant melted together Cronenberg monsters, often making up different tools and languages. So, communicating between these services can become an untenable challenge without some shared vocabulary. We can communicate in many ways, but today I wanted to talk about asynchronous messaging protocols and figure out how AWS can help.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Problem
• S3 Solution
• DynamoDB Solution
• Conclusion

Introduction

A hybrid infrastructure has tons of exciting challenges. Although we host a great deal of our software in AWS at my company, we cannot do everything in the cloud. As such, we have tons of physical infrastructure as well. This hybrid infrastructure presents many challenges that we strive to overcome on the software team. One of the challenges we are working towards is imaging and utilizing software to detect our yields. This piece of that puzzle will focus on storage for our images.

Read More

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Key Management System in AWS
• Customer Master Keys
• KMS and Lambda
• Conclusion
• Additional Notes

Introduction

Do you hate when gnomes steal your underpants for profit? I know I hate when those guys come out to steal my stuff. Unfortunately, I cannot help you prevent the theft of your undergarments, but I can help you protect some assets in AWS. Specifically, we are going to talk about encrypting environment variables in Lambda.

Read More