I was inspired by others to document the tools I use working as a software developer professionally, and hacking on side projects out side of work. One thing to note is in my day job I work on an Apple Mac, but my personal machine is a Linux laptop running PopOS. I find using Linux as a desktop works as most software I use is web based or supported on linux....
Assuming you read my Starting a Go Project post you should have the starting point for a minimal go web service. For your first project it is easier to keep all your code in one folder, in the base of your project, but at some point you will want to restructure things, this is done for a few of reasons: Having everything in one folder results in a lot of inter dependencies in the code....
Given the changes with Go Modules I wanted to document a brief getting started for Go projects, this will focus on building a minimal web service. Before you start you will need to install Go, I recommend using homebrew or for ubuntu users Golang Backports, or as last resort grab it from the Go Downloads page. So this looks like this for OSX. brew install go Or for ubuntu we add the PPA, then install golang 1....
In my spare time I spend a bit of time building and working on a scaled down self driving RC project which uses an opensource project called donkeycar. I have been through a few generations of car, learning how both the hardware and software worked, hopefully I can provide some tips on how to avoid at least some of my mistakes in this post. Current Car Starting Out Probably the lion share of lessons, at least initially were learnt about how to setup a custom RC car, especially the power and drive train....
The AWS Cognito product enables developers to build web or API based applications without worrying about authentication and authorisation. When setting up an applications authentication I try to keep in mind a few goals: Keep my users data as safe as possible. Try and find something which is standards based, or supports integrating with standard protocols such as openid, oauth2 and SAML. Evaluate the authentication flows I need and avoid increasing scope and risk....
Early this year amazon web services released the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) which is best summed up by a quote from the GitHub project. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. Before I go recommending this new project to anyone I most certainly need to road test it myself. This post provides a bit of background on where I work, and why I am looking into CDK, and what I love to see in the future....
Step Functions allow you to build pipelines involving one or more amazon, or external service. Some examples of this are: complex customer on boarding processes jobs which provision resources then send a welcome email billing jobs where you may need wait for payment authorisation provisioning users and setup of any resources each user may need pipeline In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements (processes, threads, coroutines, functions, etc....
Background jobs form the backbone of a lot of modern applications, they are used to perform a range of asynchronous tasks, from image processing through to order processing, fulfillment and shipping. Wherever there is a need to dispatch some sort of task, then monitor or wait for it’s result. In the serverless space AWS Step Functions play a similar role to projects such as delayed job or resque in ruby, celery in python, but with the following differences:...
Over the last few months I have been working on a project which uses DynamoDB almost exclusively for persistence, this has been a big challenge for everyone on the team. As a developer, most of us are comfortable using a Relational database management system (RDBMS) systems, so the move to a primitive key value store has been fun, but we have learnt a lot. To try and capture some of these learnings I have written this article, hopefully it will help those who embark on a similar journey....
Lately I have been using apex to build a side project, this tool stream lines building and deploying serverless applications using AWS Lambda. While working on this project I have helped others get started with golang at the same time as apex. My general strategy for building apex applications is to build a standalone version of the functionality on my machine, typically in a way which makes the code reusable, then I import and use that in apex....