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_Part 3 of 3: Reflections on 30 Years in Technology_ _Part 1: The Short Bus and the Fairway | Part 2: The Fear of Being Included_

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_Part 1: The Short Bus and the Fairway_

Adaptability is a critical characteristic of software systems that developers and architects constantly strive to achieve. However, it's a delicate balance between productivity, performance, maintaina

I've been writing for a while now on setting up Kubernetes specifically with AWS' EKS. I love how EKS gives me the flexibility to install the standard and custom Kubernetes resources that I need and w

Event-driven applications aren't new, but the patterns and discussion in the context of the cloud are hard to miss these days. It's hard to argue with the patterns and practices because with events, I

Over the past few years I've spent a great deal of time writing and building with Datadog. I find that their platform gives me as a builder the right insight and tools to diagnose things quickly, make

Working with Kubernetes opens a world of possibilities in a software project. That's one of its biggest appeals to me as a developer. And when building with distributed systems, one of the components

I've been spending a great deal of time lately working with Service Meshes and after having a few of the same conversations over and over (in a good way), I wanted to codify some of the reasons why th

Clicks, copies, and pasting. That's an approach to deploying your applications in Kubernetes. Anyone who's worked with Kubernetes for more than 5 minutes knows that this is not a recipe for repeatabil

Tracing Lambda Functions with observability code is the basement level of instrumentation that should exist when writing Serverless Applications. So many times, even in Lambda Functions, there are tim

Working with browser hosted code (UI) requires a developer to be cautious about exposing secrets and tokens. A less than trustworthy person could take these secrets and do things that the user doesn't

This is an article to my past self and perhaps those that come later who are in the same position I was in this time last year.

**UPDATE: I had a missing index on my DSQL table. If you read the article before, please go back and check the metrics and graphs**

Serverless developers that use Lambda as their compute of choice have long had to make a trade-off in AWS when it comes to storing their application data. Do I use a purely serverless database in Dyna

Modern applications are complex. Fewer and fewer applications are built as single monolith that runs in one process, stores its data in a single database, and has access to the underlying single file

So you finished that degree, boot camp, or course work and are ready to enter the workforce. It's the day you've dreamed of for years or perhaps just the day you hoped for as you transition roles in y

The decision to add a Service Mesh to an application comes down to how your application communicates between itself. If for instance your design is heavily asynchronous and relies on events and me

Observability is a user experience concern. Let that sync in for a minute. When you reach a certain amount of scale, it's not practical for a developer to take feedback from each and every user and th

In the beginning there were punched cards. And since that beginning, technologists have continued to find better and better ways to deploy code to bring end user value. And as those new techniques hav

A modern web application can take many shapes and forms from an architecture and design standpoint. With the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014, the cloud vendor thrust the capabilities of Serverless into a

As much as I love Rust and especially Rust on serverless, it would be hard for me to recommend Rust and Lambda to a company without a plan for Observability. I've written about this topic before and t

I talk to my kids about this all the time. The difference between influence and manipulation that is. It's a subtle distinction but something that makes all the difference when creating content that i

Containers are a fantastic way to package up your application code and its dependencies. I'm on the record as a huge fan and probably write more production code in containers than I do with Lambda Fun

I wrote recently about Mind Boggling Speed with Caching with Momento and Rust and wanted to continue in that theme as I explore the Momento SDK for Rust. Caching is a technique that builders reach for

I don't think it's a surprise if you've been following along with me lately that I've pivoted my daily programming setup to Neovim. What might surprise you is that I started my career working on HP-UX

Summer is here and in the northern hemisphere, temperatures are heating up. Living in North Texas, you get used to the heat and humidity but somehow it still always seems to sneak up on me. As I start

No. Short, simple, and direct. The answer to the question is that serverless at this point and time doesn't matter. Now I'm not saying that it's never mattered. But what I am saying is that it's just

Microservices are about domain decomposition. This decomposition allows code to be deployed that is more isolated, durable, resilient, and launched in a compute form factor designed for the requiremen

Picking up where I left off from the last article, I'd built a simple WASM project with Rust and walked through how to generate a publishable distribution. In this edition, which is probably the penul

It's been a while since I wrote a series going back almost 9 months to my Building Serverless Applications. I enjoyed that so much that I have been wanting to write another, but just didn't have a con

Buckle up for this one as it's going to be a lengthy piece. I love writing articles like this one because they contain complete infrastructure builds that highlight some best practices to put multiple

Serverless architecture has given developers, architects, and business problem solvers new capabilities to deliver value to customers. It feels like we are in the age of maturation of serverless in so

Some time ago I wrote an article about Cross-Origin Resource Sharing with API Gateway that talks about custom allow lists. I wanted to revisit that implementation not because the code doesn't work, bu

I've been encouraged lately by all of the Rust and Serverless content that has been posted on various platforms. I've also been public about the fact that I believe that Rust adoption with Serverless

I'm early on in this new venture as a full-time consultant but something that isn't new for me is being someone people go to for help. Every time I speak to someone about this topic I tend to drive ba

What if I've been thinking about my career all wrong up until this point? How can that even be possible? I consider myself to be making the turn. Heading into the back nine of this adventure. Does tha

I've been hitting the gas pretty hard on Rust lately and doubling down on my desire to see more Rust in Serverless. I feel strongly though that balance is important in anything in life. For every peri

Propagating changes in an event-driven system can be accomplished in many different ways with many different tools. Do I work with transaction logs, put events on an event bus or do something else? Fo

One of the things that can be difficult when starting with a new technology, framework or tool is where to get started. That "get started" can mean a great many things to many people. Over the past 6

Open Telemetry and Lambda are topics that I've spent a lot of brain cycles on over the past few weeks. Most of my work with these topics has been with Rust but I want to take a look at where my opinio

Welcome to the Cognito Starter Kit with a large helping of Rust seasoned with some CDK. I'm a big believer in Cognito and the power it gives builders to customize the various signup and authentication

I made a statement on LinkedIn that if you have enough traffic hitting your Lambdas you might want to consider a different programming language. And if you've been reading my content lately, you won't

Following up on my popular Rust and Lambda article, I wanted to explore how to put an event on an AWS EventBridge Bus. If you aren't familiar with AWS' EventBridge, think of it as a highly scalable Ev

Rust and Lambda are new friends. Sure, there's a great deal of momentum lately around Rust but the language has been around for almost 20 years. It struggled to take off early on but has seen its adop

Agile and Serverless go together like peanut butter and jelly. Ham and eggs. Coffee and creamer. Tea and milk. Name your favorite combination that resonates best in your head. But the truth is this, A

Identity and Access Management is a critical part of any application. And having a solution that provides customization can also be super important. Take for instance the ability to customize a Cognit

I've been spending more and more time with Rust which is perfectly in line with my end-of-year planning. So far, my collection of articles is growing and so are my Rust skills. I can't profess to be m

I had several conversations at re:Invent that have got me thinking since I returned. No names or details will be given about those whom I spoke with, but I have been processing the how and why of one'

Gratitude. That's the simple yet powerful word that comes to mind when I look back on re:Invent 2023. This article is an expression of my gratitude to those who made not only re:Invent something more

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote an article on using Rust with AWS. In the span of then and now, AWS officially released their Rust SDK for interacting with many of their services. If there wa

Day 4 of AWS re:Invent 2023 has come to a close and it was just as epic as the other nights. The day itself was a little slower due to my Day 3 evening ending fairly late, but there's still a good bit

So this one is rough in the best of ways possible. It's currently 2 AM Las Vegas time and I've been up since 7 AM the previous day. Back to what I said a few days ago, re:Invent is a marathon and not

Amid everything going on, I stayed up after Day 2 of re:Invent to get my hands on the new Amazon S Q Digital Assistant. For more on the release here is the announcement. While sitting in the Adam Seli

Day 2 of re:Invent 2023 has come and gone and it was personally my best day yet. By the numbers, I'm at the halfway point with my two busiest days ahead. Let's get right to my recap as it's filled wit

Day 1 of re:Invent has come and gone and it was an epic start to the week. I've often heard it said that re:Invent is a marathon and not a sprint and that's a very true statement. If you are reading t

Here goes the beginning of a nightly blog post recapping my experience at AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas. AWS re:Invent officially kicks off on Monday 11/27/2023 but for those of us who arrived early

I've had a few people ask me about my writing process and how I produced the articles and code that I do here on my blog. At first, I thought, no way anyone cares what it takes for me to produce the a

I've been working recently with some data that doesn't naturally fit into my AWS HealthLake datastore. I have some additional information captured in a DynamoDB table that would be useful to blend wit

I've been trying to learn Rust for the better part of this year. My curiosity peaked a few years back when I learned the AWS-led Firecracker was developed with the language. And I've continued to want

Some find that handling bad news as a leader is tricky. Their first thoughts range from figuring out who to blame, how to hide the damage or even just how to make the problem go away. I like to look a

When working on building solutions, the answer to some problems is often, it depends. For instance, if I need to deal with data as it changes and use DynamoDB, streams are the perfect feature to take

I've been spending a lot of time lately being self-reflective and this week I was thinking about building trust. The more I thought about trust, the more I wanted to write something about how to build

I was working recently with some backend code and I needed to communicate the success or failure of the result back to my UI. I instantly knew that I needed to put together a WebSocket to handle this

A good friend of mine is working on a really neat redrive tool with SQS and wanted to write an article to describe its purpose and use. I'm super honored that he asked me to share his writing on my bl

Influence. I've been thinking about this often over-used word for a while and wanted to take a candid look at how to establish influence, increase influence and embrace that influence for the betterme

First off, this post is not affiliated with AWS or the re:Invent conference. The content below contains opinions and some tips for navigating your first re:Invent conference. I believe that if you are

Event-Driven architecture paired with Serverless technologies are a powerful combo to build applications. But failure does happen and you should expect it to happen. Dealing with that failure is often

I've written a few articles lately on EventBridge Pipes and specifically around using them with DynamoDB Streams. I've written about Enrichment. And I've written about just straight Streaming. I belie

I've been wanting to spend more time lately talking about AWS HealthLake. And then more specifically, Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) which is the foundation for interoperability in hea

In my previous article I wrote about a Callback Pattern with AWS Step Functions built upon the backbone of HealthLake's export. As much as I went deep with code on the Callback portion, I felt that I

Some operations in a system function asynchronously. Many times, those same operations must also happen to be responsible for coordinating external workflows to provide an overall status on the execut

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Building Serverless applications can feel a bit overwhelming when you are first getting started. Sure, Event-Driven Systems have been around for many years but this notion of using managed services to

Up until last week, when you deployed a new version of your State Machine in AWS Step Functions, the old version was gone and the ability to test or rollback was limited by your ability to re-push a p

For full disclosure, I've been writing Lambda function code since 2017 and I completely breezed over the release of Lambda Extensions back in 2020. Here's the release announcement. At the core of exte

Earlier this week a new set of APIs were released for working with Dead-Letter-Queues and re-drives back to its primary queue. Messaging-based systems have been around for a long time and they are a c

Infrastructure as Code is an emerging practice that encourages the writing of cloud infrastructure as code instead of clicking your way to deployment. I feel like "ClickOps" is where we all started ye

Caching. Simple. Useful. This architectural topic applies to a serverless app as well as an app with servers. Some functions never need caching, and some benefit from it right as the first user traffi

I've been following along the past couple of weeks in the "wake" of the article by the Prime Video Team. I've seen a lot of rebuttal-type articles by some folks that I respect so I didn't want to cont

Even experienced builders run into things from time to time that they haven't seen before and this causes them some trouble. I've been working with CDK, CodePipeline, CodeBuild and Golang for several

One of the nice things about building with Serverless is that you can design things in a way that the pieces are composeable. This means that you can put logic cohesively with other like-minded logic

Using CDK for building Golang Lambda functions is a super simple process and easy enough to work with. It is well documented and is a subclass of the `Function` class defined in `aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambd

So you've decided to build your first or your 500th Lambda function with AWS. Congratulations! That in and of itself is a great decision that will set you up on a solid foundation for operational exce

If you've been following along for a bit, you know how much of a fan of Serverless I am. And even more specifically, how much I love Step Functions. If you have the problem of needing a highly availab

I've been working a good bit lately to push testing down when using Step Functions and building some patterns with AWS State Machines Locally. In that same spirit, I'm wanting to be able to create the

There is so much buzz in the Serverless world about scalability, reliability, and nano-sized functions with the ability to generate faster speeds to market. These points are no doubt true and there ar

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing is a topic that most developers don't generally like to talk about it. It is usually a higher-level item that "is just in place" when building and shipping APIs. However,

Follow me along on a journey toward data unification. One of the applications that I work on is a modern, distributed, event-driven and serverless-based architecture. What that means is that data is c

Using and EventBus Mesh can provide good separation of concerns when developing features usin an Event-Driven Architecture

I've been thinking and working hard on how I can start to introduce EventBridge and Pipes into some of my existing applications. Unfortunately, I have SNS in front of a lot of my service code and you

In life, when working on anything, small and iterative changes give us the best opportunity for feedback and learning. And it's through that feedback and failure even that we get better. The same thin

Achieving the fetch of multiple items from DynamoDB using the BatchGetItem operation with Golang

How to use some common AWS CLI Commands

parsing Apache Parquet format stored in S3 using Golang

Stream AWS DynamoDB changes to a Lambda via AWS EventBridge Pipes, Rules and CDK

Extending JWTs from Cognito with Lambda and Go

Unmarshalling a DynamoDB map into a Go struct

Handling change with AWS Healthlake using the Change Data Capture pattern

Mapping AWS State Machine output to API Gateway response with VTL

Creating a Cognito User with AWS Step Functions native SDK integrations

Using bath path mapping with AWS API Gateway and CDK

Querying AWS Healthlake with Go

Handling bad messages in Kinesis streams when using them as event sources with Lambdas

I often have the scenario where there is a client which makes a request to an endpoint and they just want to make sure that payload was delivered but not necessarily concerned about the outcome. A pre

tracing http requests with Go and Datadog

observability with aws lambda datadog and go

re:Invent 2022 recap

aws cdk piplines L3 construct

introduction to aws cdk with typescript