My first exposure to programming was when I was thirteen years old and started trying to build Flash games. By the time I was deciding on what program I was going to take in University I was already able to write working code in several programming languages which I had…

While I am already fairly familiar with AWS Lambda, the platform for doing serverless computation at Amazon, I was not familiar with the “Step Function” aspect until I was introduced to it at work. …

One man’s thoughts on which Linux flavor is best suited for your personal computer — The first time I tried Linux was when I was still in high school, circa ~2004. I had used Windows my entire life up until then but as someone who was passionate about technology, network security, coding, and general computer tinkering, the word “Linux” came up enough times in my…

We recently launched a new project at work that uses AWS’s “serverless” lambda functions and I wanted to see how simple it would be to leverage lambdas again to do some alerting around when our application encountered errors. When you print to standard output in a lambda (as is the…

I wanted to put together a guide on how to get started with my typical set up for a new rails web application project, mostly for myself to refer back to as a kind of checklist for how to quickly get going with my usual tooling, but I figured it…

Running a web application such as a Node.js API, Ruby on Rails site, or really anything that accepts HTTP requests simultaneously with Apache or NGINX may seem counter-intuitive: you might ask yourself “why the heck would I want to run a web server with my application that already acts as…

Coming from the pre-Angular2 Angular.js world, Angular (which is already at version 5 at the time of writing) can seem daunting with its insistence of using the Observer/Observable design pattern. Everywhere you look, things seem to return an RxJS Observable instead of that nice familiar promise we all know (and…