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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_

Thirty years in technology taught me that resilience, mentorship, and an analytical mindset matter far more than mastering any single technical skill.

Introversion in tech is far more nuanced than antisocial stereotypes suggest, and online community can extend real life rather than replace it.

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

Career independence after one year of leaving a CTO role, with lessons on family, sales pipeline, finances, and building a consulting business.

**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

Kestra workflow orchestration demonstrated with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, covering HTTP tasks, database queries, and the control plane interface.

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

Momento SDK for Rust delivers 2ms topic latency on EC2 and near-instant webhooks on Lambda, proving serverless caching performs at any scale.

Neovim setup with LazyVim, tmux, and Wezterm creates a simplified terminal workflow that boosts developer flow and productivity for daily coding.

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

Serverless as a corporate-backed movement may be fading, but its value, community, and impact on cloud computing will endure for years to come.

Neighborhood domain modeling maps bounded contexts to familiar concepts like houses and HOAs, making microservice architecture easier to understand.

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

Rust and Lambda API tutorial walking through a complete CRUD implementation with DynamoDB, Cargo workspaces, and CDK for deployment to AWS.

Consultant mindset tips that elevate your influence by mastering four skills: listening, adding value, working backwards, and making tradeoffs.

Career growth in technology does not require climbing the corporate ladder, and discovering your why can reshape how you measure true success.

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

Serverless Rust developer experience guide covers the complete workflow from IDE setup and Cargo Lambda to local debugging and CDK deployments.

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

Rust web API on AWS Fargate built with Axum, DynamoDB, and Docker, covering local development with Docker Compose and ECS cloud deployment.

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 and community shaped an unforgettable re:Invent 2023 experience, from favorite announcements to meaningful connections with builders.

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

AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 3 recap covering keynote reactions, community booth volunteering, building lasting connections, and the Momento bash.

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

AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 2 recap covers the Adam Selipsky keynote, announcements like Amazon Q and S3 Express One Zone, and community networking.

AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 1 recap covers a DynamoDB modeling session, the Healthcare and Life Sciences Executive Symposium, and Monday Night Live.

AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 0 recap covering the community hike at Valley of Fire, meeting builders in person, and kicking off the conference week.

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

DynamoDB incremental exports can be orchestrated with Step Functions using native SDK integrations, eliminating the need for Lambda compute code.

Building trust in technology teams starts with adding value, listening before speaking, giving your time selflessly, and showing up when it matters.

AWS API Gateway WebSocket tutorial showing how to build real-time serverless apps with Lambda, DynamoDB, and CDK using Golang step by step.

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

DynamoDB Streams enrichment with EventBridge Pipes transforms domain data into FHIR healthcare resources using serverless filtering and Lambda.

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

Serverless security on AWS broken down into three pillars: API Gateway custom authorizers, least-privilege IAM policies, and KMS data encryption.

API Gateway for serverless apps explored through resources, method requests, integration types, models, custom domains, and base path mapping.

Serverless event handling on AWS explained through SQS, Kinesis, SNS, and EventBridge with guidance on when to use each service in your design.

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

Serverless data storage on AWS compared across DynamoDB, RDS, S3, OpenSearch, Timestream, and HealthLake with guidance on choosing the right fit.

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

Lambda extensions built with Golang enable cross-language reuse by running a sidecar HTTP API for caching with Momento and DynamoDB read-through.

SQS dead-letter-queue re-drive automated with Golang Lambda functions and Step Functions provides self-healing workflows for event-driven systems.

Infrastructure as Code shifts deployment ownership to development teams, building a culture of accountability, customer focus, and faster response.

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

Golang private modules in AWS CodeBuild require specific configuration with .netrc files and GOPRIVATE variables in your CDK CodePipeline setup.

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

Golang Lambda functions with CDK explored through entry points, runtime selection, environment variables, and linker flags to reduce binary size.

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

EventBus Mesh pattern connects multiple EventBridge buses to isolate microservice boundaries while enabling cross-domain event-driven communication.

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

DynamoDB BatchGetItem with Golang retrieves multiple items by key in a single call using the AWS SDK BatchGetItemPagesWithContext function.

AWS CLI commands reference covering SNS, SQS, S3, CloudFormation, CodeCommit, Cognito, and Kinesis with practical examples and explanations.

parsing Apache Parquet format stored in S3 using Golang

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

Cognito JWT customization using Go Lambda triggers lets you add private claims to ID tokens through the PreTokenGeneration user pool trigger.

DynamoDB map unmarshalling in Go lets you convert nested key-value attributes into strongly typed structs using custom UnmarshalDynamoDBAttributeValue methods.

AWS HealthLake change data capture using CloudTrail, EventBridge, and Step Functions enables event-driven workflows for FHIR resource mutations.

VTL mapping templates in API Gateway transform Step Functions output into custom HTTP responses with dynamic status codes and JSON payloads.

Creating a Cognito User with AWS Step Functions native SDK integrations

API Gateway base path mapping with CDK routes multiple REST APIs under a single custom domain name while disabling default execute endpoints.

AWS HealthLake querying with Go requires signed REST API requests to fetch FHIR Bundles and Patient resources from your datastore endpoint.

Kinesis poison pill messages block stream processing for hours when Lambda event sources fail, but CDK event source configurations can solve this.

Step Functions async integration with API Gateway via CDK enables durable webhook-style endpoints that return immediately while workflows execute.

HTTP request tracing in Go with Datadog wraps the standard HTTP client to generate spans with method and URL details in your flame graphs.

Lambda observability with Datadog and Golang covers setting up structured JSON logging, distributed tracing with spans, and correlating them together.

re:Invent 2022 recap

AWS CDK Pipelines construct provides an opinionated CI/CD pipeline with self-mutation, cross-account deploys, and automatic source monitoring.

AWS CDK lets developers define cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, enabling testing and reusable constructs.