Feature Toggles are a simple idea, at first glance. But if you scratch below the surface there can be a lot of nuance to them. — Martin Fowler has a rather brilliant post about this subject (well actually it’s Pete Hodgson’s post). I make no apology for having used the article very much as the foundation for this writing: Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags) martinfowler.com Maybe you should just click this link and read that article instead… seriously you should!

Tests help to give us confidence in our coding, but they can also slow us down. How do we strike the right balance between running them often enough to catch problems, but not getting in the way of progress? — Even relatively simple serverless applications can be complex. With complexity comes the risk that the system doesn't behave as intended. We have two weapons against this risk: Testing — trying to catch as many issues before releasing software as we can

Hurray, you’ve got a MacBook! Now, let’s get it working like a charm 👩🏻‍💻 Last year I wrote the first MacBook, like a Pro and people found it really useful, so a new year, a new MacBook Pro — and an updated article! I hope you find it useful 🤔 Setting up any personal machine is mostly about personal choice. The following are suggestions…

Reduce the frustration and the time it takes to start writing Lambda functions — Every Lambda function I write starts in the same way: a bunch of code to unpack the event and then validate its contents. Sound familiar? Moreover, I can never remember the exact key names for certain event payloads. How do I get the headers from an ApiGateway event again? Is…

Secure your local dev server to give you access to restricted features, such as device APIs. — To utilise some features of modern browsers, you need to be operating over a secure https connection. By default, the NextJS development server runs on http. Here’s how: Generate a certificate for localhost Add the certificate to keychain Update server.js to use the certificate and require https Update package.json scripts

Building modern architectures can be a hailstorm of difficult decisions. Using Principles can simplify the decision-making process and lead you to better solutions. These are my principles. — TL;DR These are the Principles of Architecture at ResponseTap. They are used to guide everything we build in the ResponseTap Engineering team: Serverless First. Cloud-First. AWS First. Configure First. Write Code Second.

If you’ve ever bought a Custom Domain, chances are you wanted to have email addresses on it. Here’s a really easy way to set them up, using AWS. — Registering and validating custom email addresses in Route53 and Simple Email Service (SES) doesn’t need to be difficult. But there is almost no documentation to show you how to do this easily. Here’s a simple solution. Buying a Custom Domain via the Route53 console on AWS is really easy. They…

Hurray, you’ve got a MacBook! Now, let’s get it working like a charm 👩🏻‍💻 — Setting up any personal machine is mostly about personal choice. The following are suggestions, based on my opinion. But, there’s lots of stuff here, see if you can find something that helps you. ✌️ Especially for my friend, Mark stevens. TL;DR Upgrade OS Chrome Homebrew iTerm2 + oh-my-zsh S̵p̵e̵c̵t̵a̵c̵l̵e̵ Rectangle PasteBox

Turbo-charge your Lambda functions by sending messages in batches — A fundamental principle of building systems in a serverless world is that your functions should do their job as quickly as possible. The longer functions run, the more they cost. Regardless of what your Lambda functions are doing, in the majority of use cases, a big slice of the processing…