A recent tweet from Helen Anderson prompted me to think of a few things that I’ve done in the past when creating new AWS accounts for myself and others. So I’ve put together a list of five first steps — this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should help those of you who now find yourselves with enough time and elbow room (I don’t know about you, but I prefer to experiment/fail in solitude) to finally play around with AWS.

Choose Your Services

Logging into the management console for the first time can be intimidating. At the time of this…

A sizable chunk of time has passed since Part 2 of this series. In the months since my last post, I’ve started a new open source project (more to come later), travelled, and stood up a small, manageable data lake. I’d like to say that my delay in bringing you the engrossing (or boring? YMMV) content you’ve come to expect from me is the result of me back-loading 2019 with a whirlwind of activity; the reality, I’m afraid, has more to do with indolence than anything else. Sorry.

In this post, I’ll focus on my recent use of Amazon Athena…

In Part 1 of this series, I shared my plan for rebuilding my personal website. Before I start thinking about changes to user interfaces or HTTP responses, I need to clean up the mess I created with my poorly designed data model. In this post, I’ll focus on my experience with Amazon DynamoDB and the role that service will continue to play in my site’s architecture. Let’s go over some core DynamoDB concepts so we can shine a bright light on my missteps.

Some Basics

DynamoDB stores data in tables. If you’re familiar with other popular database systems, chances are you’ve come…

For a little over a year and a half, guillermoandraefisher.com has existed as a serverless application that is powered by a familiar blend of services: Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB. Things have changed significantly since I first deployed the index.html file — for me, and for some of the services I’ve been using. In this series of posts, I’ll discuss my mistakes, highlight relevant services, and walk through the overhaul of my small, drab corner of the Web.

Continuous Learning

As a people manager, writing code isn’t something I do on a regular basis. Occasionally, though, some extraordinary circumstance…

If you’re a PHP developer whose cloud provider of choice is AWS, chances are you’ve suffered through a bit of serverless FOMO due to AWS Lambda’s lack of support for PHP. But thanks to the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) and Bref — both open source projects available on GitHub — it’s now possible to deploy your PHP applications to Lambda without having to fiddle with Node.js shims. And with the help of Travis CI, running automated tests and deployments is essentially a cinch. There are, however, a few gotchas.

I Don’t Know Who or What a “Bref” Is

I didn’t, either, until a few weeks ago. Matthieu…