AWS budgets, alarms, and AWS single sign-on — Introduction This really happened, and keep in mind that stories such as these seem to happen with some frequency: “I used my personal AWS account for [an AWS] workshop and thought I had deleted the CF stacks at the end of the workshop but hadn’t. At the end of the month…

Optimize your AWS services to pay less per month with cost allocation tags — Bob had just arrived in the office for his first day of work as the newly hired chief technical officer when he was called into a conference room by the president, Martha, who immediately introduced him to the head of accounting, Amanda. …

A powerful non-standard feature that developers should know about — Introduction Wouldn’t it be great if we could receive event-driven change notifications (EDCN) when data changes directly from the database without having to poll for updates? This feature is, in fact, available in some relational databases, but not all, as it’s non-standard functionality and not part of any SQL specification. In…

TL;DR: Take a course online, use flash cards, and take as many practice exams as possible (17 quizzes, exams, and practice tests are included below, see the *’s). In this article I include several observations based on my experience preparing to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect: Associate Certification Exam‎…

I originally posted this thought as an update on LinkedIn and since that time I thought I’d expand on this idea a bit. In this article I’ll answer the question: what is the software project half-life? The Software Project Half-Life The software project half-life is a term invented by yours truly which is defined…

The Problem You’re at the management-level, your website is “slow”, but you’re not sure why or how to go about determining how slow it really is, or if there could be other performance-related problems. You want to get an assessment quickly, and on your own. The Solution Below I’ve included a short list of…

Let’s take a look at one WordPress plugin — it’s not the only one that offers this functionality however it’s the one I use and we can compare page load performance when the plugin is disabled and then enabled. …

In this article we review several examples of low-hanging search engine optimization (SEO) fruit — features of a website which can positively impact SEO and which are relatively easy to achieve, along with commentary — if you have other low-hanging SEO fruit please add them in the comments. Insofar as…

Long-tail keywords are a search query involving three or more keywords which are focused and hence less competitive and which should result in driving high-conversion traffic to a website. By high-conversion traffic we mean visitors who end up converting into customers. The following simple formula should help pages rank better…