Keep.✨SWE.🔥Soft.💩

After close to a year of working with GitHub actions, I’ve compiled a list of handy “survival skills” that help to keep developer velocity high.

If it listens on a port, it can be deployed to Lambda!

Part 1 of 3 in a serverless discovery brain dump. This portion focuses on the Lambda (compute) and Aurora (database) layers within the larger picture: FQDN → API Gateway → Lambda → Aurora.

I finally got around to ticking off a few items on my todo list.

1. Shoving an express.js app into a lambda function.
2. Deploying a Docker container to lambda.
3. Using a new HashiCorp product.

...And it all required very little code. Sort of.

Early last year, I began transcribing the react components from Vercel's component library site for use on my personal site. It was initially closed source but now in 2022, I decided to open source it. This is a reflection of how I tackled it and some thoughts and learnings I had along the way.

(Re)creating a CLI tool to print directory contents in a tree-like format. And then some benchmarking.

...from JSON payloads that you send! — This was a recent rabbit hole 🐰🕳 that took me 2 days to figure out. I couldn't find a quick and clear answer on Google so I figured I'd write about it.

Journal entry reflecting on past achievements and what's in store for the future. Self-assigning some Golang homework and some exploratory work into new territory.

Using CloudFront functions to apply some clever and sensible Cache-Control headers to a fully static Next.js app.

Using Uber's H3, React Native, and DynamoDB to build a serverless system, end-to-end, to track and visualize my own GPS locations

The AWS Python SDK (Boto3) provides a “batch writer”, not present in the other language SDKs, that makes batch writing data to DynamoDB extremely intuitive.

Webpack 5's Module Federation makes creating micro frontends straightforward. It is also available in NextJS 10+ via an experimental feature flag and it makes integrating micro frontends a breeze. You first build an external micro frontend and deploy it as a "federated module" to your destination of choice. Then you update some configs in your NextJS application and Webpack does the rest. It's kind of magic 🦄.

A play by play in successfully reducing first load JS bundle size by 25% with code splitting via dynamic imports, and getting all NextJS pages into the green zone.

Lerna, AWS CDK, and Github Actions make continuous integration and continuous delivery super easy. I figured out how to setup a CI/CD pipeline for my NextJS static apps backed by additional AWS infrastructure like Lambda functions, API Gateway, and Dynamo DB.

I found myself repeating some tedious tasks within the AWS console, week after week, and wanted to stop suffering. Infrasructure-as-code was the way to go but I knew I didn't want to learn Cloud Formation, and I was too lazy to pick up yet another 3rd party tool like Terraform.