Keep.✨SWE.🔥Soft.💩

How I built AI chat back in 2023

No model training; Off-the-shelf GPT 3.5 and some clever retrieval augmented generation.

On Durable Objects

Some notes and observations on Cloudflare’s globally distributed and strongly consistent coordination API.

How to Build & Publish a Terraform Provider

Documenting the critical and secondary dependencies to building and publishing a Terraform provider to the Terraform registry, based on my recent experience.

Infinite Databases with Nomad and Traefik

I managed to spin up multiple PostgreSQL databases on the fly, each with their own unique URL. Inspired by Neon, PlanetScale and Railway.

The biggest boon to my software career

A reflection on how three individuals have impacted my career in the past year.

Ok, Packer

After manually installing Nomad, Docker, Git, and ZSH on 3 EC2 instances, it was time to see if Packer could automate the process for me.

My First Nomad Cluster

My own notes — not a guide — on standing up my first Nomad cluster on AWS.

GitHub Actions Survival Skills

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.

Deploy any Web App to Lambda in 60 seconds

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

Serverless Brain Dump: Use Lambda with RDS Aurora Serverless

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.

Deploying a GraphQL Docker Container to AWS Lambda with Waypoint

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.

nextjs-components

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.

Tree CLI & Benchmarks

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

Dynamic Matrices in GitHub Actions

...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.

CloudFront Functions for an Efficient Cache Policy

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

Hexagonal Geospatial GPS Data Visualization 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

CSV To DynamoDB

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.

Micro Frontends in NextJS with Webpack 5

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 🦄.

25.33% Reduction in First Load JS with NextJS Dynamic Imports

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.

JAMStack CI/CD with Lerna, NextJS, CDK, and Github Actions

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.

Infrastructure as Code To Save Time

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.