Posts

Prelude In the last two months, many things happened in my life, so this is the reason I wasn’t able to dedicate a lot of time to my blog. What can I say… I’ve been in South Africa, and I literally lived experiences I will never forget and cannot be described. I visited the Blyde Canyon and the Rain Forest. I made so many safaris, I saw the elephants in the morning washing and drinking from the river, the giraffes, I saw the warthogs - and by the way, they are exactly as Pumba in the Lion King by Disney - the lion, which was about to attack the buffalos, I found the white rhinos, the hyenas and the leopards. I ate in places with monkeys literally running free, I slept in a lodge - which was more similar to a castle than a lodge, and so much more comfortable than my apartment - and I had showers with an astonishing view on the savannah and nothing else. I visited Cape Town and I bought a beautifully engraved ostrich egg, I took a boat for the island of the seals. I made pictures of so many panoramic points on the coast, and I saw one breeding of ostriches. I reached the tip of Good Hope with the funicular up to the lighthouse, and I saw where the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet. I saw the South Africans penguins, I stopped inside False Bay and after that, I visited the botanical garden, with so many flowers, directly under the mountains, connected to the wild forest. It was an amazing trip, but it is not the only thing it happened to me. In fact, I also decided to leave Germany… ...

Prelude This is a twin post of - I guess - a good one that I wrote a long time ago: I was just surfing the blog thinking about all I would like to do, and I came to my old thoughts. I was curious, you know? so I read it, and read it once again, I reflected a bit on it - and I found it inspiring in a sense: even better, I would say I found myself surprised to agree with myself of almost 1 year and a half ago, in most of the things I wrote. For me, it was an important moment because it has been like a kind of retrospective. This is the reason I wanted to give this new lifestyle-kind-of post just the same title as his father. Like: I’m still learning. Or even better: I’m still learning - Revenge of the Fallen but I wanna warn you, once again - this is a deeply full-of-truth-and-complaints post - ok no, just kidding. This is more kind of a story, in five Chapters. ...

Introduction In the first part of this series - I run VSC in the browser and I was just fine - I wrote many stupid things around the possibility of having a VSC server instance running inside AWS over a simple, immutable, ec2 instance. The template {that can be easily deployed by a Lambda function [that can be easily deployed behind a route53 record (that can be easily placed as the endpoint of a custom Slack action)]} let you start your IDE and code from wherever you would like to. In this second part, I wanna talk about how to extend the same idea to serve a Team of developers. Yes, like the one below. ...

Introduction Serverless and managed things are the best choices if you don’t want to deal with infrastructure (3 2 1: fight) buuuuut…even immutable things are not so bad for this purpose - at least, if they are immutable for real 🤣 Today I wanna talk about a useful way to run an instance(s) of VSC server in AWS and code from everywhere (yes, even your iPad): let’s start! This time I will go native: so no CDK, I’m sorry, but pure Cloudformation instead. If you are not interested in all the astonishing things I have to say, you can find the template here. ...

Introduction In the last two weeks, I released a few CDK stacks: I made some experiments around API Gateway and service integration that came out in two serverless forms, the Contact Form and the Upload Form, read to be deployed in your static web page 😎. Actually, with CDK you can do so much more and so much more easily. The last stack I released - a producer-consumer chain presented here - it was a way I used to introduce how you can leverage Typescript inheritance to recycle an old stack and build on top of it. In this last step of this cycle, I will extend this concept once again to build - DRUMROLL - an OCR Serverless solution to be integrated into your application. The use cases are multiple: imagine you want to create podcasts of course lessons on top of your notes, to be able to listen to them during your trip to office or university or whenever you want. Imagine an application to help blind people - like the Be My Eyes app - to read documents without the help of no ones but AWS Services. Well, the use cases are endless so… let’s go! ...

Introduction A few days ago I wrote about a simple stack that leverage API Gateway and Lambda-proxy integration to create a safe upload endpoint to let unknown users push inside a bucket of your choice. The stack I will present today is can be used to build a producer-consumer chain, by implementing the SQS Extended pattern you can find in AWS exams. For the most curious, here you can find the core code. ...

Introduction The AWS CDK is becoming day by day pretty easy to use. I use Typescript, and today I will talk about a common use case: a simple Upload Endpoint for your API Gateway than like a LEGO can be built with a few instructions and of course…without the need of any server. For the most curious, here you can find the core code. Scenario You want to provide an endpoint to upload object: where? S3, of course. How? With a pre-signed a URL! What is it? A pre-signed URL it’s a URL that gives someone access to the object identified in the URL, provided that the creator of the pre-signed URL has the permissions to access that object. That is, if you receive a pre-signed URL to upload an object, you can upload the object only if the creator of the pre-signed URL has the necessary permissions to upload that object. ...

Introduction Hi everybody, thanks for the claps, it was a great month - rain rain rain again - now I’m back. The only GOOD THING of this terrible May is that AWS CDK came to simplify our life and I started using it (just a little) bit - still, enough to say, sincerely: it’s awesome. I used the Typescript version, everything is broken 2 release out of 3 but the time you save exploring the interfaces instead of looking for Cloudformation documentation online worths the time spending in troubleshooting the ongoing changes. Today I’m here to write about a common use case, a simple stack, and that’s all I have to say. ...

Disclaimer I’m on a train, back from Frankfurt - Germany, another of the cities to collect together with the ones I visited in this experience abroad in search of myself, trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be. Why this post and what to expect…Well, why, it’s simple: I recently studied a lot and got my AWS certifications (yuppie), I didn’t stop studying because I already planned other exams (really one of a bad idea of mine) and I also started to use my free time to go ahead with a couple of side-projects - they are super time-consuming. Thus, it was a while since I used this blog to… complain, maybe? well, not properly - about something. What. to. expect. It’s difficult to say: this post will be certainly biased. It’s rude, real. This time, I think I will tell some stories about how things went and still going on out there. ...

Prelude As you know might be aware of, AWS has quite recently delivered - but it’s still in beta - the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). Indeed, you should also know that I more recently migrated my blog to AWS as part of my migration strategy to the clouds - where my head already sits since 1991. Since I was using a Cloudformation stack though together with one of my colleagues, and since I did some manual changes to it - breaking the rules, I know - I decided it was a good moment to give a chance to CDK. I was waiting for Golang implementation to come up, but in the end, Typescript is fair enough: it not only add Types, but the interfaces will let you be so much more effective in reading the docs and find out what is missing / what is wrong in your template. Sorry, in your code 😃. ...