While watching Avengers: Infinity War for the tenth time (I’m a bit of a fan), I had this realization: designing for accessibility not only helps those with special needs but when done properly it enriches the experience for everyone. I’ll explain… In case you’ve missed the 20 plus Marvel movies…

This blog post is a preview of life with the Windows 10 2019 Fall Update. …

The landscape of AWS compute options is overwhelming: EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, Lightsail, Elastic Beanstalk, Batch … did I miss any? At their core, all of these options let you run a program, but they have different characteristics; depending on what you want to do, one will be better than…

According to eMarketer, 2019 was the first year that Americans spent more time on their mobile devices than watching television. This shift to mobile builds on a digital evolution already well underway, one that now sees almost 50% of the world’s population using the internet, 570 new websites launched every…

I find the SAM (Serverless Application Model) CLI extremely frustrating to use on Linux, starting with installation. But this week I learned two things that simplify both installation and operation. I’m passing them on in the hopes that they’ll be useful to you as well. Happy Friday! Homebrew isn’t required For me, the…

Cypress is a relatively new web testing tool that is easier to use than Selenium, and it’s gaining in popularity. But using it in a continuous integration environment like AWS CodeBuild requires some additional steps compared to running it directly on your own computer. This blog post contains helpful information…

Short-lived database credentials are a best practice because they have a limited “blast radius” if compromised. However, Spring Boot — indeed, Java connection pools in general — aren’t well-adapted to changing credentials, because they’re normally configured when the application starts. …

How do you configure database connections for your Spring Boot application? Here’s one way: spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://db.example.com:5432/postgres spring.datasource.username=postgres spring.datasource.password=my_super_secret_password The problem with this approach is that “my_super_secret_password” isn’t: it’s sitting in a file in plain text, available to anyone who can either check out your source code or copy your deployment bundle…

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) was released just over a year ago. At the time, I was working on a web application deployed to AWS. The infrastructure was simple. There was a Node app, running behind nginx, in an EC2 instance. That instance served a REST API as well…