2022 - A year in Review
Yup, 2022 flew and it’s that time of the year again. I want to write that boring post that I am the only one to look forward to writing and I don’t expect anyone to read. Well, if you are brave enough to go ahead and read it, let me say thank you and then, to follow the tradition, let me greet you with a boring GIF: A yawning monkey Becoming an AWS Serverless Hero Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room, the biggest (and most unexpected) achievement of the year: being awarded the title of AWS…
Invite-only microsites with Next.js and AirTable
I recently needed to create an invite-only Next.js-powered microsite (for my wedding 🌸) and in this article I’m going to show you how I went about creating invite codes and how I implemented code validation in the app, using Next.js API endpoints and AirTable as a lightweight backend. The use case and the tech stack 24 June 2022 was the best day of my life. Seriously, I got married with the human being I love the most and everything was just perfect. But we are not here to talk about my wedding, right…
AWS Solution Architect Professional exam, my notes and tips
Hello everyone, I am really happy to share with you that I recently got my AWS Solution Architect Professional certification (SAP-C01) 🎉 In this article I talk about my experience with the exam, how I prepared for it and share a few tips that can, hopefully, help you if you are preparing for the exam. Who is the AWS Solution Architect Professional certification for I’d recommend you embarking on this challenge only if you already have a few years of AWS experience and you already managed to explore a few…
2021 - A year in review
A post where I reflect on my professional life in 2021 as a look ahead for what to expect in 2022. As usual, let me tell you that I write this kind of posts for myself and I don’t expect other people to be able to read this and be engaged. So, if you really feel like you want to venture forward and have a peek on my 2021, well, I am flattered… but make sure to grab a coffee, because this might get a little (just a little…) boring! boring stuff ahead Yes, this GIF is probably the least boring element of the…
Create resources conditionally with CDK
Did you ever need to create a resource based on a condition in CDK? I recently needed to do that and finding a viable solution for this problem took me longer than I originally anticipated. In this article I will try to summarise what I learned and present my solution. In short, we will learn about the CfnCondition construct and how it can be used to create CloudFormation conditions. Then we will see how to attach condition to low level construct. Throughout this article, we will discuss these concepts with…
Provision an Ubuntu-based EC2 instance with CDK
You are using CDK and you need to provision an EC2 instance. What if you prefer to use Ubuntu over Amazon Linux? In this article, we will see exactly how to do that, and, hopefully, we will learn a bunch of interesting things in the process! I have to be honest, I am more on the Ubuntu camp than I am in the Amazon Linux one… It’s a subjective preference. I find myself more comfortable with apt, snap, systemd and other Ubuntu nuances than I am with yum and other things in Amazon Linux. Plus, I find easier to…
How to send gzipped requests with boto3
I recently needed to send a big payload to CloudWatch and I managed to increase my chances of staying within the AWS payload size limit by using gzip encoding on the request body with boto3. Unfortunately, with boto3, gzip encoding is not enabled by default and it can’t be turned on with some simple boolean flag. To make things worse, as of today, there isn’t a great body of documentation or examples available on how to achieve this. Or maybe I am just terrible at googling… I had to go down the rabbit hole…
How to to_string in Rust
In Rust, there are several ways to turn a value into a string. In this article, we will explore a few different ways and discuss what are the most idiomatic approaches depending on the context you are currently working on. Personally, I have been quite confused for a while on what’s the best way to implement a “to string” functionality for a given Rust struct. The reason why this has been confusing to me is that there are indeed many ways to do that and they all have different purposes. I finally decided to…
Rust shenanigans: return type polymorphism
In this article, I will describe Rust return type polymorphism (a.k.a. generic returns), a feature that I recently discovered and that I have been pretty intrigued about. I am seeing this feature for the first time in a programming language and at first glance, it did seem like some sort of built-in compiler magic, available only in the standard library. In reality, it is a generalised feature that you can use in your own code every day. Keep in mind that I am still quite a beginner with Rust, so my…
Where to go to learn Rust in 2021
In this article, we want to provide a list of some free and paid resources that we loved the most in our journey to learning Rust. Rust is certainly not the easiest of programming languages, especially at first glance, but once you can overcome the initial “wall of fear” and start to grasp some of the key concepts, Rust becomes a language that you are going to love and you will probably be looking for more and more excuses to use it and learn it further. For this reason, we wanted to collect a list of…