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The Latest from Our Team
Using an Access Control List to Block IP Addresses from Cognito
AWS Cognito is a very solid authentication service. We often use Cognito as an identity provider (IdP) for the applications we build. We redirect to Cognito, and then Cognito redirects back to us. Cognito gives us a code that we can use to get a JSON Web Token (JWT) to access our services. It’s a…
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Get an Overview
After we have a rough mental model of a software system, we often want to get an overview of the system. In this step, we are trying to peel back one more layer. Where a mental model is a rough understanding of the system, an overview is deeper and more complete. We often jump straight…
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How to Send GCM Messages Using C#
In my previous blog post, I mentioned how to send APNS messages using C#. In this post, I will do the same using GCM. Sending a GCM message is very similar, but in this case we will use a different NuGet package. You will need to install the FirebaseAdmin NuGet package. The first step of…
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Sending APNS Push Notifications Using C#
Over the years, we have built many mobile applications across numerous industries. One of the most common features of these mobile applications is sending push notifications. Most applications we have built have used third-party services to send these notifications. But how hard is it to send APNS notifications? It’s really not that hard. But why…
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Reflections on Attending the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC 2024)
The Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC) consists of a full day of participatory workshops, two days full of talks, an evening mixer, a whole lot of sponsor booths, some regretful karaoke, great barbeque, great bars, and at least one actual magician. Today, we’re talking about my attendance at the 15th annual KCDC, held June 26th…
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Making a Mental Model
What does a year look like? This is a question you may have been asked before. And there is a variety of works out there discussing the differences in how people perceive a year. Ultimately, many people have some sort of circle for a year. When creating a software system, we should create a mental…
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Cognito Basic User Operations in C#
When building a solution on top of Cognito, we will often build on top of the existing Cognito user interface. But, it is possible to make all of the authentication calls without using it in a UI. In this blog post, I’ll show how to use C# to make these calls. You probably should avoid…
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Rate-Limiting Requests with RxJS
Recently, I had an issue in a front-end application in which a user was allowed to click around a calendar and begin loading any day that was tapped. Each day triggered a semi-expensive API call, which could take a second or two to complete. The user was free to click around on more days and…
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Your Vision + Our Engineering
Every business is striving to achieve business agility. They want to create larger impacts, deliver value more often, embrace customer learnings, and ultimately move faster to outpace competition. At the same time, businesses are being required to tackle new and varying classes of problems. Innovation, for example, is classified as a wicked problem. This means…
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The SWEBOK and Its Applications for Software Developers
Musings On Career Development in Software I have spent a fair amount of time over the last 5-10 years thinking about how our industry views and supports professional development. My own journey has given me an opportunity to see and experience what it takes to go from no education (other than a FORTRAN class in…
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