Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

In our previous blog posts (Part 1, Part 2), we have created some Lambda functions that query against a DynamoDB table. Now we will put an API gateway in from our services. One complication of hosting is the point of contact, between the callers and the service. In many systems, the callers call the services…

In our previous blog post, we started our project by setting up a Lambda function in Amazon Web Services (AWS). We didn’t dive very deep, we barely even described much about those Lambda functions. Our single Lambda returns all contacts in a table associated with a particular groupid. Now we are going to write three…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a lot of services that make it quick and easy to build software solutions. They provide a lot of services that don’t require a lot of effort to set up. In this post, we are going to set up an AWS backend that can return some contacts that we store…

UI development can be a significant risk for a project. UIs are what users interact with, and waiting for the UI to be done at the end can endanger your project’s timeline or negatively impact a user’s experience with it. Building software in the most efficient way often starts by building from the bottom up….

“Software is hard.” – Donald Knuth Shipping software is hard. Supporting software can be even harder if you don’t set yourself up for success. If you have customers, you can’t just push the Ship It button and run away. Why is supporting software so difficult? One of the reasons is that re-creating what users are…

With .NET Core 2.1 there is a new Angular template. That, in combination with the new UseSpa configuration, makes using Angular with .NET Core feel a lot better than .NET Core 2. Let’s take a quick look at this new feature. Create a new ASP.NET Core Web Application. Select Angular as the project template. Now…

Formatting text is a common part of software development. Many web pages are just that, some sort of template that is converted into HTML. In the .NET world, we often use ASP.NET MVC for generating those HTML pages. We often also have a view that is rendered with a model to create an HTML page….

There are a ton of articles out there on how to choose a JavaScript framework. This article is not one of them. Instead, I’ve written this article to provide some guidance that should help you NOT choose a particular JS framework. Often, the correct choice is no JS framework at all. If you are just…

When it comes to testing your code, good data is hard to come by. For new greenfield solutions, there often is no data. And using production data is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t reduce the importance of good test data. We need good test data, and good (read: realistic)…