Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

Azure Cosmos DB is a fantastic technology. It provides a very robust document database with multiple query languages supported. But as with many cloud technologies, it has the problem of only being able to run from the cloud (obviously). Thankfully, some cloud technologies – like Cosmos DB – can be run on the ground, on…

Users are essential for software, but managing users isn’t a unique value-add we are often providing with our software. Letting someone else manage users for us makes a lot of sense and saves many headaches. Thankfully there are many services that do this really well. One of those services is Azure Active Directory B2C. In…

iOS push notifications are often a requirement for mobile applications. But this feature isn’t easy to set up. It involves several steps across various applications, online and locally. And if you’re developing for multiple platforms (i.e., iOS and Android), you can be in for even more work. But with Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (SNS), you…

In my previous post, we got our code running locally and connecting to DynamoDB in the cloud. Now we are going to get our code connecting to DynamoDB also running locally. Why would we want to do this? Well, it gives us a great development experience. Each developer can have their own instance of DynamoDB…

DynamoDB is a document storage technology hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS). We have used it for several projects, and it works pretty well for a lightweight document store. Calling DynamoDB from within the AWS ecosystem is pretty easy, but what about calling DynamoDB from the ground, or from your own machine? Why would you…

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….