What Drives Efficiency
The last couple of months I’ve analysed my working to try to see which techniques I find useful on a day to day basis and which not. I’ve compiled a small list of things which I think are highly useful to get more done in your day to day business. It’s of course a list that is under constant development as I test and evaluate new ways of approaching problems. As of today this is how the list looks though:
The Hidden Constraints
Most programming languages do a wonderful job of hiding complexity. Often the compiler can do a good job of figuring out what you want to do, and wires things to your likings. Sometimes though it’s not possible. That’s when you start interacting with the hidden constraints of the language.
The Small Things That Make a Difference
I’m trying to create a habit out of learning something from my work every week. I try to observe the work that I’ve done and try to see if there’s something I did that I could have done better.
TDD or Not?
Not so long ago, a discussion arose at my work regarding test driven development (TDD). If you do TDD, won’t you risk having to cleanup a lot of tests when you start refactoring?
Architecture
I started reading this book on Software Architecture. I find that the book is well written and well structured, but at the same time I found it lacking with perhaps one of the most fundamental questions. What is Software Architecture?
SPACE and Developer Productivity
I stumbled upon this post that is outlining an updated way of measuring developer productivity. I recommend everyone to go there and read it.
Creating a Build User
It’s become very easy to setup github actions to do you building. At some point you probably want the build system to also publish releases into your AWS account. Now, the shortcut to do this is to simply have some admin role and create an access key for it that you supply to Github. That’s not very nice from a security perspective though. Following the principle of least needed access, you should rather create a user that has the minimum required permissions instead. Now, how do you do that?
ECR and Lambdas Step Two
Ok, so we’re in the middle of pushing lambda images to ECR in AWS. How do you push your image?
Well, here’s a small script that basically does the job.
ECR and Lambdas Step One
When AWS released their tool SAM (Serverless Application Model) it conceptually felt like a step forward. Before this many people had probably used Serverless to simplify their process of pushing Lambdas, and now finally AWS was taking steps of standardizing this. I mean, it makes sense. A Lambda is at its core something very simple. A small piece of code that you want to run under some conditions. So what’s the work you need to do to get it published?
AWS Doable Style
The AWS framework for Node has been around for a while, and for such reasons probably have to live with backward compatibility. One of the things that has annoyed me with the API is the usage of callbacks. I mean, that’s all fine, but many people these days problably want to use promises and async / await instead. Turns out that’s not very difficult.