AWS (?) made simple: What is a Netlify function?
~Simple~ Let's face it, AWS (a.k.a "the cloud") is not simple. Even though some AWS services have the world 'simple' in their name (e.g. S3, SQS, SNS) they are anything but simple. I'm personally trying my best to level the playing field by learning AWS Lambda in public but still, serverless…
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AWS Made Simple: Trigger a lambda function via API Gateway
Once we create an AWS Lambda function we probably want to be able to call it (otherwise, why bother creating a function at all?). As we established in the previous posts , an AWS Lambda function can be triggered by various events - including an HTTP request, which citation needed is probably…
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Why (frontend) testing matters
Imagine the following. You join a new project and after getting access to the repo you notice that there's no tests. You decide to ask the team whether they are in different repo or something and unfortunately the answer is: We don't have any tests, we didn't have the time. 😐 Let's talk about why…
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AWS Made Simple: WTF is Amazon EventBridge
In the serverless world, everything revolves around events. Your (micro)services are responsible for either producing or reacting to different kinds of events (e.g. API calls). When you have an architecture where (for example) a single API call can trigger a Lambda function that saves something in…
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AWS Made Simple: WTF is AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) and why it's awesome 🤩
Let me start with a quick story. When I started to learn how to program it was obvious at the time that you need separate languages for frontend and backend. For instance - JavaScript at the front and PHP at the back (which, for the record, is still a valid choice for a web service). Since then the…
Read Article →Why I'm excited about serverless as a frontend engineer
Back to the basics Basically every non-trivial web app (e.g. Uber for Bunnies) is composed out of three basic components, think of it as a recipe: Visuals (frontend) - a layer that users interact with, so your good ol' trio of HTML/CSS/JavaScript (with a dash of jQuery plugins, tracking scripts and…
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"Crap, I broke production" - How do we ensure it never happens again?
Let me start with a story. Suppose you're a developer (if you're reading this, it's highly likely) who just pushed this code to master (that part hopefully doesn't apply to many of you): (If you're not familiar with React, the point is that we're trying to render an app in an element with an id of…
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