I recently started a role on a company’s developer experience team. One of the responsibilities that comes along with this is building larger CLI applications. As I wrote previously, I use the commander library when writing DevOps scripts for my NodeJS projects. This is great for smaller utilities that only…

Just about every developer that I meet has one, or more, side-projects that they work on. My primary side project (an Alexa skill called Movie Quiz) has helped me learn several new technologies over the years. Working on this skill has taught me everything from DynamoDB single-table design to CI/CD…

Some packages to use when writing code to support the real code. — Whether you need to build lambda code or hydrate a test database, most projects that you work on will involve some piece of DevOps scripting. If your application is using Node, there’s no reason not to use it in your scripting too. This makes it easier for other Node developers…

If you search for libraries to make API calls from Node.js, chances are you’ll run into the Axios package. It’s easy to use, well documented, uses promises, and it works in browsers too. When things go wrong The main complaint from other developers is that when they make a request and an error response…

Recently I was forced into using Terraform to define infrastructure. I’m so used to CDK and being able to adjust everything through context settings that I quickly ran into a problem: how do I deploy a copy of my project to test it? Editing Files Directly All I needed to update was the…

Integration tests are challenging in a standard application. They’re even more challenging in a decoupled, asynchronous environment. If you’re running them in a pipeline, you have to figure out all of the resource ARNs and make sure you have permission to access each of them. Also, what happens if your…

I’ve spent the last few weeks researching how to connect event busses in two different AWS accounts using the CDK. Most of the information that I’ve found has just been CloudFormation templates, which is fine, but some of the resources you have to create in CloudFormation are automatically created in…

One of the CDK’s greatest strengths is the ability to create a library of components to be shared across your company, or shared with the world on constructs.dev. But how do you create a construct based on other constructs in the same stack without forcing the developer to call a…

Did you know there’s a simple way to create mock responses for AWS AppSync queries? To accomplish this you just need to create the query, a special data source, and a resolver. Define the Query To keep things simple, we’re going to be prototyping the following graphql query. Create the Data Source We’ll be using a…