Importing AWS Infrastructure to Terraform

Terraform is a great tool for setting up and configuring architecture as code. However, it can be tricky to manage resources that were not created by Terraform. I recently worked on a project where most of our AWS infrastructure had been manually created in the AWS console. When we decided to manage all of our […]

Remote Pairing with Visual Studio Live Share

A recent project required our team to transfer knowledge of our code base to another remote team. We decided that remote pairing would be the most effective way to do that. Since our project is written in TypeScript and all of us were on board with using Visual Studio Code, we decided to try Visual […]

Creating Amplify Email Campaigns in JavaScript

On my current project, we are using AWS Amplify to manage cloud infrastructure. One of the reasons we’re using Amplify is to send targeted emails to our users through AWS’s analytics tool, Pinpoint. Setting up an email channel through Amplify turned out to require extra work since, at the time of writing this blog post, […]

Creating Custom CloudWatch Alarms for AWS Lambdas

AWS allows you to setup CloudWatch alarms on many performance-related metrics. Doing this for metrics like CPU load or storage use is trivial. However, setting up custom alarms based on events or errors in a log isn’t as straightforward. By the end of this post, you should know how to set up alarms based on […]

Getting Started with WebSockets

WebSockets are a useful tool that allow for two-way communication between a web server and a browser. In this post, I am going to introduce the basics of WebSockets by making a (very) simple chat application using Express, HTML, and vanilla JavaScript.

VS Code vs Spacemacs for TypeScript Development

I have been using Spacemacs as my go-to editor for around two years, and I use it on every project I can. After being assigned to a TypeScript project, I discovered Spacemacs support for TypeScript was lacking compared to Visual Studio Code. I grudgingly accepted that VS Code provided a better development experience and adopted […]

Styling Custom Components in React Native Using TypeScript

I recently ran into an issue with providing style properties to custom React Native components written in TypeScript. When defining the type of the style property, we were using the ViewStyle and TextStyle types provided by React Native. interface Props { textStyle?: TextStyle; viewStyle?: ViewStyle; } class BlogPost extends React.PureComponent<Props> { render() { return ( <View […]

Three Common Misconceptions Junior Developers Have About Refactoring

One tool that junior developers often undervalue is refactoring. Since young developers probably haven’t worked on many projects where maintainability is important, it’s easy for them to overlook the importance of writing clean code. In this post, I’ll clear up some of the common misconceptions about refactoring.

Why I Started Exercising Before Work

After graduating from college and starting to work full-time, I had made it a habit to exercise after work. Recently, I started waking up earlier than usual, but I wasn’t utilizing my morning time efficiently. I decided to change this by working out in the morning, and I have noticed multiple benefits.

Four Questions I Ask Myself When Deciding What to Learn Next

Being a software consultant requires a constant growth mindset. This means having a thirst for knowledge, in both technical and interpersonal skills. With a plethora of topics and resources available, making a choice can be a daunting task. These are a few questions I ask myself when deciding on my next topic to research.

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Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Gage Vander Clay

Author: Gage Vander Clay