Topic: Tooling

Whenever I put together an architecture diagram, I end up needing the same kind of visual element: a small labelled box with an icon that clearly signals what kind of service or system it represents. Keeping consistent sizing, border treatment, and colour coding across a whole diagram is tedious when you’re assembling things by hand. I built Component Creator to solve that — think of it as a button generator, but for diagram nodes.

Google Fonts routes your visitors’ IPs through fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on every page load — there’s no opt-out if you use the hosted CSS directly. I built a small nginx Docker image that sits in front of Google’s font infrastructure, rewrites the CSS on the fly, and serves everything from your own domain — visitors never connect to Google directly.

I run this website and a few other projects on Bunny CDN: the production setup is a Storage Zone for hosting all assets and a Pull Zone for CDN services. After each build I need the same loop over and over — walk the local output tree, compare it to what Bunny already has, upload what changed, and optionally remove objects that no longer exist locally. That workflow is second nature with aws s3 sync; for Bunny’s HTTP storage API I wanted something equally boring and reliable, not a one-off shell script.

I’ve been tinkering on a project that’s been both challenging and rewarding: building a native iOS app in Swift to control my KEF speakers. It started with a simple need — a clearer view of what’s playing — but quickly turned into a deep dive into debugging, APIs, and SwiftUI. Here I’ll share what I learned and the moments that made it worthwhile.

When writing backend services that validate JWT access tokens, you run into a frustrating problem: you need a real identity provider just to test your authentication logic. With Cognito, Auth0, or other OpenID Connect providers, spinning up an authentication service for local development or CI pipelines adds unnecessary complexity. You need valid signatures and correct claims, not the provider itself. That’s where JWKServe comes in.

I am a huge fan of Computer Interfaces; especially non-textual ones. Spoken words can be a powerful interface to digital services; Amazon Web Services has various services and products available that work with audio. To identify language in spoken words and extract textual information, you can use Amazon Transcribe and analyse audio files.

When using the AWS Software Development Kit, pagination in API responses is a common and sometimes annoying to deal with. Thanks to a shared interfaced in @aws-sdk clients, can you can establish a common pattern to interact with AWS paginated API actions using the JavaScript SDK v3. Retrieving all AWS Accounts in your AWS Organization is a neat example use case for this.

Managing and securing multiple AWS accounts gets complex. superwerker is a free and open-source solution to automate the setup and management of your multi-account AWS environments. Based on our experiences at superluminar, we teamed up with kreuzwerker from Berlin to bundle prescriptive best practices from multiple years of cloud consulting and created superwerker.

The more complex your application and architecture becomes, the more complex your deployment process usually gets. Most people and engineering teams only think about pipelines as a fix path of actions, that need to happen in a specific order. That’s true, no questions about that. But your process for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery does not need to be a monolith!

During Re:Invent 2020, AWS announced Container Image Support for AWS Lambda functions using the AWS Elastic Container Registry. Personally, I think this is a great feature. With supporting docker images, AWS Lambda has immutable deployment artifacts!

The Example for Continuous Deployment with Github Actions and AWS ECR uses a GitHub Deployment to trigger releases of tagged docker images. Using GitHub Actions, a task can be triggered for every created deployment.

If you stick to Conventional Commits for your commit messages, you can create tags and releases with GitHub Actions for every code change you push to a repository. This is great for automated and continuous releases!

You can easily deploy static files stored in a folder to an Amazon S3 Bucket. If you configure your S3 Bucket for static website hosting, you can access all files via HTTPS from any browser or tool. Using the AWS Cloud Development Kit in TypeScript, your CloudFormation Stack can look like this. After the deployment is done, the domain name to access the uploaded content will be exposed as a CloudFormation Stack Output.

You can find plenty of frameworks and tools to provision your AWS resources. Some of them do a great job for a specific purpose, others are more generic. Nevertheless, I do prefer to use native CloudFormation templates as much as possible.

The more projects you work on, the more streamlined your tooling gets. Hopefully. Various services using different languages have different tooling requirements, of course. A sweet Makefile can be the entry to a unified tooling interface.

Do you use GitHub to manage your software projects and Slack for communication? With GitHub Webhooks and a simple AWS Lambda function, you can notify Slack channels about new releases of your projects.

The YubiKey is a great OpenGPG smart card compatible hardware device. I use my YubiKey to store my private GnuPG key and for authenticating SSH connections. A few applications, however, don’t work with the OpenGPG card and require a file containing the key per default; Sequel Pro is one of them.

If you love software workflows as much as I do, you should check out my basics for deploying NPM packages using TypeScript, CircleCI v2, and GitHub Releases.

When you use a serverless environment for your service (and you should!), chances are high you might be using the Serverless framework and may end up in a situation like me with the need to process the AWS CloudFormation Stack Output after deploying the service.

It’s a recurring task in software development to forecast the amount of time something will take. There are Roadmap Meetings, Sprint Planning Meetings or even the spontaneous estimates you must provide in the hallway. All of them require you to pull out your divining rod and predict the future.

After the setup of a go command line tool with Cobra it’s now time to release it to the public and publish it to Homebrew for easy installation on MacOS. Together with the steps to use AWS S3, CloudFront and SSL Certificate Manager for easy web hosting it’s a pretty neat setup for your Homebrew application formula and go binary.