What is CQRS, and why and how do we use it?

Audience

This article is aimed towards anyone with a basic understanding of application architectures. It requires some knowledge of how applications and data stores fit together, as well as a superficial knowledge of AWS.

It looks to address the following points:

• What is Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)?
• When and why do we use it?
• What is Event Sourcing, and why is it commonly used with CQRS?
• How might these ideas be implemented in an AWS environment?

All of these points will be covered in the context of adding a…

As an engineer, how can I practice my secure coding?

Audience

This article is aimed at developers who would like to improve their security skills. It assumes a basic knowledge of at least one programming language and a reasonable understanding of web applications.

Security is an important area of expertise for a developer. However, it is often difficult to know where to begin your learning. In this article we aim to cover a number of tools which can be used to start your journey.

Argument

We will cover two main resources for learning about security:

• Secure Code Warrior
• OWASP Juice Shop

We…

So, what have I missed?

Audience

This article is aimed at developers with a basic understanding of Java but who are looking to brush up on the changes from version 8 onwards. It isn’t intended as an in-depth guide, but more as a summary to remind you of the more exciting new features.

Argument

We will start with the changes to the Java release cycle, then move on to the key additions to each new version.

Changes to the Java release cycle

Previously Java would leave years between versions, finessing all of the features it hoped to introduce before doing a big bang release. Since Java 8, this…

I understand certificates, or at least I think I do…

Audience and Aim

This article is for developers who are currently using certificates and want to concrete their practical knowledge. We won’t dive deeply into details, but will give a pragmatic overview of the different areas required for their understanding.

Please note, this article does assume you have a basic understanding of public and private key infrastructure!

We aim to answer the below questions:

• What is a certificate for?
• How do I get a certificate?
• What is a certificate authority?
• What is in a certificate?
• How do I use a certificate?
• How does…

I’m a developer, I deploy to a VPC, but what’s going on in there…

Audience and Aim

This article is aimed at developers using AWS looking to understand how VPCs work. In many companies the complex infrastructure provisioning is separated from the development process. You may be deploying into a VPC, but not really know where your code is going.

Here we will explain at a very high level how a VPC functions. We will assume a small amount of networking knowledge, but the idea is to make the explanation as clear and practical as possible.

Argument

My AWS Step Function is exhausting my Lambda pool and keeps falling over!

Audience and Aim

The audience for this article is anyone using AWS Step Functions directly calling AWS Lambdas. An issue with particularly high traffic systems involves exhausting the Lambda pool, which in turn causes the Step Function to fail. The article expects a reasonable familiarity with both components.

At the time of writing the maximum open Step Function executions per account is 1,000,000. However, the default number of concurrent Lambda executions you may have per account is 1,000. …

Everyone keeps talking about it, but what the hell is it?

Audience and Aim

This article is aimed at any engineer who has heard of the concept of Infrastructure as Code/ Terraform and has at least a familiarity with AWS.

We aim to answer the following questions:

• What is Infrastructure as Code?
• What is Terraform?
• How do we use Terraform?

The final section will walk through an example where we generate our own S3 bucket in AWS by utilising the Terraform module and workspace functionalities.

Argument

What is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is one of the key DevOps practices and relates to the management of infrastructure…

I’m a developer, I’m doing Scrum and I’m not sure it’s working for me!

Audience and Aim

This article is for people in a Scrum development team who are feeling any of the below frustrations:

1. ‘All of my non-functional requirements are being de-prioritised.’
2. ‘I’m being made to code features whose functional design I don’t agree with.’
3. ‘My stakeholders are demanding late, unrealistic changes, citing Scrum being an Agile process as validation!’

There are of course other issues you may be facing, but this article focuses on these three specifically, and how you can alleviate them using the Scrum framework.

It assumes a functional…