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Matthew Brown

I am a web application developer with experience in a wide variety of fields such as agriculture, finance and freight. I am a JavaScript enthusiast and enjoy learning all new technologies. When I'm not coding I am enjoying the Kansas City lifestyle with my wife and our son.

Building a Node.js Service with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and Serverless Framework

Matthew Brown Articles, AWS, Cloud, JavaScript, Node.js, Tutorial 3 Comments

My favorite new technology as a developer is serverless computing. The convenience and cost make it a very compelling choice for running options in the cloud. Especially for proof of concepts or quick ways to prove out ideas. Using serverless computing to get up and running takes very little effort and the costs of running an application in the cloud are minimal. Serverless really empowers developers to act on ideas as quickly as possible.

In this post, I’m going to briefly touch on what serverless computing is and the pros and cons of using it. Then I will build a Node.js service to do CRUD operations using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and the Serverless Framework. You can view the finished product on Github.

Advanced Node.js Process Management with PM2

Matthew Brown Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js, Tutorial 18 Comments

If you’ve worked on any front end applications recently, you have likely had some contact with a Node/Express application. What you may not be familiar with is how these applications are managed in production.

I recently had a project where I needed to set up a Node application on an AWS server. I needed a tool to solve the technical challenges of managing the Node processes and deploying the application in a very efficient manner.

I chose PM2, which is a handy process management tool for running Node.js applications in production environments. PM2 provides a simple command line interface that makes it easy to get started. This powerful Node module has tools for managing application processes, logging, and more.

In this article, I provide an introduction to PM2, showing why it is such a valuable tool for managing Node.js applications. By way of a reference example application, we show the basic features and commands for using PM2 and give examples of generating configuration files for both running and deploying applications.

A Test-Driven Development Introduction to Angular 2 – Part 2

Matthew Brown Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Single-Page Application, Testing 7 Comments

In this updated blog post, we’ve built an employee directory using Angular 2 with unit tests, gone over some differences between Angular 2 and version 1, and introduced some of the features of TypeScript.

I originally wrote this article/application when Angular 2 was still in beta. Now that it has released officially, I have updated the source code to reflect updates made to the Angular 2 framework for release. My approach to get this working was to start from the new Angular 2 quick-start project, port in the original application source code, and refactor as needed to make things work. Let’s get started…

A Test-Driven Development Introduction to Angular 2

Matthew Brown Angular, Articles, JavaScript, Testing, Tutorial 5 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 9 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.Note This blog post and application were created when Angular 2 was in Beta. Since, I have updated the application to the Angular 2 final release. You can view that updated post …