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Life as a Software Consultant

John Boardman Articles, Consulting, Keyhole, Opinion Leave a Comment

I’ve been in the field of programming professionally since 1990. I started out as a corporate employee for 14 years, then as a consultant, back to an employee, and finally settled with consulting. In both positions, I’ve worked with small, medium, large, and huge Fortune 50 corporations. There are many similarities between being an employee and a consultant, but there are also some significant differences.

In this blog, I’ll explore what life has been like in each role and hopefully give some perspective to others who might just be starting out. Keep in mind when I write “employee,” I am specifically targeting programmers.

Using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis To Optimize Your Spring Boot Application

Brandon Klimek Articles, AWS, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Spring, Spring Boot 13 Comments

Has your project gotten to the point when big data sets and/or time-consuming calculations have begun to affect performance? Or are you struggling to optimize your queries and need to cache some information to avoid continually hitting your database? Then caching could be your solution.

For this article, I will demonstrate how to utilize Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to speed up areas of your application. The example application we will build uses Spring Boot 2.x and is available on Github.

AWS AppSync with Lambda Data Sources

Mat Warger API Development, Articles, AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, JavaScript, Tutorial Leave a Comment

The power of GraphQL lies in its flexibility. That is especially the case regarding resolvers, where any local or remote data can be used to fulfill a GraphQL query or mutation.

In this post, I’m going to demo a quick example of what this looks like, and a couple gotchas that were apparent in working with Lambdas as a data source for AppSync. Let’s gooooo!

Hello Micronaut

Rik Scarborough Articles, Java, Microservices, Testing Leave a Comment

From some of my previous posts, you can get the idea that I promote the idea of developing maintainable code rapidly. So I was pretty excited when I learned that the same group that was responsible for Grails was working on a similar project for Web Services. Hello, Micronaut.

In this post, I provide an introduction to the Micronaut framework and its features to provide a foundation for you to try it out yourself.