The text discusses migrating from CDK Pipelines to CDK Express Pipeline, highlighting the challenges with CDK Pipelines and the benefits of CDK Express Pipeline. It provides a comparison of deployment times, stack IDs, and setup s...
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Rehan van der Merwe is an AWS expert and founder, passionate about serverless and big data, with a strong engineering background.
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0CDK Express Pipeline Tutorial
2025-03-02 • tutorial aws cdk pipelines deployment
The tutorial explains how to set up and manage deployment pipelines using the AWS CDK Express Pipeline library, which creates a dependency graph between Waves, Stages, and Stacks. It covers prerequisites, project setup, understand...
The blog explains how to connect AWS Lambda functions to a Tailscale network, which is a zero-config VPN built on Wireguard. It discusses the challenges with existing solutions and the need for language-agnostic, simple, and maint...
The blog discusses the process of setting up a CDK starter project, covering topics like configuration, environments, build systems, CI/CD processes, and GitHub Workflows. It also explains the architecture, structure, and setup of...
The post discusses the use of a monolith Lambda API function, also known as Lambdalith, compared to single-purpose Lambda functions per API route. It challenges the 'best practices' and argues that a monolith Lambda function is be...
0CDK Shorts #3 – Local Bundling
2023-06-17 • docker aws lua s3 cdk bundling deployment s3 command asset hash
The text discusses local bundling of CDK assets, providing two methods to achieve this. It explains how to create a new class that implements the ILocalBundling interface and how to pass an object that satisfies the interface with...
The author reflects on the progress made in November, including rebranding, blogging, documentation, launching a new feature, and improving the UX around SSO logins. They decided to focus on user growth instead of profit and set g...
0A slower month
2022-11-05 • marketing documentation cloud services retrospective
The author reflects on the past month, discussing work on Cloud Glance, joining MessageBird, and future goals. They mention profit, goals, new features, and plans for the upcoming month.
The author reflects on the launch of Cloud Glance, a product that has received positive feedback and has around 20 daily active users. The author discusses the lack of website analytics and the focus on daily active users as the m...
The text is a postmortem on WarpURL, a product the author attempted to side hustle and failed. It covers the technical and soft skills required to create and run a side hustle on AWS, including AWS CDK, Lambda functions, DynamoDB,...
The text discusses the importance of refreshing a single-page application (SPA) after deployment and the inefficiency of current polling methods. It proposes a more efficient method of refreshing an SPA by piggybacking off existin...
The blog discusses improving the Developer Experience (DX) by using an API SDK, which becomes the single source of truth between backend and frontend projects. It highlights the problems with the current process and proposes a sol...
The text discusses the need for runtime type safety in TypeScript and explores various tools to achieve this. It focuses on AJV Standalone method that outputs JS validation functions at compile time to be used at runtime. The auth...
The text discusses the use of an in-memory cache as a fallback strategy for an external cache like Redis. It compares different caching scenarios and their impact on performance. It also delves into the use of Lambda functions and...
02021 in Review
2021-12-08 • retrospective milestones achievements
The text is a retrospective of the year 2021, focusing on the author's professional and personal achievements, including a new job, side projects, speaking engagements, and personal milestones such as marriage and new hobbies.
The text discusses the transition from monolithic architectures to microservices, focusing on the use of Amazon EventBridge and the Event Carried State Transfer pattern to create loosely coupled and independent services. It also p...
The text discusses the challenges and misconceptions of using microservices, and the importance of considering non-technical requirements before deciding to use microservices. It also explains the differences between traditional m...
The author reflects on the challenges faced with WarpURL, a shortening service, and the difficulty in finding market fit. Despite positive feedback, the decision is made to put the project on hold. The author also discusses the st...
The post discusses the ability to deploy stacks in parallel using CDK and CloudFormation. It explains how a basic 3 stack application’s deployment time can be reduced by deploying stacks in parallel where possible. It also provide...
The author reflects on the importance of validating an idea before building a product, sharing experiences and challenges faced while working on WarpURL. The post includes a retrospective on the previous month's goals, marketing e...
0WarpURL Day 1!
2021-07-03 • software development cloud services retrospective
The author reflects on the progress of WarpURL, a project he soft-launched, and shares plans for the next month. He discusses the challenges he faced, such as AWS CodeBuild issues and the expenses incurred. The author also outline...
The text is a report on how the AWS CDK handles asset hashing, addressing non-deterministic deployments of assets such as Lambda code or S3 Bucket content. The author found that the problem was not with how CDK determines the asse...