Get instant access to a low-latency, auto-scaling web server directly from your browser. — I’ve never been much of a front-end developer. Throughout my career my focus has been on the backend. I like designing systems, building data models, and choreographing event-driven workflows. It’s a satisfying set of problems that have challenged me since I graduated college.‍ But when I started working at Momento…

Auth is hard enough as it is. Be sure you understand the difference between two primary modes of authentication: API keys and tokens. — They say the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things. Honestly, that’s not wrong. Those are super hard.‍ What makes naming things difficult is being clear yet concise. There should be no doubt about the meaning of a variable, term, function, or class. If you…

Starting a SaaS app and need to set your users up with premium features? Here’s how to get started. — Earlier this year I released an AI-powered fitness app focused on creating tailored workouts using equipment you have at your disposal. It was pretty good, but inadvertently was geared toward how I exercise. Not great for general usage. So I completely rewrote it for a hackathon. I took the best…

Get your audience engaged with emoji reactions in real-time! — Have you ever given an in-person presentation? As you talk, you look around the room and see heads nodding or people taking notes. Maybe someone raises their hand and asks a question about something you said. It’s easier to get engagement from someone when you can see them directly. But…

With more and more options that abstract away writing code, what will we be doing in 5 years? — Last week I was in San Francisco to attend the launch of Postman Flows. It was a fun event focusing on innovative use cases built entirely on Postman’s new visual editor. I walked around from booth to booth talking to different vendors who have built incredibly impressive workflows ranging from…

Let’s take a look at the architecture that makes up Momento Topics, a serverless WebSocket service. — A few months ago, Momento released Topics, a fully-managed serverless WebSocket service. This service aims to connect everything. You can connect backend service to backend service, backend service to user interface, even user interface to user interface with literally two API calls 👇 // sends a message containing “hello world!” await…

Want to get started with SAM but don’t know what to do first? You’re in the right place — When moving to the cloud, be it in a migration or greenfield project, a responsibility you might not be accustomed to is declaring your infrastructure as code. Infrastructure as code is exactly as it sounds — you declare your cloud resources like Lambda functions, EC2 instances, and databases in a…

WebSockets are a cool and impressive part of modern applications, but man they can be hard to implement. — A couple of years ago I worked on a project to bring real-time notifications into my web application. I was excited at the idea of “real-time” and immediately knew I was going to get a chance to implement WebSockets. I knew what WebSockets did, but I didn’t really know what…

We’ve all seen the phrase “production-grade” software, but what does that actually mean? Are we setting our apps up for failure? — One of my favorite things to do is build “proof of concepts”. They are quick little apps that show a business problem can be solved in a certain way. They’re quick and dirty and throw caution to the wind. One thing we all know about POC’s is that you should…