Amazon Lambda

If, like me, you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if running server-side code was as straightforward as running client-side code, you might be excited to learn about Amazon’s new Lambda service:

Lamda is shockingly simple. You upload Node.js scripts that run on-demand in response to various events. All infrastructure — hosting, scaling, maintenance, configuration, security, etc — is managed automatically. “Run no servers, no instances,” as the presenter claims in the video above.

Events that trigger your scripts include many of Amazon’s popular services, such as S3 uploads, DynamoDB updates, and Kinesis streams. You can also set up custom or scheduled events. They claim you can create complex applications by loosely-chaining together multiple functions through this event-driven system. The video above shows a hypothetical Instagram-style application built entirely on Lambda.

I’m fascinated by the idea of an infrastructure that is fully abstracted away from the stateful fussiness of server maintenance, leaving behind only stateless, functional code. It sounds perfect for some of the side projects I’ve had in mind.

This looks like the future to me.

|  3 Apr 2015




More Followup on Sharing Data With WatchKit Extensions

Reader Erich Graham emailed me some more followup on a recent series of posts I wrote about WatchKit extensions. There are new NSNotifications available in iOS 8.2 (since beta 5) that extensions can use to monitor for host app state changes:

Added NSExtensionHostDidBecomeActiveNotification
Added NSExtensionHostDidEnterBackgroundNotification
Added NSExtensionHostWillEnterForegroundNotification
Added NSExtensionHostWillResignActiveNotification

Erich writes:

I reached out to Apple about your File Coordinators point in this post and I was advised that the technical note was out-of-date, and as of 8.2 Beta 5, there are background/foreground methods for extensions, and File Coordination is recommended.

Great to hear. I look forward to rethinking these problems.

|  13 Mar 2015




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|  16 Jan 2015




Taking the Time to Thank Your Mentors

In the latest issue of Objc.io, Andy Matuschak (a former lead UIKit engineer at Apple, now elsewhere) writes about his experience at Apple:

I was fortunate enough to be able to pester a few people into spending a fair amount of time teaching me things, and in certain cases I made mistakes egregious enough to have people spend their time teaching me things without requiring pestering. […] The industry is an interesting place right now, because it’s flooded by new grads, and the new grads are noisy and they’re on Twitter and they’re the ones that are speaking at conferences. But this industry has been around for a while. And there sure are a whole lot of software engineers with 15 or 20 years of professional experience in the field, and they’re not as noisy. You don’t read stuff by them all the time. They’re mostly locked away in companies, where they can’t talk, but they sure do know a lot.

On a spectrum from total beginner to one of Matuschak’s obscure mentors, most days I still feel like a newcomer. But when I dare to peek at my code from a few years ago, it’s obvious how much I’ve matured as a developer. There are lots of people to thank for that growth. Matuschak’s interview brought to mind all the people who have mentored me. Some of them might not even realize how much they were teaching me at the time.

So to:

and many others — thanks for taking the time to help me grow.

|  14 Jan 2015




[Sponsor] Digit

Everyone feels like they should be saving more money. However saving money is hard and stressful. That’s why we built Digit. Digit automatically saves money for you, so you don’t have to think about it. Our hope is, with Digit, we can remove some of the money stress from our lives. So far Digit has saved over $700,000 for our members.

Today we’re sharing more invites to Digit.

Anyone who uses this link, not only will be able to sign up for Digit today. But will also get jump started with a free $5 in their Digit savings.

Note from Jared: Digit looks seriously cool. Even cooler that all that great tech sits atop an FDIC-insured savings account. If you’re anything like my wife and I, then you have trouble sticking to a budget. Watch their Sandwich video to learn more. I love the playful, off-kilter animations.

This post is sponsored via Syndicate Ads.

|  11 Jan 2015