It’s time for my annual review! Starting last year, I began to review what I’ve managed to accomplish over the course of the previous 365 days.

I regularly see questions related to the various bits of terminology surrounding DynamoDB. Specifically, questions always come up related to Primary Keys, Partition Keys, Sort Keys, and a bunch of the other names and types of each of them. I wanted to do my best to describe what each of these terms means and how they relate to one another.

I’ll assume a little bit of DynamoDB knowledge going into this post. If you’d like to dive into this yourself I’d suggest getting started with the DynamoDB Developer Guide. So let’s get started breaking apart all the jargon involved with AWS’s Managed NoSQL offering.

Have you ever tried to do something with CloudFormation but just needed a little something more to get the job done? In those cases I’ve started using CloudFormation custom resources. These resources essentially allow you to extend the use of CloudFormation templates whenever you create, update or delete a stack.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you could use these custom resources to provision your DynamoDB tables with some data. This can be useful if you’d like to run additional testing on your AWS environment that requires actual data inside of the environment.

In this tutorial, we’ll use Flask to create an API that serves up historical weather data in the Seattle area. We’ll put together a very simple API using open weather data and finally, we’ll suggest a few modifications you could make to continue expanding and improving the functionality of your API.

I’ve recently decided to scale back some of my social media and other time-wasting activities.

Initially I was trying to do this with browser plugins to block specific sites. Unfortunately, I was too clever for my own good and removed those plugins or opened incognito windows whenever I wanted to, say watch Youtube or browse Twitter.

So I tried to think about how I could make this even harder for myself and decided to change my hosts file to redirect urls to another IP effectively blocking all my site vices. Here’s how I did it.