Posted on Become a Better Developer

Finding Your Best Side Hustle – Avoiding Mistakes

There are some that say any side hustle is a good one. The very act of starting into a side hustle is your first step into entrepreneurship.  While that may be true, your best side hustle is one that you enjoy and can turn into a full-time job.  This is one of those activities that are easy to understand but can be very difficult to implement. Know Thyself The simple part of this activity is to take a close look at what you truly enjoy.  This may be a challenge if you have always focused on paying bills over a fulfilling career.  Nevertheless, this is a critical step, and there is no time like the present to know what makes... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

Amazon Mobile Services

The Amazon mobile services group is one of the newer ones in their offerings.  However, that does not mean it is something you want to skip over.  These solutions are likely to be very valuable to your mobile application development efforts.  They will help you increase productivity and ease your integration with the AWS infrastructure when you use it for the solution platform. AWS Amplify This helps you build and deploy mobile and web applications.  Amplify is a development framework (libraries, components, etc.) and the CLI to help you build a mobile backend for your application.  It is compatible with React, iOS, Android, and Web-native applications.  This service frees you up to focus on your front-end and business logic rather... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

E-Commerce Solutions – Free and Low Cost

E-commerce is one of the primary drivers of the Internet.  Although funny pictures of cats may seem like the largest draw, those pictures and social sites get their revenue from advertising.  That advertising is only valuable when it leads to purchasing and e-commerce is becoming the way we buy our stuff.  In this episode, we look at some excellent tools to get your electronic shop on the Internet and ready to take orders. Shopify URL: https://www.shopify.com/ SAAS, HTML/JavaScript Easy to use, all-in-one solution with plugins as well.  Not the cheapest solution nor the easiest to customize.  On the other hand, it is easy to get started with a product or two and provides options for everyday needs like fulfillment, recurring payments, and more. XCart... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – Chain of Responsibility Pattern

This episode covers a pattern that is not as well known as some of the recent ones.  This time we look at the chain of responsibility pattern.  This is also our first foray into the behavioral patterns.  These may be techniques you have used without knowing they had a formal name or related pattern. The Chain of Responsibility Pattern Defined As always, we will start with the “Gang of Four” intent to set the stage for our discussion. “Avoid coupling the sender of a request to its receiver by giving more than one object a chance to handle the request.  Chain the receiving objects and pass the request along the chain until an object handles it.” This intent is a lengthy one. ... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Application Integration Services

This week we look at a shorter list of services in the Application integration group.  The list may be short, but these are highly useful and valuable services for application developers.  These are excellent ways to integrate your applications (as you would expect from the name). AWS Step Functions Coordinate Distributed Applications The Step Functions free tier includes 4,000 free state transitions per month. All charges are metered daily and billed monthly.  This service provides a way for you to visually connect pieces of your application when the pieces are serverless or otherwise stand-alone functions. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Managed Message Queues Simple Queue service is a bundled solution.  It runs on a server and uses storage for the queue.   Thus, the... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

Time Tracking Solutions – Free and Low Cost

We all need to measure how much of our life is spent working.  Thus, time tracking is one of those features that we all can make use of.  The good news is that this is a problem that can be solved at a low cost and in less intrusive fashion than in the past.  There may be a few “do you want to allow application X to do Y” questions to answer but otherwise, these tools can be quickly installed and utilized. Clockify.me Address: https://clockify.me/ This is free to get started and easy to set up.  I registered, created a project and was tracking time in minutes.  It is team focused, so a lot of the features make it easy to... Read more