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

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – The Proxy Pattern

We continue a look at the structural patterns with a look at the proxy.  This is much like the flyweight we reviewed in the last episode.  However, it has a different focus.  The flyweight can be used to implement a form of proxy but is a solution to a large number of instances where this is a different goal. The Proxy Pattern Defined As always, we will start with the “Gang of Four” intent to set the stage for our discussion. “Provide a surrogate or placeholder for another object to control access to it.” That, once again, provides a short and simple description of our pattern.  The proxy saves us from having to instantiate an object before we start using it.  The proxy... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Machine Learning Services

The AWS machine learning services are more examples of the newer offerings.  Nevertheless, these are growing fast and can help you embrace cutting edge technology.  Machine learning is a recent technology in general so the time you spend understanding these services may help you land that next job. Amazon SageMaker This service provides a method for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at any scale.  This is a great way to try out machine learning.  The time you spend here is good to use on your next resume update.  You do need to put some data on S3 to analyze and then check out the use cases.  There is a free tier for the first two months. Amazon Comprehend Quick... Read more