chime
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Chime – Keep In Touch

The Chime application from Amazon has a very limited free tier option (limited to two people) but does have a thirty-day trial.  Better yet, the trial does not require a credit card and simply drops to the free tier after thirty days have passed. Conference Application You may have lived in a hole or work in a low tech business.  In either case, you might not know what Go To Meeting is.  This is a tool for creating virtual meetings.  A virtual meeting is held online and allows members to share screens while talking on a conference call.  Many of these tools allow for recording and either a call-in number or use of you laptop microphone and speakers.  These meetings can be... Read more

athena
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Athena – Spreadsheet to Database Conversion

The tour of Amazon AWS services moves to Athena this week.  This service is a utility on top of S3 that allows you do queries of data files stored there.  Thus, it is a great tool for digging into your log, spreadsheet, or other data without the need of a DBA. An Athena Overview This tool is as easy to use as it is powerful.  All one has to do is upload a file to S3, link to it in Athena, and map some columns.  Once these steps are done then, queries can be run against the data much like any database provides.  The service also provides some built-in parsers to categorize the file data.  Thus, CSV, Apache log files, and... Read more

workspaces
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon WorkSpaces – The True Road Warrior Solution

The next stop on our AWS tour is Amazon Workspaces.  This service allows you to launch a virtual desktop you can access anywhere quickly.  Thus, no more lugging around a laptop.  Now you can connect to your desktop from anywhere.  Even better, you can get to work with only an Internet connection. Virtual Windows Workspaces There are some options available via Amazon workspaces.  However, the Microsoft Windows options have the largest appeal.  They offer an opportunity to bring your license for a lower cost or to use one from Amazon.  If you have a few Windows licenses floating around (maybe from old, unused laptops or desktops), then this is an opportunity to make use of them.  The versions include prior Windows... Read more

simple notification service
Posted on AWS Tour

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

There is a broad range of services included in Amazon’s AWS.  The offerings include an easy way to subscribe to and send, notifications in a variety of methods.  This product is called the Simple Notification Service (SNS for short) and we will look into it for this stop on the tour. An Overview of Simple Notification Service Amazon provides a nice summary and overview of SNS as they do with all services.  If that seems too lengthy then the summary can be made shorter.  SNS provides a way to subscribe to a channel (called a topic) and then publish data that will be available to all subscribers.  A subscriber can be a cell phone text address, an email address, or an application... Read more

Chalkboard of words like training and development
Posted on Become a Better Developer

How to Create an Effective Clickable Demo

In this second episode of the Creating a Software Solution series we look at the clickable demo.  This tactic is used to help speed software design and becoming very common.  However, an effective clickable demo is much more than a wireframe.  We look at how to avoid spending too much time on details as well as how to keep it flexible. A Fine Line between Throw-away and Beta We started the series by looking at requirements and use cases.  This next step continues a focus on the “why” of the project.  We look at how an effective clickable demo is a first step in solving that core problem.  It is a visual tool for discussing details and even the user... Read more