My 31 Blog Posts

Why and How to Use Snapshot Tests in AWS CDK

7 min read

When I first encountered snapshot tests, I was skeptical. The concept seemed strange, and their benefits weren't immediately obvious. But after experiencing their value firsthand, I've become a convert – and here's why I think you should give them a ...

My 2023 in Retrospective (Personal Live)

4 min read

I intended to write about my personal live and my professional live in this post. But I have decided to split it up. There is so much to write about both of those and most of you are probably not interested in my personal stuff. So this post is only ...

Podcast Notes: Happy Bootstrapping

5 min read

💁 I will update this post if I have notes for new episodes. By Andreas Lehr (🇩🇪) who is the founder of We Manage and also runs a newsletter allesnurgecloud. My name is Andreas Lehr and in this podcast, I interview different entrepreneurs every ...

How To Use Different Git Configs

3 min read

A lot of us are coding for an employee and privately or as a freelancer for multiple companies. You might want to associate commits for the different projects with a different user (e.g. email) or sign them differently (I think you should). While you...

Create Your Personal, Pay-Per-Use ChatGPT Client in Minutes

4 min read

I was hesitant to purchase ChatGPT Pro. While I often use ChatGPT, the $20 per month price tag seemed excessive for my needs. However, the slow response time and limited availability were frustrating. I appreciate the serverless, pay-per-use approach...

You Have Fucked Up! How to git revert?

5 min read

You have messed up production. All hell broke loose. What to do now? Fix it as fast as possible and undo the last change that made everything fall apart to unblock further deployments. Fix Production Fast First of all, it is a good idea to get back t...

How to Securely Use Secrets in AWS Lambda?

7 min read

It is quite common to need a secret value of some kind in a Lambda function. Either for a database connection, a 3-rd party service, or whatever else. But how to securely use secrets in your Lambda? In this post, I am going to tell you why environme...

Mastering AWS CDK Aspects

10 min read

CDK Aspects Introduction CDK Aspects are a powerful tool provided by the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). They are utilizing the Visitor Pattern. By applying a CDK Aspect to a specific scope, you get access to every child node within it. You can insp...

When to (Not) Use React Context API for State?

3 min read

React's Context API is a popular choice for global state (my definition: state that is shared amongst components). It is easy to use and we are used to it because a lot of libraries leverage them. There are characteristics of React Context that you s...

Authentication: Cookie- vs. Token-based

2 min read

Authentication is about confirming that users are who they say they are. Whereas authorization is about permissions of a given user (e.g. admin vs. user). Authentication is an integral part of most apps. The two main methods for authentication are co...

How to Run Lambda on a Schedule

8 min read

Running arbitrary code on a schedule is a very common use case. A common way of doing that is by using cron jobs. But how would you do that in the cloud (specifically AWS) without having to run a Linux instance or something similar? What We Are Going...

Benefits and Downsides of Using Statecharts

7 min read

This post is part two of my series about state machines. It is a follow-up post of State Machines and Statecharts: What are they?. Start there if you'd like to learn about what (finite) state machines and statecharts are. After having answered the "...

State Machines and Statecharts: What are they?

10 min read

If you are working as a developer (software engineer, coding wizard, or whatever you want to call it), chances are high you came across the term state machine. But do you also know what they are? Can you explain them to others? What is a statechart? ...

Introduction into Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

10 min read

The concept of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) was introduced by Eric Evans. He wrote about it in his book Domain-driven Design back in 2004 (aka "The Big Blue Book"). ℹ️ What is a domain in the context of DDD? A sphere of knowledge, influence, or activ...

AWS Cross-Account Access

6 min read

I recently set up an AWS organization to follow the best practice to use a multi-account environment (read "Why should I set up a multi-account AWS environment?"). That was quite easy using Control Tower, which sets up an organization with some accou...

Debunking Tailwind Counterarguments

8 min read

Same Discussions Over and Over Again This post debunks some of the arguments against using tailwindcss. I've argued about them quite often in the past. Maybe you have, too? I'll plan to just reference this article from now on. This will make my (and ...

Why Svelte is different - and awesome!

6 min read

Just to get this out of the way in the beginning: This is not meant to be bashing other frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular. I used all of them and React (using NextJS) is mostly still my go-to. What is Svelte? Svelte is a radical new approach to...

TypeScript decorators basics

5 min read

⁉️ What are decorators? What types of decorators are there? ⁉️ How can they be used? ⁉️ When are they executed? Decorators Decorators are a stage 2 ECMAScript proposal ("draft"; purpose: "Precisely describe the syntax and semantics using formal spec ...