programming

What’s the point of Lambda SnapStart?

Lambda SnapStart is intended to improve the cold start time for a Lambda function. It’s been available for Java workloads since 2022, and was recently released for Python and .Net workloads. It works by running the initialization code of your Lambda function when you release a version, and then storing an image of the Lambda execution environment. Cold starts load this image rather than running the initialization themselves. Given that cold starts happen unpredictably, and may be measured in seconds, this seems like a win-win situation.

The reality, as usual, is more nuanced. SnapStart introduces its own cold start delays, as it loads the image into the runtime. And it increases the time and effort of deployment. In this post I drill down into the nuance, so that you can decide whether it’s a worthwhile choice fo your project.

What, Why, and How of gRPC

Introduction When developers start a new software project, they frequently give a lot of consideration to the choice of programming language or languages, frameworks, and persistence tools; however, they often give little thought to how the services or endpoints will communicate. Projects will automatically select REST, or something REST-like for this communication.  There are other … Read More

Getting Started with Burpless: Writing Cucumber Tests in Clojure

No matter how rapidly the world of software development may change, one constant is the need to ensure the quality, functionality, and reliability of our software applications. As our demand for more and more complex applications continues to increase, so does the risk, not only that developers might program something incorrectly thereby introducing bugs, but … Read More

An ML tale: From notebook to production

Data Scientists spend their days working in Jupyter notebooks, which are then passed to an implementation team to prepare for production. This post guides you through that process, emphasizing iterative refinement. I will be using the scikit-learn and XGBoost libraries, but other ML libraries could be swapped in. While scikit-learn offers a comprehensive library of … Read More

Automate the Boring Stuff with AI

My motivation for creating tools often stems from a desire to get familiar with new technologies. This project was no different; I wanted to deepen my understanding of Generative AI. However, this wasn’t the primary reason for its creation. The real driving force was a persistent gap in my workflow that I couldn’t ignore any … Read More

A Practical Way to Improve Javascript Code using Dependency Injection

We have all seen endless articles and walkthroughs for implementing The Greatest Design Pattern Ever™. The one failing many of them seem to have in common is that they all assume a user is starting with a new project. It’s relatively easy to set up an ideal theoretical project, and implement a design pattern, but … Read More

Lambda Four Ways, a Rosetta Stone for AWS

When I write Lambdas professionally, Python is my preferred language. It offers decent performance, a straightforward syntax, and high developer productivity. I’ve also used Java, both in demonstration apps and actual client work. But while I have some familiarity with other languages supported by the platform, I’ve never used them. So, with some downtime, I decided to implement the same Lambda in four different languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, and Go, to get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses.