tips and tricks

Android background processing – a decision guide

If you’ve ever done anything in Android that takes more than 16 milliseconds to process then you’ve probably heard of Android services and background processing in general. Why 16 milliseconds? At Android’s refresh rate of 60 frames per second, the main thread can not be delayed by more than 16 milliseconds to avoid frame skipping … Read More

Hunting the Wolf: App UX and Database Review

The Wolf Golf Scorecard app for Android, by Rod Biresch of Chariot Solutions, is a record-keeping application for a classic four-player golf game. Recently, Chariot had the opportunity to redesign and refresh the look-and-feel and usability of the application (first released in 2016) through a complete design deep-dive process.

Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store

AWS gives you two ways to store application configuration: Secrets Manager and Systems Manager Parameter Store. Both can store arbitrary configuration data. Both use IAM (Identity and Access Management) policies to control access. Both can encrypt the data. So which should you pick?

CloudFormation Tips and Tricks

I’ve noticed that many of Chariot’s clients — from 4-person startups to 40,000-person multinationals — use CloudFormation for their infrastructure-as-code. For them and others, here are some tips that I’ve learned while developing CloudFormation templates over the past five years.

Delving into CloudTrail events

CloudTrail provides you with an audit log of every successful API call made in your AWS account. This post focuses on management events in CloudTrail, and techniques for exploring and analyzing those events using a search engine such as Elasticsearch with Kibana.

Building Developer Sandboxes on AWS

The ability to experiment is one of the unsung benefits of cloud computing. It was, in fact what drew me to AWS in 2008. At Chariot, we have multiple sandbox environments, some for specific projects and some for general play, and recommend that our clients do the same. However, sandboxes need some controls, to ensure that they don’t become a source of runaway costs.

Managing Your AWS Credentials

Given that hardcoding is a bad idea, how should you manage your AWS keys? AWS gives you three options, which we analyze in this post.