July 05, 2020
Exporting an RDS Postgres database to local database
If you work with databases in the cloud, there’s a high possibility that you’ve worked with/or at least are familiar with Amazon’s relational database service, RDS. RDS offers capabilities to host all of the major relational database engines you would need when considering database provisioning, hosting, scaling, etc. In my...
June 27, 2020
Running NPM script tasks in different directories
Recently I’d been working on a TypeScript project that had nested modules throughout the codebase. It had a top-level package.json file and three nested sub-modules all with their own package files. In order to build and test the project before checking-in code changes, I needed to access the NPM script...
March 09, 2020
Software Engineering - An Industry of Opportunity
Last month, lots of people working within the tech industry (Software Engineering, specifically) contributed to a trend on Twitter where they shared their personal response to 5 important facts related to their professional journey (1. Education, 2. Years in the game, 3. Job Title, 4. Working Location, 5. Salary). Personally,...
March 03, 2020
Fetching zip files from S3 Buckets with NodeJS
Recently, I’ve been working on a project that uses a lot of Serverless technology. In most cases, I’m writing Serverless functions in AWS using their FaaS (functions as a service) offering, AWS Lambda. Amazon have did a great job in providing a SDK for NodeJS which makes writing Lambda functions...
August 21, 2019
Killing Running Processes with NodeJS & NPM
Recently I was trying to use bash/terminal to kill a running process on my local machine. I’d been running a Python service that was hanging and wouldn’t stop so I knew it was going to take something a little more to free-up the port it was hogging. Like with most...
June 22, 2019
Winning an AWS IoT Button
I recently won an AWS IoT Button through a competition in my work. I’m not 100% sure what I’ll do with it as yet but it seems like a pretty cool device and a really intuitive way for anyone to get involved with the internet of things. It shouldn’t come...
June 19, 2019
Facing fears
After writing a post 6 months ago talking about how I wanted to blog once per week, I’ve realised that setting such a goal was ridiculous. Life gets busy and sometimes other priorities take precedent. Either way, I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to be more active...
December 08, 2018
Done is better than perfect
I’ve owned my domain, andrewhil.es, since 2013. It had always been my intention to create a website that would act as a personal journal where I could document my work, random thoughts and generally share articles on things I think others would benefit from knowing. However, shortly after I crafted...