In conversations with people who are much smarter about education than am I, one idea that came up was this notion of foundational knowledge. To define “foundational knowledge” by analogy think of learning basic arithmetic. First you learn addition then subtraction, multiplication and finally you move on to division. I can’t claim to understand the […]

 The idea was that you set the colored piece of cardboard on the keyboard at a certain position and then by following the colors in a special songbook one could pick out a tune.

I started to learn how to program in high school at the end of the 1990s using a mix of BASIC, Turbo Pascal and HTML with JavaScript. The seed for this blog post comes from my experience with learning how to program in JavaScript, without having much guidance or organized resources. This article continues a theme that I started in my interactive Commodore 64 article, which is to look at past programming systems and see what interesting past ideas have been lost in contemporary systems. Unlike with Commodor[...]

AWS AppSync added support for Lambda authorizers on 30th July 2021 and it made it much easier to implement group-based authorization with 3rd party identity services. Group-based auth with AppSync and Cognito I previously wrote about how you can secure multi-tenant applications with AppSync and Cognito. Where you can use custom attributes to capture the tenant … Group-based auth with AppSync Lambda authoriser Read More » Liked this article? Support me on Patreon and get direct help from me via a private[...]

With API Gateway and Lambda, you can handle client errors gracefully by returning a 4xx response. module.exports.handler = async (event) => { // run validation logic return { statusCode: 400 } } This way, we can communicate clearly to the client that there’s a problem with its request. It also lets the Lambda invocation complete … How to handle client errors gracefully with AppSync and Lambda Read More » Liked this article? Support me on Patreon and get direct help from me via a private Slack channel or[...]