A friend runs a lab with custom software that handles sample tracking, inventory management, and reporting. It does nearly everything they need — except print labels. They have Zebra thermal printers on the network and a collection of ZPL templates, but the software has no integration with the printers, so printing
Several months ago, I was looking for some new music and decided to give Claude a crack at finding me some new music. i'm trying to make an album based playlist. It should consist of 3 (mostly) complete albums. Right now I have Hum - Downward is Heavenward
A friend had been building a web app with Claude Code — Express server, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, in-memory data storage. The app worked and kept growing. But it was running on her laptop with no deployment, no database, and no auth. She needed to get it to AWS and had
I recently revisited cdk-websocket-server, a demo I published in 2023 for running a WebSocket server on ECS Fargate behind CloudFront. The original worked, but it carried unnecessary complexity — EC2 instances backing a Fargate cluster, a custom Lambda to patch CloudFront headers, and a single-stage Docker build running as root. Here&
I recently revisited a CDK project I published in late 2022 — cdk-private-rds-with-lambda — and ended up rewriting most of it. The original worked fine, but it carried complexity that didn't earn its keep: projen for project management, an EC2 bastion host for database access, password-based auth via Secrets Manager,
Authentication typically happens in one of two places: the frontend checks if a user is logged in before showing protected UI, and the backend validates tokens before processing requests. There's a third option—verifying JWTs at the edge, in a Cloudflare Worker, before requests reach your backend infrastructure.
API keys for backend authentication create a fundamental challenge in web applications: the credentials need to authenticate requests but cannot be exposed to clients. Hardcoding keys in frontend bundles or environment variables leaves them visible in browser developer tools. Anyone who opens the network tab can extract the key and
When building a React SPA with Cloudflare as the CDN it is possible to use S3 for static asset storage. If you have all of your resources typically on AWS, but want some of the advantages of Cloudflare, you can build a system that is very similar to the traditional
After four months of running a fully self-hosted Ghost CMS on AWS, I made a decision that might seem counterintuitive: I moved to Ghost Pro managed hosting. But here's the thing—I kept all the custom Lambda-powered features I'd built. This post documents that migration and
Preparing for re:Invent 2025 If you've been following this blog, you might have noticed things have been quieter than usual. The technical deep dives, infrastructure walkthroughs, and problem-solving posts have slowed to a trickle. There's a good reason for this temporary silence - I'