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&
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
Ghost recently released ActivityPub support, enabling Ghost blogs to participate in the Fediverse alongside Mastodon, Threads, and other federated platforms. Through extensive testing and production deployment, we discovered that the official ActivityPub container has a bug that prevents self-hosted ActivityPub deployments from working. Combined with AWS-specific networking challenges, we had
Ghost handles email differently than most CMS platforms. It ships with newsletter capabilities built-in but requires external SMTP for transactional emails and lacks automated digest features entirely. This post covers setting up both transactional email through Mailgun and building an automated weekly digest system using AWS Lambda and EventBridge. The
Running Ghost in containers presents a storage challenge. Container filesystems are ephemeral - when a container restarts, any locally stored files disappear. This includes all uploaded images, making local storage unsuitable for production Ghost deployments on ECS. The solution uses S3 for persistent storage and CloudFront for global content delivery.
Ghost requires a MySQL database, persistent storage for content and images, and a way to handle traffic at scale. AWS provides these through RDS Aurora, EFS, S3, and ECS Fargate. This post walks through deploying the core infrastructure using AWS CDK, which allows us to define everything as TypeScript code
A comprehensive guide on using Cloudflare as a security and CDN layer for AWS-hosted applications, with edge-level API key injection