Why have this blog...

...when I'm a seemingly reclusive software engineer just trying to get work done? Well, maybe I might be able to convey some of my experiences to help others, or maybe others can find what I've done and give me hints on what I could do better.

In either case, it's therapeutic, and if nothing else, provides an external outlet for thoughts on issues I encounter in the area where data networks and software collide. Enjoy!

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Software Design Principles - SOLID

The SOLID software design principles weren't called SOLID while I was in grad school, but the concepts were there in my Object Oriented Design course. They're worth mentioning here, primarily because I think once you start coding and become dangerous, it's one of the best ways to stay organized once you incorporate it into your daily coding routines, and it even changes your way of thinking for the better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

Best Documentation of a Free Software Package

One oft overlooked artifact in software development is the documentation. An API that is not well documented is no API at all when time is of the essence. That's why I think it is important to discuss some of the tools I have used and their documentation. AutoIt - I love how you simply press F1 within the AutoIt editor and boom, the reference to the particular syntax or function pops up in the help window. This help file is well written, self-contained, and chock full of examples that can be opened up in the editor right from the help, a fantastic symbiotic relationship. After installing AutoIt and giving it a try using their examples, I was able to create client/server scripts, GUI scripts, and window management scripts in no time. Overall, AutoIt is tops in this competition. A+ MySQL - At the bottom of each page of documentation that discusses a particular statement, users are able to post comments containing code snippets for that particular statement. This is great... M...

AWS Development On A Budget

I was interested in hosting a small portfolio of applications in AWS, but I wanted to keep costs down. I was willing to maybe host about $30-$40 a month of servers just to showcase some of the applications I was putting together. Here's what I came up with. The basic capabilities here were: serve up about 6-10 applications that would require some level of web application hosting, database, file storage for larger items, and possibly queuing or email schedule jobs to run periodically to either scrape websites for new data or access APIs regularly These were the services in mind, all out of US-East-1 (Virginia): EC2 instances are pretty cheap. You can run a t3a.nano for about $3.38 a month, or a t3a.micro for about double that for $6.77. The more things can run on one of these instances, the better. Lambdas also don't really add up to much if they are scheduled jobs that do not consume large amounts of memory or computing. The cost of a Lambda run as pa...

caelumvox - building on a cloud

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