What is an array

An array is a grouping of the same typed values in computer memory. In Java, the data stored in an array can be a primitive or an object. As a quick refresher, primitive data types in Java are byte, short, int, long, float, double, or character. When storing primitives in an array Java stores these in adjacent blocks of memory. An element is an individual value in an array. The index is the location of an element in the array.

Creating an array

In Java, there are two ways to create an array. …

What is AWS X-Ray?

X-ray is AWS’s distributed tracing system. What the hell is a distributed tracing system? That means that you can trace requests as they travel through your architecture. Distributed tracing allows you to find any bottlenecks that may exist in your application flow. When working in a micro-service world distributed tracing is a powerful tool that allows developers, operations, architects, and managers to see the big picture view of the application. Splunk provides a great explanation of distributed tracing.

X-Ray is AWS’s distributed tracing solution. It allows users to trace requests through an application then view and filter information from that…

AWS Solutions Architect Study Guide

I achieved my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification back in September of 2020. You can check out my badge here. I wrote about my experience on Medium and my blog but wanted to share my actual study guide so that others can get certified just like me. I’d recommend checking out my first post on getting AWS Solutions Architect certified to decide if you’re ready to commit to studying. The test isn’t easy and there are no quick paths, getting certified requires 80–120 hours of studying and even then there’s no guarantee you’ll pass. I spent 7 months studying…

What is Angular?

Taken from the Angular docs, “Angular is a framework and platform for building single-page apps”. It is one of the big three frontend frameworks along with React and Vue. Angular consists of a few core concepts: Modules, Components, and Services. Each of these core concepts has a few concepts of its own. Modules have root modules and feature modules. Components have root components, templates, views, data binding, directives, and pipes. Services have providers and use dependency injection. This may seem like a lot because it is. …

What is Spring?

Spring is a lightweight framework for Java often used in, but not limited to, enterprise development. Spring is modular, meaning you only need to pull in the packages you use. Spring has several groups of modules Core, Web, Data Access, and Miscellaneous. Spring enables inversion of control(IoC) by using dependency injection(DI), this decouples the code and makes testing easier. The ease of DI is often seen as the biggest benefit of using Spring. Spring has some framework-specific terms, one of the most common terms used is a bean.

What is a Spring Bean?

Containers

Before learning about beans let’s look at the containers that use them…

Get certified in X months articles are crap

Last month I attained my AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification(CSAA). It’s the first certification of my IT career and I’ve learned a lot from the whole experience. When researching the certification I came across a ton of articles talking about how to get it in a few months. I bought into these articles and began my studying thinking that I would finish in three months tops. What I’ve learned is that those articles are hyper misleading. Can you get your CSAA in a month or two? Sure, but don’t expect to do anything outside of work and study. I want…

Let’s start the the high level. Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, offers a super durable, scalable storage solution. It offers 99.999999999% durability, also known as eleven 9’s. This means that once every 10,000 years you would lose some data in S3. All S3 tiers offer encryption at rest and the ability to move data to different storage classes using lifecycle policies. There are seven flavors of S3. Standard, Standard-Infrequently Accessed, Intelligent Tiering, One Zone-Infrequently Accessed, Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive.

Standard

This is your most expensive S3 option. The key thing to remember about S3 standard is that…

To write this post means that I’ve now spent three years in software development. Time flies and acknowledging that is scary. It feels like the other day when I walked into my first computer science class when it has now been ten years. Each year I’ve told myself I should write one of these “what I’ve learned articles”. Well this is the year, year three. My goal with this series is to revisit this post each year. I plan to add one more lesson I’ve learned with each year. …