Last week, I spent Thursday listening to sessions from the AWS conference. There were so many amazing highlights, from sessions like “How to Build a Serverless Startup from Scratch in Just 30 Minutes,” that covering them all would get out of hand. However, within the keynote address there were a few key concepts that, as a young developer, really hit home for me.
Building Applications With Microservices
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this approach to development played a huge role in Amazon’s growth. Their focus on creating modular functionality that multiple parts of their company (and now we, as developers) can draw on has allowed them to scale rapidly. I didn’t understand modular development during my coding boot camp—I was too busy trying to keep my head above the water. But in hindsight, and after taking Computer Science 101 through edX, I wish that this foundational concept had been emphasized throughout my initial training.
“Design to Retire”
This is a concept that is probably a little out of my depth, since I don’t have the experience of working with data migration, etc. However, with the rapid rate of technological development and the exponentially increasing amounts of data that companies need to process and store, I think that considering future expansion or retirement is crucial for all developers. That probably seems like an obvious statement, but for someone like me, who has only recently gotten my “sea legs” under me, it was great to have someone remind me that development is a constantly-evolving field. That’s something I love about this work: I’m constantly learning, and so is everyone around me. But the other side of this evolution is that, as developers, we must do our jobs with the future (and its impact on our applications) in mind.
“Security Is Everyone’s Job”
Oh boy. May I tell you that this quote feels like an amazing confirmation of something I felt throughout my coding boot camp (and that I often see my students feeling)? Many coding boot camps are paced at such a break neck speed that there is little time to focus on how or why things work. One of the most enjoyable things for me since my boot camp has been unraveling these mysteries. Many foundational concepts (like the difference between http and https) were passed over to pack in more technologies. And when it came to implementing authentication in your applications? Well, just use someone else’s package and rely on it to protect your app.
This philosophy didn’t settle well with me. I am all for working smarter, not harder, but I wanted to understand how these crucial elements of an application actually worked, as well as the many other elements of application security. I haven’t ever heard anyone say, “Security is everyone’s job,” but now that I have, I feel even more motivated to identify and fill in gaps in my own knowledge.
I know that I’ll be returning to the on-demand versions of many of the sessions I saw, and I can’t wait to implement some of the AWS services in my applications. What were your favorite sessions?
