Recently I've been getting back into doing some algorithms coding challenge problems, and I really wanted to setup for myself a nice, comfortable coding environment that I could be proud of and that really followed the TDD principles of Uncle Ben, Ken Beck, and all the other gurus. Anyway, this is a guide for setting up simple, barebones TypeScript node.js projects for TDD. I'll show you how to set up a brand new node project, how to make your project a "typescript project", how to add mocha and chai in watch mode, and finally how to see your test results in a nice code coverage report. It's a lot I know, so let's dive into it!

Recently I have been working on some AWS Lambda functions, and I am using the serverless framework to help build and deploy them. However, once I wanted to have multiple stages with different environment variables I was not sure the best way to do it. Here are some things I tried and the command I ended up going with in the end. 

Recently I've been doing a lot of work with MongoDB, an I've definitely been enjoying it! I work primarily in NodeJS and front-end JavaScript, and the reason why I love mongo so much is that you can basically just take an object and drop it directly into your database! Then when you read the value, it's already nicely in an object for you!

Welp, we're going to look at some nodejs code for and aws lambda function here, and specifically the code will be invoking a different lambda function. Although there are a few ways to do this, I really wanted to find a way of chaining lambdas such that they don't have to wait for the one one they just called to finish. It's a bit confusing, but maybe with some example you'll understand what I mean. Well then let's dive right in!

Once upon a time I was the serverless guy at a startup company building lambda functions. My function went into production at 128mb of memory and a timeout of 3 seconds. Because of game had "live races" we would see big spikes in traffic at certain times of the day, and unfortunately I would also see big spikes in the number of errors in the CloudWatch metrics charts... My boss even opened the website during the high volume event and noticed requests to the lambda returning 400 error. In the cloudwatch logs I could norrow down the logs to just the high volume time and see many timeout errors happening during this period. Needless to say, this is not a good look, and you don't want it to happen to you (especially you, future Jim)!