Howdy World

Howdy, world!

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m CJ [LinkedIn], a simple fella who enjoys technology and helping people. Today, I do that by supporting the development of certification exams for Amazon Web Services. With 15-plus years in the IT industry, I’ve worked at small and large companies, optimized workflows, built solutions, mentored up-and-coming talent, and helped senior leaders.

I’ve reached this point through God’s grace, perseverance, luck, and a somewhat unhealthy tendency to blur the lines between work and play. I have experienced many failures and felt inadequate numerous times, and sometimes I still do. Now, I enjoy helping others see that it’s okay to fail and to find growth in those moments.

AWS Service Catalog - Concept Introduction

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

So, what’s this Service Catalog thing? Well, let’s visit that before we get into the technical details.

Example: Restaurants and made to order meals #

Ever used a menu at a restaurant? Then, you’ve used a Service Catalog, conceptually, before!

Restaurants have a generalized workflow.

Customers are seated
Wait-staff takes customers’ order
Wait-staff passes customer order to the Kitchen-staff
Kitchen-staff prioritizes and cooks orders
Kitchen-staff hands-off customer cooked meal to wait-staff
Wait-staff delivers the order to the customer

In this generalized workflow, we have both an internal and external use-case for a “Service Catalog” for the business.

AWS CDK Elastic Beanstalk Examples

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

AWS CDK enables you to codify infrastructure within a variety of programming languages to build reusable constructs that generate large amounts of AWS CloudFormation. The ratio of effort input vs value output is astounding.

In this repository is a public learning effort gradually ramping up toward full SDLC of an application backed by AWS ElasticBeanstalk.

Examples #

01 - Creating an Application #

AWS Elastic Beanstalk has a concept of an Application that houses multiple environments. Here, we create that Application.

From AWS Elastic Beanstalk to AWS EKS

Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From AWS Elastic Beanstalk to AWS EKS #

Links #

Overview #

What could it look like to experiment with an existing application running on AWS ElasticBeanstalk over to AWS EKS using modern tools?

Cooking my brand like homemade spaghetti

Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy #

Personal branding isn’t something I’ve thought much about in the past. I’m one that believes consistent actions speak for themselves. But with an upcoming commitment to speak at, it dawned on me that I have no consolidated place for folks to go!

Throwing spaghetti at the wall #

Some call this generating a “word cloud” or “mind mapping” to organically generate a consolidated idea from throwing words out there and connecting them to see what can stick.

Planting seeds for a culture of learning - starting DevBookClub

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Original post on Medium brought here for posterity. I’ve since moved to another company, and the DevBookClub started grew into a Louisville meetup - Dev Book Club by a fellow organizer.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest your reap but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

The idea that created a hunger to explore #

I have always been plagued with a curious mind, but it wasn’t until some time ago that I developed an interest in trying to share in that curiosity with others. I attribute that to the perspective gained by mentoring for an organization teaching others involving my given craft (CodeLouisville).

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m CJ [LinkedIn], a simple fella who enjoys technology and helping people.

Today, I do that by supporting the development of certification exams for Amazon Web Services. With 15-plus years in the IT industry, I’ve worked at small and large companies, optimized workflows, built solutions, mentored up-and-coming talent, and helped senior leaders.

Now I’m exploring what it looks like to share written content online.

Disclaimer: These articles and opinions are my own and not those of my employers.