The blog is back! 2024 is the year that I take my writing more seriously so that I can contribute more effectively to the community.

I love writing code and hacking on open source projects. But code can be a bit impenetrable for the people unfamiliar with the problem it solves.

So this year I want to spend more time writing articles to support and explain the open source work that I do and to highlight interesting problems that I solve at work.

Just today someone contacted me to ask for advice about AppSync and DynamoDB. It’s not my speciality, so I recommended other AWS Community Builders to contact to ask for advice based on what they have written about those topics:

  • Benoît Bouré has a whole AppSync series on his blog
  • Johannes Koch published a tutorial to build a serverless app using AppSync and DynamoDB
  • Seth Orell writes about why his first pick for a database is DynamoDB
  • Robert J Berger’s Omnyway stack uses Amplify

Although I’ve not worked directly with any of them yet, I was able to recommend them based on their writing. I want people to be able to do the same for me! So I need to start writing again so that people can see what problems I like to work on and what I can help them with.

Why haven’t I published more? I take a lot of technical notes at work, notes that I could adapt into a lot of technical articles. But it would take time to generalize from confidential customer data and use cases or redact other things I cannot share publicly.

10 years ago I was single and more energetic and so I had time explore miscellaneous topics on my old blog. My favorite article from my previous blogging life is Now I’m married with dogs and so I have to manage my time more carefully.

This year I hope to involve my customers in the learning-in-public process and work with them to write about the problems we solve in a way that they are proud of sharing online, either on my own blog or on their company blog if they have one.

Another reason that seems more silly but did psychologically block me was the difficulty of knowing who reads what I write. My block has no comments, and the Amplify Hosting backend I use has no built-in analytics.

Amplify’s missing analytics almost made me tear up the architecture and start again. But last weekend I hacked together a script that downloads the access logs and uses SQL to find the most requested pages, the top referrers, and other basic insights.

That analytics solution for Amplify Hosting will be the topic for the next article!

I’ll add comments too, using utteranc.es, a comment manager backed by GitHub issues. I using GitHub to host my code and manage my projects, so I’ll try it for comments too.

Hope to see you round here more often!