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Now an AWS Certified Developer

A week ago, I achieved the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification, and decided to take the developer exam.

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I'm now an AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Given most of my projects utilise AWS, I recently started a journey to achieve a number of certifications on the AWS cloud platform.

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My cloud certification journey – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

I've been using cloud services in some capacity for a number of years, primarily Amazon Web Services.

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Vagrant Book: Second Edition

Web-based software projects are becoming increasingly complicated, with a range of dependencies, requirements and interlinking components. Swapping between projects which require different versions of the same software, becomes troublesome, and getting team members up and running on new projects becomes time-consuming.

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Accessing internal servers remotely

Over at Ground Six the development team each run a number of virtual machines hosting their development environment. We also have an internal ESXi server which hosts a number of projects and staging areas.

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Why re-invent the wheel?

As developers, it's sometimes tempting to reinvent the wheel. You need some code, a tool, an API, a CMS or framework that works in a specific way. You find tools out there that do most of what you want, but not quite everything. And so, we give in to temptation. Before you know it, you have spent more time reinventing things that you need just so that you can start developing your product - but you haven't yet started on the product!

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Perfecting digital ownership and facilitating team development

Over at Ground Six last week we put Own My IP online. This was our first product as a development team. Alongside this we have worked on some other projects, including ShareScribe, our first team Hack-Day and the redevelopment of a high-traffic news service - more on those another day.

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Nested Submodules in Git

I'm currently working on a project which has been split into a number of distinct parts, and as a result we have a number of separate Git repositories of code for the project. We decided to use submodules to manage these dependencies, and set it up so that the four repositories were nested, one inside the other, inside the other, inside the other.

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SalesJump Launched

Full Disclosure: I'm a full time member of the Ground Six team (more on that in a future post), so this review is *slightly* biased, however its a great milestone for us so I felt the need to share it.

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Processing CAN messages in PHP

The automotive industry makes extensive use of a standard called CAN bus, a Controller Area Network which allows the various components of a vehicle to talk to each other without the need for a host. Typically, messages sent on the CAN bus are short 16 character hexadecimal words, with an identifier associated with them. To get from these 16 character words to meaningful information you need two things: a CAN specification provided by the relevant component manufacturer, and a way to process the information and decode it as per the specification.

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