On March 4th, 2025, I woke up thinking it was just another Tuesday morning. Like many people, I started my day by making a cup of coffee and scrolling through social media. But this day was different because it was the AWS Community Builder acceptanc...
TL;DR
For the Hashnode AI For Tomorrow Hackathon, I launched CongressGPT to help us finally understand what Congress is actually doing.
CongressGPT lets users have natural language conversations with the latest bills from the United States House of R...
I've come across a fun website feature that has been appearing mainly on developers' personal sites: a Guestbook page where users can sign in and leave a message. This somewhat reminds me of the old Facebook wall from the 2000s which I admit I miss v...
TL;DR
For the Hashnode APIs Hackathon, I launched hashnode-next, a beautifully simple Hashnode starter kit powered by Next.js and shadcn/ui. Hashnode-next is the fastest way to go headless with Hashnode, enabling you to migrate your blog with just on...
As a web developer, it's important to understand and effectively use meta tags to enhance your website's SEO, social media presence, and overall user experience. Below are the top 7 SEO and social media-related meta tags that you should ensure are pa...
TL;DR 📚
For the Supabase Launchweek X Hackathon, I launched supajournal.app, an AI-powered journal that features statistics tracking and AI-generated writing prompts.
Intro 👋
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Journaling...
Alright, here's the scenario: You're a front-end developer who was just given a stunning custom font from your designers, and they're incredibly excited about it. They want to use it as soon as possible. However, you're only familiar with using fonts...
About 18 months ago I joined Croissant as Director of Engineering to help change the way we think about shopping. The stuff you buy has value beyond the point of purchase and Croissant's Guaranteed Buybacks ensure that your purchases retain their wor...
In this article, we explore 7 useful AWS CLI commands for managing S3 buckets, including checking bucket size, listing objects with specific extensions, finding the largest files, listing objects from a specific date, listing objects with a specific ...
Vercel rolled out native support for Bun 1.0 just 72 hours after its launch. That's the kind of speed that got me excited to switch my new Astro project, BullyBarks, over to Bun 1.0.
In this blog post, we're going to walk through a step-by-step guide...
The much-awaited JavaScript Swiss Army knife, Bun, has finally released its 1.0 version, and it's a game-changer. If you're new to the scene, Bun serves as an all-in-one JavaScript runtime and toolkit, engineered for blazing speed. It comes complete ...
The developer community has been set abuzz by DHH's recent Twitter announcement: Turbo 8 will not be using TypeScript. This has reignited a classic debate among developers—TypeScript or JavaScript?
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1699427078586716327
...
Introduction
AWS provides a wide range of services that, when combined, can produce powerful results. One such combination is the direct integration of API Gateway with Kinesis, although it comes with its own set of challenges. In this post, we will ...
Introduction
For many years, I had heard about the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, but I never took the time to dive deeper into its teachings. That is, until the Summer of 2022, when I attended Michael McGill's Practical Stoicism online course. From...
TL;DR 📚
I've launched https://fitgpt.xyz, which offers an AI-powered Fitness Coach capable of creating specialized workout routines and personalized meal plans tailored to your current fitness level and future goals.
Intro 👋
Are you feeling bored w...
I just picked up a new MacBook Pro M1 and decided to take this opportunity to document all of the various applications that I use on a daily basis.
Brave
My go to browser for the past year has been Brave. As a web developer, it offers me everything t...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK and TypeScript to build a Lambda Function that triggers a CloudWatch Alarm that sends an email when an invocation error occurs.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few ...
TL;DR
My submission for the Hasura X Hashnode Hackathon is Petsura.
Help pets find their forever homes! Quickly scroll your feed of adoptable fluffs and share on Twitter, send an email to the foster, or open the pet directly in Petfinder
Petsura ...
TL;DR
My submission for the Hashnode/Netlify hackathon is Hashnode Roulette.
Make your hashnode feed wonderful. Quickly find new stories and authors to follow using simple mobile gestures.
Hashnode Roulette is powered by the Netlify platform, built ...
I was recently interviewed by Elise Greve of AWS about how we scaled Credit Genie from MVP to a full-scale platform with over 20 AWS Amplify applications. You can find the original article here. In this post I want to expand on some of the topics cov...
In this post, we are going to learn how to add external links and blog series links to the Hashnode navbar.
Adding custom navbar links to your blog's home page is a great way to direct your readers to all of your other work!
Let's take a look! 👇
F...
I've consistently been creating software development content through my blog and Twitter for a year. This week, I want to pause the technical posts and reflect on my content creation process and what I've learned with the hope that it resonates with ...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK to build an AWS Lambda Function that triggers from an AWS Kinesis Stream.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few commands to set up our CDK app.
mkdir how-to-trigger-l...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK to build an AWS Lambda Function that is triggered from an AWS SQS message.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few commands to set up our CDK app.
mkdir how-to-trigger-...
I recently spent time polishing the mobile responsiveness for my personal site, https://alexkates.dev, and I wanted to add a little animation flair to some empty space next to my Hero introduction.
👋 TL;DR 👋
I made the waving hand emoji actually w...
Extreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology that promotes communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect in order to create higher quality software and maximize the quality of life for developers.
The following resource ...
Ever try to use test-driven development when working with Luxon's DateTime.now() method and need to use the expected current timestamp in your business logic?
In this post, we are going to look at why business logic that depends on the current date a...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK to build an AWS Lambda Function that triggers an AWS SNS message.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few commands to set up our CDK app.
mkdir how-to-trigger-lambda-fr...
It's never been easier to start your own blog. Platforms like Hashnode have made it easier than ever to create content. But with so many blogs out there, what can you do to make yours stand out?
In this post, I'll break down 5 Hashnode features that ...
TL;DR
I built a Wordle Clone using Next.js, TailwindCSS, and TypeScript.
Source code at https://github.com/alexkates/wordlol
Running at https://wordlol.vercel.app/
Introduction
Over the past few months, Wordle has nearly consumed all of our Twitte...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK to build an AWS Lambda Function that is triggered from an AWS S3 Put request.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few commands to set up our CDK app.
mkdir how-to-trigg...
In this post, we are going to use the AWS CDK to build an AWS Lambda Function that triggers from DynamoDB Stream Events.
All of the code can be found in this repository.
Setup
We need to run a few commands to set up our CDK app.
mkdir how-to-trigger-...