I frequently find myself switching between AWS profiles, especially when I’m home from work switching between side projects on different AWS accounts. I got tired of opening and editing my credentials file manually so I wrote a Python script and a Bash function to do it for me. You can use it too!

Meet Sparrow - a Twitter bot shell that makes it easier to create interesting automated accounts. In this post I’ll show you how to make a simple automated Twitter bot on AWS using Sparrow and AWS Lambda. Better yet, it’s all free!

This post was originally appeared on the Pluralsight Blog on February 28, 2017. Be sure to check out my Pluralsight course that can introduce you to AWS Lambda!

Maintaining data warehouses can be a difficult undertaking for any organization. Not only do you have to establish processes and procedures for regularly loading flowing data, you also have to ensure you’re doing it in a way that’s resistant to failure and future errors. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at some of the biggest challenges of maintaining large scale data warehouses, and how AWS Lambda can help.

A few days ago I needed to test a Lambda function build script for my recent Pluralsight course on a Windows machine. One of my course viewers notices that the bash build script I’d written for unix environments was incompatible with Windows bash. Because of this I needed to write a custom .bat script for windows environments. Only one problem, I don’t own a Windows machine, and I don’t want to.

Recently I was trying to use the psycopg2 libraries for Python in combination with AWS Lambda. My first hint that this was probably overkill was that the function package, when zipped, started exceeding 50MB. AWS console errors quickly reminded me that 50MB is the size limit for Lambda packages.