For the first installment of my Twenty Projects in Twenty Days series I wanted to take a look back at Tech Pay Rates. I started this project around the same time I started looking for fulltime work about a year ago and I think it’s a classic example of an Minimum Viable Project (not product, as I’m not selling anything here!).

The goal of the project was to help promote the trend of disclosing industry information surrounding salary in order to promote pay transparency and pay equity. To do this, I built a project to let workers post their salary information and search through other salaries. If you’d like a look, go ahead and check out Tech Pay Rates. Full disclosure, it’s been a while since I’ve advertised for it so the salaries are out of date - feel free to add your own!

So let’s look at how it was put together.

This May, I’ll be sharing 20 different starter projects that I’ve built using different AWS services, Serverless technologies, Python, Node.js and more! If you’d like to get these projects in your inbox, you can sign up for my mailing list here.

After signing up, you’ll get blog posts delivered to your inbox with the following:

• Every project’s source code
• An accompanying blog post tutorial for the project
• Access to a live version of the project (if one exists)
• A free 30-day trial to all of my Pluralsight.com courses (reply to the first welcome email and I’ll send a unique trial code your way)

You can check back on this blog post throughout the month - I’ll update it with links to everything. Now let’s take a look at the calendar of different projects you can expect to see this month!

I recently wrote about using Node.js and the AWS SDK for JavaScript to get data from DynamoDB. In this post, I’ll take you through how to do the same thing with Python and Boto3! We’ll use both a DynamoDB client and a DynamoDB table resource in order to do many of the same read operations on the DynamoDB table. I hope this helps serve as a reference for you whenever you need to query DynamoDB with Python.

I frequently see people looking for simple examples of how to use one of AWS' SDKs to do simple operations on DynamoDB and other services. So I thought it was about time we had a few examples to work from that weren’t completely overwhelming. In this post, I’ll show you a few ways to use the AWS SDK for JavaScript to get data out of a DynamoDB table. I hope these will serve as a decent reference for many basic operations you might need to take to read information from your DynamoDB tables!

So you’ve developed a snazzy new Serverless API on AWS and everything is going great. That is until you realize that there might eventually be production data behind it that you don’t want someone with Postman and 20 minutes on their hands to have access to. That’s where Lambda Authorizers come in. They’re a way to make sure that your API will only respond to authorized callers. Let’s look at how to implement authorizers for ourselves using an example application called Serverless Jams - where we vote on our favorite coding-related music.