I regularly see questions related to the various bits of terminology surrounding DynamoDB. Specifically, questions always come up related to Primary Keys, Partition Keys, Sort Keys, and a bunch of the other names and types of each of them. I wanted to do my best to describe what each of these terms means and how they relate to one another.

I’ll assume a little bit of DynamoDB knowledge going into this post. If you’d like to dive into this yourself I’d suggest getting started with the DynamoDB Developer Guide. So let’s get started breaking apart all the jargon involved with AWS’s Managed NoSQL offering.

Have you ever tried to do something with CloudFormation but just needed a little something more to get the job done? In those cases I’ve started using CloudFormation custom resources. These resources essentially allow you to extend the use of CloudFormation templates whenever you create, update or delete a stack.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you could use these custom resources to provision your DynamoDB tables with some data. This can be useful if you’d like to run additional testing on your AWS environment that requires actual data inside of the environment.

Are you interested in learning how to create your own Serverless chatbots with AWS services like Lex and Lambda? Great news! I just launched a course that’s perfect for you. You’ll build your own alerting chatbot on AWS and integrate it into a Slack organization. Here’s an example of the bot in action inside Slack:

Want to know more?

Here’s me (actually on camera!) talking about the course:

I’d like to introduce to you a new advanced analytics tool for site traffic - Nandolytics.

Nandolytics is a highly-advanced one-of-a-kind analytics service that’s going to change the world through uniquely variable analysis in a market of established and reliable vendors for analytics services.

A few lucky visitors can have access to a demo of how I built this service. Find out if you’re one of them by clicking the button below.

For Valentine’s Day this year I wanted to get a nice gift for a special someone. So I decided to buy some tickets for a dinner and show. Just one problem, the site I was looking at ran out of tickets for currently scheduled shows. When I called the restaurant they told me to check the website - they were going to add more tickets at a later time.

But I didn’t want to constantly check the page to see if new times and dates were added, so I wrote a new project called Ticket Owl to do it for me.