Creatives and businesses depend on programmers to fulfil their visions. The problem? Programmers are scarce. There are 230,000 unfilled jobs for programmers in the U.S. alone, and more than 90 percent of the gap is outside Silicon Valley. And, when the vast majority of the world’s great software talent resides in the halls of tech juggernauts — like Google, Amazon and Facebook — giving them an embarrassment of riches, the rest of the world is left behind.

Automatically detect network failures and reconnect with AutoSSH. This tip lets you create a persistent connection between two servers, or between your desktop and server, and have it automatically re-connect.

You can quickly and efficiently use SSH to safely access data in your remote MySQL RDS data stores with just a single command. This tip not only enables you to access your remote server as if it was local and take advantage of local tools, but also modify data remotely, download MySQL backups, and do it all securely, through an SSH encrypted connection.

You can quickly and efficiently use SSH to safely access data in your remote Redis Elasticache data stores with just a single command. This tip not only enables you to access your remote server as if it was local and take advantage of local tools, but also modify data remotely, download Redis data, and do it all securely, through an SSH encrypted connection.

You can quickly and efficiently use SSH to safely access data in your remote Memcache Elasticache data stores with just a single command. This tip not only enables you to access your remote server as if it was local and take advantage of local tools, but also modify data remotely, download Memcache data, and do it all securely, through an SSH encrypted connection.

One of the biggest responsibilities of system administrators and DevOps professionals is ensuring networks are always functioning properly. Network configuration management used to be a simple task. Watch resource usage and make the appropriate tweaks when the occasional traffic spike occurred. Since then, the rise of agile principles within the DevOps field has required system administrators to adapt to rapid shifts in their field.

I was recently doing some work related to AWS Cognito, which I wasn’t previously familiar with, and it turns out to be pretty interesting. Stackery has a cloud-based app for building and deploying serverless applications, and we use Cognito for our own authentication. The thing I was trying to do was hard to figure out but easy once I figured it out, so I’ll include some code snippets related to my specific use case.

If you’ve dealt with Lambda functions you may have run across the RequestEntityTooLargeException - * byte payload is too large for the Event invocation type (limit 131072 bytes) AWS Lambda exception that occurs when a function is invoked with too large of a payload. Current AWS Lambda limits are set at 6 MB for synchronous/RequestResponse invocations, and 128 K for asynchronous/Event invocations.