Posts in Category: Programming

NodeJS Garden Bench

The need

Plants keeping warm

My wife wanted to start her own seeds this year but here in Maine, you have to do that inside and also make sure you keep the right temperature during the day and night. #RaspberryPiToTheRescue !!

Took a bunch of scrap pieces of wood that I had to make the bench itself so it doesn’t look pretty but it works. We just covered it with some painter’s drop-cloths to hold the heat.

Modified Power Wheels

Backstory

Showing the wires

Back in 2016, we were about to bring home our new daughter from India. She has been diagnosed with Caudal Regression Syndrome. In her case, she is actually missing her legs. So when we saw that Power Wheels was about to release their new “Wild Thing” model, we thought it would be great for her to be able to play in the yard with the kids. Of course, the price wasn’t great at the time and we ended up forgetting about it.

Debugging a Lambda with VSCode

Writing code for the cloud is great! So many positives that it just makes sense. The biggest downside with some is debugging your code….it gets tricky making a change, deploy, test then dig through your logs. Of course this can be automated but still get tiresome. With AWS enhancing their SAM (Serverless Application Model), it is now possible to actually run your lambdas locally within a docker container and have your IDE’s debugger attach. There are plenty of tools/plugins to utilize this (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio…full list here) but I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Code. So let’s take a deeper dive in how to debug our java lambda line by line with VSCode!