AWS Certification Meetup & Head of Innovation

Really excited for the AWS summit that’s coming up in the next 2 days, I went to the certification appreciation event at the all hands brewhouse in Darling Harbour. I thought at the least it will be some decent free food and drinks… but I was pleasant surprised!

Oliver, the AWS Head of Emerging Technologies AP was there to give a brief preso about machine learning and AI, which was in itself interesting – but I had an equally long talk to him to delve deeper into this stuff and how it’s going to apply to web applications. His takeaway was that machine learning was going to become the new norm, whereby it will be embedded in all new software because of so many opportunities that it has to add value.

We also talked about AWS translate (which was released about a week ago) and some principles surrounding AI translations, where it’s at, and where it’s going. Overall, an amazingly interesting chance to talk to someone who’s clearly very smart. Not often you get the chance to do that after work over a beer!

Big thanks to AWS for flying over these brilliant individuals to Sydney for a few days.

VueJS Sydney Meetup – so much fun!

Went to my first Vue.js meetup today. I have to say, it was great fun, and both talks were amazing. Special kudos to the Ukranian guy, the entire talk was super funny (as well as useful) !

Me and my colleague topped the scoreboard for the pokemon demo progressive app.

Chrome 56 : Gamechanger for SSL

If your website has any forms related to payment or login, Google Chrome will start to present a warning to it’s users when they browse the website.

This is quite a game-changer, because the traditional rule-of-thumb is that you should use SSL when payment details are accepted, but not necessarily for any other reason (this is for your run-of-the-mill sites of course).

This might have been an unprecedented inconvenience for a huge amount of website maintainers and a huge boon for SSL sellers – however luckily Lets Encrypt has come onto the scene recently, and has now matured to a point where it’s proven to be highly reliable and robust.

I’m using it for most of my websites which do require any sort of SSL (such as this very blog!), and I highly recommend everyone who doesn’t use SSL, and is worried about the implications of this, to start using Lets Encrypt.