LocalStack

LocalStack I recently needed to be able to test a lambda function locally. Whilst its possible to do this in AWS, the feedback loop was frustratingly long. To speed this up, I decided to leverage LocalStack. This was a fairly interesting exercise so I thought I would share my notes around getting this set-up in the hope that it helps someone! You can find the example code referenced throughout this guide here....

February 11, 2024 · 8 min · Ashley Sykes

Integration Testing with a Redis cluster

Say what? A recent work project utilised the power of Amazon’s MemoryDB to build a distributed caching layer (if you wish to find out more about Amazon MemoryDB see here). Under the hood, MemoryDB effectively provides a Redis Cluster running in the cloud. The project in question is written primarily in Java and executes as a series of Lambda functions running within a couple of Step Functions. As part of some improvement work carried out on the project we abstracted any execution of Redis commands into a custom repository layer, built on top of the excellent Lettuce library....

January 7, 2023 · 7 min · Ashley Sykes

Testing through the layers

A pyramid scheme Most people may be familiar with the testing pyramid, a concept originally developed by Martin Cohn but popularised by Martin Fowler. For those that are not, it attempts to convey how tests should be distributed within a project - lots of fast, cheap and easy to write unit tests, thinning out (i.e. not duplicated at each layer) as we go further up the pyramid, ultimately to more complex, time consuming and potentially brittle automated GUI tests....

January 18, 2021 · 9 min · Ashley Sykes

Status Update

A Quick Status Update I know it’s been a long time since my last blog post aimed at providing Java users with an up-to-date guide on building GraphQL API’s with SpringBoot (if you missed it check it out here - shameless plug 😁). Anyway, this is just a quick status update to say that I’m still alive! Work has been hectic recently as I’ve been asked to undertake a rather large project....

October 21, 2019 · 1 min · Ashley Sykes

A guide to GraphQL in Java

GraphQL, MongoDB and Java: An introduction TLDR; Follow the guide below if you are interested in an up to date walkthrough on how to integrate GraphQL, MongoDB and Java - if not head over to my GitHub to view the code. I decided to create this article as although a lot of guides exist today they were either incomplete, irrelevant or out-dated. After struggling to decipher existing tutorials I thought I would contribute my findings back in hope someone would find them useful…...

May 31, 2019 · 8 min · Ashley Sykes