Developer

An informal survey of my application developer friends revealed four main types of motivations driving developers. These four types of motivations are represented in this diagram: Individual developers can be motivated more or less altruistically. Individual developers can also be focused on the external manifestations of success - such as appreciative customers - or on the internal manifestations - such as more power or money. The diagram above is not a judgement of “better” or “worse” motivations - it is simply meant to capture two personality factors and their expression among individual developers. Also note that developers may have different motivations at different times, or even simultaneously in combination. ...

You’re a developer writing applications that use the cloud. Your code manipulates cloud resources, creating and destroying VMs, defining storage and networking, and gluing these resources together to create the infrastructure upon which your application runs. You use an API to perform these cloud operations - and this API is specific to the programming language and to the cloud provider you’re using: for example, for Java EC2 applications you’d use typica, for Python EC2 applications you’d use boto, etc. But what’s happening under the hood, when you call these APIs? How do these libraries communicate with the cloud? What language does the cloud speak? ...

Here you will find practical tips for developers who are using cloud computing. This is me on the Amazon Web Services EC2 support forum, where I’m a frequent poster answering questions and sharing practical advice based on my experience. My nickname there used to be “shl0m0”; you might see that reference in older posts. My experience includes more than 15 years of software development and software architecture. I’ve been building cloud-computing-based applications for clients (including my own company MyDrifts, where I am CTO and co-founder) since 2007.