Author: Jeff Barr

I entered college in the fall of 1978. The Computer Science department at Montgomery College was built around a powerful (for its time) IBM 370/168 mainframe. I quickly learned how to use the keypunch machine to prepare my card decks, prefacing the actual code with some cryptic Job Control Language (JCL) statements that set the […]

My colleague Georgie Mathews wrote the guest post below to introduce you to Amazon Pinpoint, a new service that helps you to measure and improve user engagement for your mobile apps. — Jeff; Our mobile customers have told us how expensive it can get to acquire new users for their apps. Then there is the […]

The online world can be an unfriendly place! As soon as you put a web site online, it can become the target of many different types of attacks, all aimed at causing trouble and taking the site offline. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are one very common trouble spot. They draw on compromised resources all […]

Developers typically have to set up and operate a shared build server to run continuous integration builds and tests on their source code changes. Because of the maintenance overhead, many developers avoid that and just run builds on their local machines, often leading to situations where code that works for one developer does not work […]

From what I can tell, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Grace Hopper was the first person to apply the term debugging to the process of identifying and removing errors from programs. While I have never had to extract an actual bug from a computer, I did spend plenty of time debugging assembly language programs early […]

Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades.  On the business side, adding new […]

A I was preparing to write this blog post I went back and read the post I wrote when we launched AWS Snowball last year (AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances) and then cataloged all of the updates that we have made since then. To recap, Snowball started […]

Computing and data processing within the confines of a data center or office is easy. You can generally count on good connectivity and a steady supply of electricity, and you have access to as much on-premises or cloud-based storage and compute power as you need. The situation is much different out in the real world. […]