Blog - Begin

Begin Book Club Updates

We've lined up our next three book club meet-ups. Join us in March for The Coding Career Handbook with Shawn Wang, May for The JAMstack Book with Raymond Camden and Brian Rinaldi, and June for Modern Software Engineering with Dave Farley.

Simon MacDonald

read time 3 mins

Sanitizing Input

By this point in the pandemic, we are all tired of sanitizing our hands, but that doesn’t mean we should let our guard down when sanitizing user input. Don’t rely solely on client side validation as it can easily be bypassed.

Simon MacDonald

read time 4 mins

Do you really need a form library?

Filling out forms is one of the backbones of web applications, and there is a myriad of form libraries that help you manage this task but do you really need them?

Simon MacDonald

read time 7 mins

ClickOps is an Anti-pattern

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is touted as an industry-wide best practice, but why is the alternative called ClickOps, and what are its pain points?

Simon MacDonald

read time 3 mins

Building Functional Web Apps with MongoDB

In this tutorial, we'll use Begin to quickly develop a to-do list application. We'll use AWS Lambda as our serverless platform and MongoDB Atlas as our database provider.

Simon MacDonald

read time 11 mins

Building Functional Web Apps with MongoDB

The Boring Technology Checklist

Technologists love new technology—that new shiny thing. But, often, the promise of a new solution introduces new unforeseen problems creating unplanned challenges. Let's revisit what makes technology boring.

Brian Leroux

read time 6 mins

The DynamoDB Book: Begin Book Club

Read the transcript from our first ever book club meeting where we discuss The DynamoDB Book with the Author, Alex DeBrie.

Simon MacDonald

read time 55 mins

Using Auth0 to secure Architect application routes

Learn how to integrate Auth0 authentication with an Architect application.

Simon MacDonald

read time 14 mins

Using Auth0 to secure Architect application routes

Architect 9.5: welcomes ES Module support

Recently AWS Lambda released support for ES Modules and we decided so should we.

Simon MacDonald

read time 1 mins

Architect 9.5: welcomes ES Module support

Rebuilding my personal website: Getting Started

My website is super out of date so I decided to rebuild it using Begin. In this first part we'll setup a new project with a landing page.

Simon MacDonald

read time 10 mins

Rebuilding my personal website: Getting Started

Tools for testing Functional Web Apps

Tests should be proportionate to our cloud functions in scope and size. Fast and small, just like the services they're testing.

Taylor Beseda

read time 3 mins

Begin Book Club

We are starting a book club. We love to read at Begin! Our daily stand-up calls frequently include updates and recommendations on books we are reading, so we wanted to share that with our community.

Simon MacDonald

read time 2 mins

Fat Functions are an Anti-Pattern

The debate over whether to use a single-purpose function vs. a fat lambda continues to this day, and in this post, we hope to convince you that Fat Lambda is truly an anti-pattern.

Simon MacDonald

read time 6 mins

How-to: resize and transform images automatically without relying on 3rd party APIs

I got fed up with too many "A"s in my JAMstack and built an image processing plugin to eliminate one of them.

Ryan Bethel

read time 7 mins

How-to: resize and transform images automatically without relying on 3rd party APIs

Shopify Webhooks with Begin

Receive and respond to Shopify webhooks with a free Begin.com account. Leverage the power and scale of AWS Lambda without the laborious Amazon web console.

Taylor Beseda

read time 4 mins

Tale of the Tape: Highlight.js vs Shiki

One of the best things about JavaScript is the ecosystem, as there always seems to be a package that can be used to accomplish your task. However, one of the worst things about JavaScript is that there are often many packages that you can use to achieve the same task. It’s not always obvious which package is best. How do we know which one to use?

Simon MacDonald

read time 4 mins

Adding dark mode to the personal website template

Dark Mode is a popular feature of many websites. It helps to reduce eye strain by adjusting the brightness of the screen according to current lighting conditions. In this post, we will progressively enhance our personal website template to add dark mode functionality.

Simon MacDonald

read time 4 mins

Adding dark mode to the personal website template

Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

Architect users often ask for some way to avoid large surprise bills from AWS. The budget-watch plugin sets a cost limit for your app and temporarily shuts it down when the limit is reached. It is the first step to solving this problem for our community.

Ryan Bethel

read time 6 mins

Architect 8.4: say hello to Lambda tree shaking

One of the thing that sets OpenJS Architect apart from other serverless tools is its opinion that serverless apps work best when composed of many small, discrete Lambda cloud functions.

Ryan Block

read time 2 mins

Architect 8.4: say hello to Lambda tree shaking

Architect 8.3: custom file paths & much more

By popular demand: OpenJS Architect 8.3 (El Chupacabra) now supports custom file paths, custom Lambda templates, a fresh new local (and global) preferences file, and lots more!

Ryan Block

read time 2 mins

Architect 8.3: custom file paths & much more