A year and a half later, I finally have another post on my blog! Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:

Lots of school

2018 was the year of school for me, working the whole year on a masters program. I took some awesome courses:

  • Machine Learning
  • Object Recognition
  • Deep Learning

I learned a ton about Computer Vision and Machine Learning, which were two fields I didn’t know much about before. It was a pretty cool feeling to go from knowing nothing about a topic to being able to read the latest research papers and understand (some of) them.

Unfortunately life intervened and I’ve had to put my schooling on hold until some distant time in the future. In the meantime, I plan to continue the never-ending process of learning on my own.

My next project idea

I worked on the Handel tool at BYU and wrote about it in a previous blog post. I really enjoyed building that tool but haven’t really done anything significant in that area for the last year or so.

Lately I’ve been formulating my ideas for the “next version” of Handel. This one will be called Thunderhead. In some ways it’s a continuation of many of the design goals of Handel, but also with some key differences. The main one is that I want this tool to work directly in existing CloudFormation templates this time. It should enhance your usage of CloudFormation and increase your productivity in writing templates, and should allow you to use as much or little of it as you want.

So how does this relate to the upcoming AWS CDK? Well, it frankly will have a lot of similarities. The main difference is that I want to keep you writing in CloudFormation, whereas the CDK wants you to build your infrastructure in code.

Knowing me and my other life obligations, it probably won’t get built. But I figure it will be fun and I plan to use it as my opportunity to learn Golang.