I recently started working more with AWS Lambda functions , some of them with external dependencies, and I quickly ran into an issue where dependencies that are built on MacOS sometimes don't play nicely with Amazon Linux on Lambda. The solution, back in the early days of Lambda, was that you would have to spin up an EC2 box, and then build and zip up your dependencies there. Luckily, things are…

When I finished Life Saver it seemed obvious to host the downloads on S3, like the rest of the site. But I wanted to be able to track how many times it had been downloaded, and S3 doens't have this functionality built in. Coming from a traditional web background (Apache, cPanel, etc) I wasn't sure where to start, but luckily I saw a StackOverflow answer that pointed me toward S3stat . What's…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about what I did over the course of the week. Life Saver I released Life Saver v1.1 this weekend. It's a relatively small update that contains a lot of the work I mentioned previously on this blog: SpriteKit optimizations for performance gains, as well as a couple small bug fixes, and one new feature. The new feature is "random color preset…

Life Saver is an abstract macOS screensaver based on Conway's Game of Life . With a variety of settings and color schemes, Life Saver should satisfy designers and geeks alike. Download Life Saver v1.1 for macOS See what's new in version 1.1 on GitHub. Life Saver is free, open source software. If you like it, please star it on GitHub . If you'd like to know more about Life Saver's…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about what I did over the course of the week. This week was another fairly easy week, because I took a mini-vacation Langton's Ant (Map) Early this week I continued work on the Langton's Ant experiment I wrote about last week . I decided to keep running with the "landscape generator" idea and made some big changes. Namely, the use of Langton's ant…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about what I did over the course of the week. This week was WWDC, so there was a lot of excitement all over the internet about that, but I also learned some cool stuff outside of that later in the week. Langton's Ant Over the course of the week I was wrestling with the question of "what's next?". This seems a little silly because I have at least two…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about, well, what I did over the course of the week. I took it relatively easy on myself this week, so there's not a ton to talk about. Life Saver I promoted the release of Life Saver a little on Reddit (on r/iOSProgramming , r/Swift ) and on two Slack communities ( iOS Developers HQ , LA Design & Development ). Not a huge response in regards to…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about, well, what I did over the course of the week. I might write about programming or anything else tangentially related. Life Saver I completed my short term project that that I started work on last week and released it complete with a simple page here on amiantos.net and I fleshed out the readme on GitHub with the same stuff . The joke…

Hi! Welcome, this is my weekly post where I talk about, well, what I did over the course of the week. Life Saver After showing Aeon Garden at work I ended up talking about artificial life with a co-worker who'd asked if I'd ever heard of Conway's Game of Life . I had been kicking around the idea of creating a simple Game of Life implementation somehow, but all the Life apps on the app store are…

I've decided to try to set myself a weekly goal of writing about whatever I did or learned about this week, just to get into the habit of writing regularly again. I'm always working on something, so I figure I should be able to find something to say about it. Aeon Garden Screensaver I'm going to include something I did at the end of last week: I got screensaver support merged in ! It was really…

Since I was a kid I've been pretty intrigued by artificial life simulations. It started most predictably with Tamagotchi, but when I got a PC in the mid-90's I learned that there were people out there interested in making their own, more elaborate, versions of artificial life. One that's still available today is Gene Pool , and I remember one that consisted of a 3D modelled woman who wandered…

Allegedly someone named Emmert Wolf said or wrote, "A man is only as good as his tools". Now, no one seems to know who Emmert Wolf is or where he might have said this, but he probably lived sometime before the last 5 years because if he were alive today he'd probably know better and say something like, "an individual is only as good as their tools," instead. While the statement might only be…

This is a quick hit and run post on how I got my Gatsby site up and running on S3 and CloudFront with minimal fuss. The main perk to running a site this way is that it is very nearly free. Unless my blog gets a lot traffic, I assume I'll be paying at most $6.00 a year to host my blog. That's cheaper than I've ever hosted a site for, and the entirety of that charge is just paying for Route 53 to…

Hi! Welcome to my new blog. I don't really know what I am going to put here, because I haven't blogged in so long that I feel mostly like I have nothing worth saying. I wanted to learn some React, and Gatsby seemed like a cool way to use React as sort of a framework for building simple websites. I'm only in the beginning stages, but components seem like a very nice thing for web development, and…