Amazon

Over the years, I have used AWS Route 53, CloudFront, and S3 to deploy single-page web apps (SPA). Most of the time the backend API is delivered alongside the web app. This has a lot of advantages: Eliminates CORS issues Provides superfast delivery of the web app via CloudFront’s CDN CloudFront may provide faster access to your API than connecting from the browser/app to an AWS region. This is unintuitive, but if the CloudFront edge node is closer to your browser, there will be less latency. [Read More]

I was at my wife’s holiday dinner about a month ago and a conversation came up about Google Home and Amazon “Alexa” (a.k.a “Echo”). Mind you, the rest of the people there are not as technically savvy as my wife and me. Just about everybody had an aversion to these devices. One person at the table said “Dan, they’re always listening right?” I said Google isn’t always listening. The device is listening for the “Okay Google” key phrase inside of the device, then sends what it hears after the key phrase to Google. [Read More]