Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an industry leading service for scalable and secure object storage!. There are so many use cases for S3 including; storage (photos, videos, documents etc.), backup/recovery and even static website hosting!​​

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

DynamoDB is Amazon’s managed NoSQL database service. This blog will be focusing on data retrieval and how it is critical to think about what your data will look like, to make an informed decision about your database design.

DynamoDB Scan Vs Query

When presenting AI solutions, the machine learning model can seem like a black box and sometimes people will want to understand more about what is going on behind the scenes. How can we find a way to break down and explain the model without going too far into model interpretation?

What-If I could explain my ML models better?

The Uprise festival is one of Europe’s leading Talent and Tech Festivals. This year the Uprise festival were running a 100Y Membership program. This membership is for the top 100 young innovators in the UK and Ireland.

Uprise2018 - Being a Top 100Y Member

Last week I boarded the train in the scorching heat and travelled to Dublin, to view the magnificent new Microsoft office and to take part in OpenHack, with one of my Kainos colleagues.

OpenHack unpack!

In this blog I walk through how to change an existing AWS::DynamoDB::Table to be an AWS::DynamoDB::GlobalTable without downtime and without the need to run a data migration script!

Convert an AWS DynamoDB table to global with zero downtime using CloudFormation

Last week I attended the AWS London Summit in the ExCel London.  The London Summit is an event hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) targeted at developers, IT professionals, and business leaders.

London Summit 2024 Round Up

In this blog, I’ll cover why I love Step Functions, the benefits they’ve brought me, and introduce some of the new features, discussing how they can impact future projects.

Elevating Orchestration: Navigating AWS Step Functions' Latest Features

A huge part of these conferences are the people that you meet and the community that you have around you. While there was such a huge range of announcements at re:Invent in terms of compute, serverless and AI this year, I wanted to release this blog more on the community aspect of the conference!

AWS re:Invent - Community Edition

Kinesis can be a valuable component in machine learning solutions, particularly in scenarios where real-time data processing and analysis are required. This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Data Streaming With Kinesis

Data Visualisations can play a number of different roles within Machine Learning projects. They can be a big part of the Data Exploration process to help find insights within the data, understand its structure and see any pattern. This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Data Visualisations

This blog explores the different Data Preparation services AWS has to offer. This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Data Preparation Services

When working on large Machine Learning projects, you need data. However, raw data is rarely in the ideal format for training models and so some form of data preparation is typically needed. This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Data Preparation Techniques

When working with machine learning you will need access to data and within AWS there are many different ways to store that data. Choosing the right storage method will depend on the type of the data you are storing, its volume and how quickly you need to access it! This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Data Storage

Data is all around us and is an essential part of Machine Learning. This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialist exam.

AWS ML Specialty Exam - Types of Data

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of Machine Learning theory and the AWS services examined on the AWS Machine Learning Specialty exam

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Study Notes

When working with AWS services I have been using Terraform as my Infra As Code. In the project I am currently working on I have a CI/CD pipeline for deploying project code using GitHub actions. However, I would now like to extend my pipeline to deploy any infrastructure changes when there are any.

Deploying Terraform using GitHub actions

Last week, I had the honour of being a guest of AWS for a Riot Games Valorant Championships experience in Los Angeles. I find the game tech sector extremely interesting, as a lot of advances in technology and innovation have originated from game development.

AWS X Riot Games Valorant Experience

As part of the AWS Community builder Program I have been selected to be a guest of Amazons at the Riot Games Valorant Championships in LA on the 24th August. Before I fly out I wanted to take a deeper look into the AWS and Riot Games partnership and see what technologies they are using and some of the problems they are solving.

AWS X Riot Games

As your project grows and user base expands, scaling up your compute resources becomes essential. In this blog I will explore the process of resizing AWS EC2 instances without incurring downtime and discuss some considerations to ensure a seamless transition.

Resizing EC2 instances without downtime

This week, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Athena Program, a women’s leadership workshop led by the inspirational Sandra Lee and hosted by Allstate Northern Ireland and Women In Tech.

The Power of Athena: Unleashing the Leader Within

When building media rich applications, that handle assets like images, audio or video — some of these assets may be publicly available, while some might be stored privately and only accessible by specific users.

Securely Accessing Private Files Within Your Client

Recently I have been working on a React app and have started adding end-to-end (E2E) tests using Cypress.io. I wanted to integrate these tests into our CI/CD pipeline so that every time someone on our team created a PR, pushed a commit to a PR, or merged code into the main branch, all of the tests would run automatically

Running Cypress E2E-tests in GitHub Actions

This is my second time returning to AWS re:invent. Last year I was fortunate enough to receive the All Builders Welcome grant to attend, which was provided by the AWS DE&I team aimed at individuals within their first 5 years of their careers. This year I got the pleasure of returning with my new employer Hamilton Robson and was afforded the opportunity to give a Dev Chat about the awesome work we are doing.

Speaking at AWS Re:Invent 2022

Another reinvent has come and gone and what a week it has been! With 6 hotels, 65,000+ attendees and over 3000 sessions, it can be hard to navigate the amount of content generated throughout the week.

AWS re:Invent 2022

Recently, in a side project I had my first interaction with containerised Lambdas. Reason being is that I’ve began working with a number of machine learning libraries and the dependencies started to become large.

Containerised Lambdas, Terraform & GitHub Actions

Over the last year at Hamilton Robson, we got a new business opportunity, to work with innovative tech to build a recruitment platform.​​ We identified several different user flows during our service design sessions and in this blog, I want to cover two of these scenarios and the different AWS services used to implement them.

How to win cloud and influence people

Today is the last day that I am at re:invent and what an incredible week it has been!

AWS re:Invent 2021- Day 4

Day 3 at the conference kicked off in a similar fashion to the previous days – coffee to fuel up for the first sessions in the morning!

AWS re:Invent 2021- Day 3

Day 2 at AWS re:invent started with a keynote session from AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. This was the first keynote session I attended at re:Invent and still can’t believe their was an opening act of a band playing at 8am before it started!

AWS re:Invent 2021 - Day 2

Wow, what a day! 3 hotels, 25,000+ steps and plenty of great technical discussions, today marks the first day of AWS re:Invent 2021.

AWS re:Invent 2021- Day 1

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Auto Scaling

AWS Auto Scaling

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS ECS, Fargate, EKS & ECR

AWS ECS, Fargate, EKS & ECR

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Route 53

AWS Route 53

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Active Directory

AWS Active Directory

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS EFS & FSx

AWS EFS & FSx

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS High Performance Computing (HPC)

AWS High Performance Computing (HPC)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Data Transfer

AWS Data Transfer

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS ENI, EN & EFA

AWS ENI, EN & EFA

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS SQS, SWF & SNS

AWS SQS, SWF & SNS

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Athena

AWS Athena

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Databases

AWS Databases

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Kinesis

AWS Kinesis

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Macie

AWS Macie

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS CloudFront

AWS CloudFront

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS CloudWatch Vs CloudTrail

AWS CloudWatch Vs CloudTrail

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB)

AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS KMS & Cloud HSM

AWS KMS & Cloud HSM

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. This blog covers AWS IAM & Billing

AWS IAM & Billing

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam.

AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Study Notes

When setting up a database such as DynamoDB it is important to choose a region that is closest to where your users are located in order to reduce latency for sending/retrieving data.

Dynamo DB Cross Region Migration

Recently, I have been wanting to up my game when it comes to analysing data — so I decided to use this as an opportunity to take AWS Athena for a whirl and see what it’s capable of.

Analysing Chocolate with Athena

At Bazaarvoice we ended January with a two day global internal company hackathon. Myself, Angela Lappin, Sorcha McNamee & Lars Wiedenhoefer teamed up to become the ultimate hackathon team, known as “The Comprehenders”!

Comprehending your customer support queue with AWS

Last week I attended HackTheHub, a machine learning based hackathon in Belfast. I was super excited to attend as machine learning is such a hot topic right now and it’s something I don’t really have much experience in.

Ready, Steady, Hack!

Now with major changes in regulations, it has become even more important that personal data is secured and only seen by the right people. With this being such a hot topic right now, I was extremely keen to work on a final year project that could tap into this every increasing issue.

Revolutionising Redaction - My Final Year Project

This year I have really seen the importance of taking opportunities. Sometimes it’s very easy for us to hear about an amazing opportunity and instantly think we aren’t good enough for it, or other people would be better at it, so what’s the point in trying! This is 100% the wrong attitude to have, as most of the time your main blocker is yourself!

All Blogs

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

DynamoDB Scan Vs Query

What-If I could explain my ML models better?

Uprise2018 - Being a Top 100Y Member

OpenHack unpack!