Forem: Conti

Do not reinvent the wheel

Conti — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 09:01:43 +0000

There are times when you feel like a god because you think you can build anything, technically speaking, and sometimes you feel useless because the product owner needs you to find a solution for a specific problem and, instead of using an already mature and developed third-party product, you find yourself in your own development roadmap for a similar tool, built from zero. So your frustration grows because you think you have the skills to build that solution, but delivery timing would be out of question since the value needs to be delivered the following week.

As a developer your lines of code value is null, the real value is in the mental process where you imagine and chain those lines of code to approach and solve that problem.

does the approach need new lines of code in your project? Good, have you estimated the hours needed and the cost of them? also good? Do it or not.

is it possible to integrate a third-party tool to solve? Good, is it too expensive and it's better to develop it in-house? also good? Do it or not.

I just want you to be able to view out of the box and try to avoid thinking in the lines of code you are going to type while the Product Owner is talking about the issue itself.

Need examples? Let's go.

Controlling the DOM

Your product team needs a way to manage (adding/removing) third-party scripts on the site to avoid adding issues to JIRA and going through the whole CI/CD process. Give them Google Tag Manager, train the people who are going to manage it, setup a solid permission scheme, and not also you gave them power and a solution, but you positioned yourself as a reliable problem solver that is able to look above the keyboard.

Growth teams use experimentation as a tool to validate hypothesis to a problem they need to solve, and most of the the experiments needs to be deployed within the apps/site. You would lose almost you whole productivity if every experiment had to go through the whole CI/CD process. You can show them Google Optimize or Optimizely to allow them to experiment without interrupting the development workflow.

Delivering

I can build you a CI/CD Pipeline using AWS Code Deploy and Pipeline, linked to a cluster of machines behind an ELB, with auto rotation for them, highly monitored in Cloudwatch, bla bla bla... I really can do that, but is it necessary to overkill every approach with that?

We already have teams of developers around the world that belong to product teams such as Vercel, which is very curated and mature. Give those colleagues some slack, investigate those kind of products before onboarding into an endeavour you do not know you would come back safe and sound.

Building

Do you have the resources to build a Magento or Prestashop from the ground? Think it twice please, perhaps you should try services such Shopify in the first attempt. I am not saying that M&P are bad solutions, I am saying that you need people behind those platforms to maintain and develop them properly.

Need a landing page for your product that is going to last one month? Try tools such as Webflow. Time and resources to build a very good HTML and CSS are not free,
your front-end expert would be the one reviewing the job done by other person with that tool instead of being the person building the landing page from zero.

Do you want to validate an idea using a mobile app? Right now there are several services to build them without coding, such as Glide. I know, I know, a native app is going to be perfect every time from here to Mars, but I am testing with that MVP if I need to hire, or not, a true expert.

Automations

Tired of build lambdas, api gateway endpoints, webhooks, listeners... to allow users enjoy your automations? Show them and let them play with automations in Zapier, Make and Twilio. Your job here is to apply a reliable security policy when using credentials/oauth to avoid misuse within the automations.

This has been a small batch of posible third parties that could lead to you reach your goal or validate ideas faster, without using nor interrupting your main work force.

Images attributions:
Business graph photo created by jannoon028 - www.freepik.com
Volume button vector created by upklyak - www.freepik.com
Covid delivery photo created by freepik - www.freepik.com
Joiner photo created by jcomp - www.freepik.com
Ai brain photo created by rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com

Being creative as a developer

Conti — Wed, 25 May 2022 14:37:53 +0000

Assumptions

Many times I have heard the word "creativity" associated to environments where the final output is:
a) A Design
b) An advertisement
c) A mockup
d) ... fill it with anything that comes to your mind regarding your experience with this word.

In spite of the examples I put above, "Creativity" has nothing to do with them, it is a human core attribute that anyone can train and improve. It is true that some environments are better than others to develop the skill itself, but believe me, it lives in you too.

What is is

Being creative is highly related with solving problems in unique and efficient ways, and how luck you are!, as a developer you are constantly solving problems, so let's see whether or not you are being creative:

Refactoring

Whenever you refactor a piece of code and the result is cleaner, more efficient and readability has been improved, that is creativity.

Practical with minimum overhead

When you decide that the same feature can run flawless using an endpoint to an external service, instead of developing an in-house new-edge-super-meta-algorithm, that has been already developed and optimised by other third party, that is creativity.

Make decisiones with libraries

They way you achieve solutions using native features instead of using 2,000 libraries from NPM to reduce your web app from 5MB to 500KB, that is creativity.

Open to learn

Being open to learn other languages and techniques allow you to expand you knowledge limits, and because of that knowledge, you will be able to choose from possible solutions and discard others faster. That is creativity.

Look for inspiration

Creativity is fed by your own experience and knowledge, but can also be triggered from other sources, such as other colleagues/professionals who share their experiences. Being able to filter and pick external content to boost your inspiration is also creativity.

Experimentation

Do not fear a failure, every time something goes wrong it is automatically added to your experiences luggage, which will feed your potential to be more creative.

Out of the box

Being able to take a step aside and view the problem out of the box is also creativity. Multiple times you have been hitting a wall when trying to solve a problem, you leave it as it is for a while, and when you come back and think of it again, suddenly some magic appears and you solve it.

Optimising your tools and environment

Investigate, try and optimise your dev tools, such as your IDE, your browser extension and tab organisation, or buying your swiss army knife of dev tools, that is is also creativity.

Remember to not look in other direction when people around you talk about "creativity", everyone has something to say about it.

Images attribution
Creativity and innovation photo created by freepik - www.freepik.com
Think different photo created by Waewkidja - www.freepik.com
Puzzle shape photo created by jcomp - www.freepik.com
Book photo created by ikaika - www.freepik.com

Thoughts on DynamoDB, 10 years later.

Conti — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 14:27:15 +0000

Happy birthday DynamoDB!

This month we celebrate the birthday of one of the most important NoSQL fully managed database service available in the market.

Production ready

I have been using AWS services for production loads since 2010, I can consider myself a pioneer of the services they were offering at that time, but I could never have imagined that AWS was cooking such a disruptive database service that will be launched two years later, on January 2012.

But DynamoDB was not a recent trend in that moment, though it was born in the edge of a few malfunctioning situations occurred in 2004 in the Amazon core e-commerce platform. From there, engineers investigated and built what we know today as DynamoDB. It was first announced as a paper in 2007 and it was adopted by several core services teams at Amazon over the following months after that.

This service was (and is) very easy to setup and work with, and avoided us to built MySQL databases when they were not really necessary, so it boosted our speed to build concept proofs, that later became a reality within the same service because its reliability and scalability.

Use cases

Below I am going to mention a few use cases I have use DynamoDB for:

Dynamic HTML widgets

I few years ago I worked for a SaaS that built custom experiences for users based on their behaviour in the website. One of the products was based on product recommendations, and the client was able to build custom widgets (html) within their dashboard. Later, when website was loaded in the browser by the user, the widget was filled with real products directly within the front-end. That HTML, with custom variables, was saved in DynamoDB, along with different properties related to the widget itself.

Tracking user actions

I have been using DynamoDB since the beginning as a database to ingest all kind of user actions. Those actions are later processed in batch to obtain useful information, and DynamoDB's search capability has been very useful to locate and filter data. this use of DynamoDB served us well when building products such as: cart abandonment emails, analytics dashboards for clients or simple data tables.
Also the ability to set up a timeout for entries, makes DynamoDB a friendly tool in terms of data protection compliance.

Used as an Identity pool management

When you are starting to know DynamoDB, the very first advice you are going to receive is: "Design your tables thinking in how you are going to search for in them later", so the sky's the limit , as Jason Derulo said in his song. Taking this advice into account, I was able to build a User Identity pool system from scratch, which also included dynamic profile attributes, without relying in a MySQL server.

I know that nowadays we are lucky to be able to use different technologies much more focused and optimised for some of these use cases, but in the past we had fun trying to "hack" DynamoDB to served us for almost everything. Anyways, DynamoDB will not leave us for a (long)while, so we will enjoy it until then.

Happy 10th Birthday, DynamoDB! Official announcement

10 Tools to measure Core Web Vitals

Conti — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 07:23:28 +0000

In May 2020 Google announced Core Web Vitals as the center of how a web has to behave in front of a user, a lot has been written since then, a lot. The 3 vitals has been explained deeply all over the Internet, so I will not talk about them. Nowadays, the most important part of these metrics is how to measure and evaluate them in the most effective way, so which tools do we have at our hand to do that?

Before that I want to make sure that you really understand the difference between two concepts, Field data vs Lab data.

I am going to paste a very good explanation took from Page Speed Insights doc page:

The field data is a historical report about how a particular URL has performed, and represents anonymized performance data from users in the real-world on a variety of devices and network conditions. The lab data is based on a simulated load of a page on a single device and fixed set of network conditions. As a result, the values may differ.

So, Field data is data tracked whenever a user visits our page, could it be from a super fast PC/Mac or a slow 2G/3G connection, which will offer very different metrics. It is very good to analyze real-world user experience issues

And Lab data is basically about having some computers at google datacenter executing Lighthouse on every page. It is good for debugging performance issues and capturing tips which need deeper study.

Tools

In browser Lighthouse
Lighthouse cli
LHCI
Core Web Vitals Chrome built it extension
Web Vitals Chrome extension
Chrome dev tools performance
Page Speed Insights
Google Search console
CrUX Dashboard
Webpagetest

In browser Lighthouse

Local Lab data on demand, but it is not really recommended since browser extensions have great negative impact on the report results.

Lighthouse cli

Local Lab data on demand, and the only way I would recommend to execute Lighthouse, since it uses a clean Chromium window to execute the test. Check it out here

LHCI

Lab data on demand and unattended. This version of Lighthouse is oriented to be integrated in a continuous integration workflow to check your metrics before deploying to production. However, you could also use it as command executed in a cron to check an environment performance over the time. I use the latter to check production performance each 12 hours, since there are third parties adding and removing dynamic content that could affect UX. Check its repo here

Core Web Vitals Chrome built it extension

Local Field data on demand, as a native extension of Chrome browser. Very useful to detect issues in real-time. Doing a Lighthouse report after viewing this, could give you insights to solve those issues. In order to show the overlay we have two options:
a) Open Dev tools -> use Run Command option -> type "Core web vitals".

b) Keyboard shortcuts: CMD + Option + I -> CMD + SHIFT + P -> type "Core web vitals"

Web Vitals Chrome extension

Local Field data vs Field data comparison in realtime. Very useful extension since it is showing data from that moment and retrieve Field data from Chrome UX Report. You may download it from Chrome web store

Chrome dev tools performance

Very useful to debug possible issues related to Web Vitals, since you can check at the very right moment an issue appeared.

Page Speed Insights

This is THE tool from google to compare Field data and Lab data regarding performance scoring. It is like an empowered Lighthouse. PSI’s data is updated daily with the trailing 28-day period.

Google Search console

Google Search Console page experience data is fed with PSI's data, so you can easily monitor every day the trailing period and receive alerts related to Web Vitals issues.

CrUX Dashboard

Building a Chrome UX Report should be one of your priorities to study Web Vitals deeply, since is going to give insights form the last month and detect trends.

Webpagetest

Webpagetest is a long live citizen of the Internet and has been always very resourceful. It offers Web Vitals with very detailed reports with Field data and Lab data comparison, so give it a try.

I hope you enjoyed this content ;)

From Individual Contributor to Manager

Conti — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 05:51:47 +0000

Past

Since 2008 I have been playing my career mostly as a an individual contributor, something I do not regret in any way, and that role belongs to a period focused on improving technical skills based on experimentation, deep study and failures.

As an IC I have had awesome mentors and team leads, who did all their efforts to build a safe environment for failures, which I think it is the key for enhancing and boosting your self confidence when you are designing and developing solutions to given problems. We could speak out and deeply about other factors that allow such environment (CI/CD, automations, etc), but it is out of scope for this post.

I was asked to change my role from IC to Manager two years ago for a different project, and all I could say in the following months was that I had played in better places. A few keys I struggled with at the beginning:

Huge Impostor syndrome: I knew I could do the job better because I was before a reliable and resourceful professional, but something in my mind was telling me the opposite.
Very poor definition of responsibilities and accountability: If doubts exist about who is in charge of specific errands, then something is wrong.
Burned and overwhelmed team which was eager to go on vacation instead of pulling issues from TODO column because of the biggest toxic stakeholder I have ever known.

On top of that, I had to be in charge of management tasks I had never done...very interesting scenario, isn't it?

Present

Two years later: I have never played in a better place

My world is different right now, I love my colleagues, they are very committed to the project, and as a result we have a high mature and productive environment.

How did we solve the hot parts ?

Impostor thing: frequent personal retrospective, feedback loops with the team and being open to experimentation.
Responsibilities and accountability: open loud and clear, respectfully, with different stakeholders of the project, and do feedback loops (again).
Toxic stakeholder: fire them, put away from the project. Do you want to work with that guy anymore? No, then do the first move, I do not know where to, but do it. And ask for help, do not be ashamed, in my case the Product Owner and CEO were the key to remove toxicity from the environment, without their help I could not have done it.

Management

Since I started this new role, I may claim right now that being IC means that there is another person who:

removes stones for you when you can not lift them.
shows a tiny light at the end of a tunnel for a problem no one has a right clue of how to solve it.
manages feedback loops for the team.
does interviews for candidates.
builds an invisible wall to allow the ICs be productive without noise from Product Management.
is accountable for a whole development workflow.
is able to play as an IC for specific issues and push stuck situations. ...

That is a small list of things a Lead role must be in charge of and they can not be avoided, so there is always a need to have someone in charge of those errands.

The question here is: do you want to try? Give it a chance, do not worry if you think that you are not ready right now, because you will never be.

Future

I am just a lucky guy who learned the pits and falls of a migration process from a non-desirable environment to a high productive and motivating one.

A good team is built with good professionals, not necessary ninjas, gurus or unicorns on specific topics, so whenever I interview someone I need to check if he or she fits our team values first, instead of tech skills or certifications.

Remember that technical skills are far easier to learn that people management, which can not ever be mastered.

Header image attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/solutionist/48227526067

Growth hacking for developers

Conti — Wed, 12 May 2021 11:46:58 +0000

It is out of scope to dive deeper in some of the concepts you will read below, so I will stay on the basics, and I will try to break the ice in this topic from a technical perspective.

What is Growth Hacking?

It is a set of methodologies, techniques and mindset that allow you to increase your digital product revenues. "Growth" starts from the need to validate an hypothesis to improve a specific area of your product, and in order to do so, a set of experiments must be developed and deployed in your production environment. When an experiment has been very successful, we call it "hack".

Differences between Digital Marketing and Growth

First of all lets review a classic product funnel (also called "Pirate funnel") which let you analyse how your users go from "knowing" your digital product to "pay" for it:

Step 1 Awareness: users know about you.

Step 2 Acquisition: users register in your product

Step 3 Activation: users use your product as you instructed them to use it.

Step 4 Revenue: users pay for your product.

Step 5 Retention: users are hooked onto your product, they have a habit of use it.

Step 6 Referral: users tell their friends good things about your product.

So, Digital Marketing is intended to explore mostly step 1 and 2, while Growth goes from the beginning of the funnel until the end of it, and iterates to continuously improve the funnel efficiency.

So, are you telling us that we should give access to our CI/CD to a group of digital marketers/experts/innovators interested in doing spam to our users through some code snippets out of our QA process?

No, they need a way to validate their hypothesis to improve the funnel, so what we do, as developers/tech experts, is to offer them a specific method to run experiments in production environment without interacting with us or our roadmap. How? Google Tag Manager, for example.

You could use Google Tag Manager to allow them to add scripts tags based on DOM triggers, users segments triggers, etc. They could also add tools such as Google Optimize or Optimizely to build UI tests A/B and use different variants to validate their hypothesis.

I, as a developer, used to think that a feature such as a classic test a/b do not need to be outsourced to an external tool, but man, I was wrong. Both services mentioned above do an excellent job in their free tier, so we do not need to re-invent the wheel.

Which technical roles are needed in Growth? Why?

Growth Hackers are experts in consumer psychology, innovation, creativity and be able to apply scientific methods to validate their hypothesis, so taking this into account it is difficult for them to build a decent technical knowledge to develop their custom own experiments based on code.

There are tons of no-code tools out there that help them to build experiments, but they often reach a point in the hypothesis validation process in which these tools are not enough, and a custom development need to be made. That is when we enter to the play field.

Experiments vary from simple modal windows, popups, CTA bars, etc, to more complex backend processes, such as building a custom GeoIP location service to trigger specifics experiments to different users segments.

A few months ago I wrote a basic tutorial for the GeoIP service, in case you are interested in it.

If your "Growth A-Team" wants to be able to manoeuvre without limitations, both front-end and back-end developers are needed. Cloud platforms knowledge such as AWS, Azure, etc are also important skills to deploy securely and fast experiments based on CDN features, redirections, specific API's endpoints, etc.

Ok, so our Growth Hackers are testing experiments through GTM, what's next?

When a hypothesis has been validated using experiments, the normal course of action is to integrate this development into the product roadmap, in order to apply that successful knowledge to the product itself. And from there, iterate again to find more ways to increase funnel performance and efficiency.

Advantages and disadvantages of this experimentation process

+ Fast hypothesis validations

+ Fast client side validation for the experiments that will occur on their site

+ No development resources usage in case the experiment could be completed with a "No-code" approach.

- Expect quality assurance concerns.

- Experiments may not comply at first with security and data protection policies.

- High chance to maintain legacy code if there is not a development process behind these experiments.

I hope you enjoyed this content, a bit different what we are used to read here, but I think that our frequent isolation as developers is a barrier to obtain knowledge about other disciplines that interact directly with our world.

4 myths about daily meetings

Conti — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 09:20:19 +0000

Intro

If your daily meetings are not working properly, do not look for solutions in articles all over the internet, you may be able to find them in the members of your team.

We are fortunate to work in such a heterogeneous environment that allows us to potentially work with people from all over the world, from the same country but with different culture, etc, and it is this environment the one that gives form to the routines in the team.

Whenever you put effort to make things right in terms of managing daily meetings, it is imperative that you open your mind and pick up practices that fit your awesome team. Below I am going to tell you what is working in the team I belong to, breaking a few myths-established rules that were not really working (context: full remote team):

1. Length

"Stand-ups meeting should be very short, people should not be losing more than 10-15 minutes in it"

Look at the word "losing", if you really think that people are losing time when they are in a daily meeting then look deeper in your organisation to find the solution.

First: daily meetings should give value to the team, spending quality time in them is equal to winning time for later.
Second: daily meetings length is dictated by the own conversation, as long as everyone in it is satisfied with the result and had enough time to sneak-peak their topics.
Third: I like to think in daily meetings as a "regroup to study the next strategy and attack".

2. Who has completed more things?

Sometimes it feels like daily meetings are a competition to enumerate tasks in progress or completed: "the more the better", but it is not. It is as simple as to visit JIRA project board to check the current status of the tasks.
The big point of daily meetings resides in being able to share ideas/thoughts/approaches with your colleagues. If you need to dig deeper in a topic with someone of your team, continue after the meeting.

3. No one leads

"The SCRUM master/PO leads the meetings"

Why? I understand that someone could want to highlight something at the beginning of the meeting, but it could be anyone. Neither everyone must be in the meeting to begin with, it does not matter. What it does matter is that the meeting occurs, we are talking here about team culture and education, the meeting itself is bigger that anyone in the team.

4. Excuse for isolation

"The daily meeting is enough to work the whole day without communicating with your colleagues"

Do not use a daily meeting to isolate yourself and avoid communication the whole day. As I said before, you could need to investigate further or do pair programming after a daily meeting, so you need to be able to coordinate with your colleagues in any or designate timetable, and also have the correct tools in hand to do such thing.

I just wanted to leave my reflexion and experience, so if you are eager to share your thoughts about this or felt that this post summoned you, feel free to comment.

Enjoy your meetings ;-)

Your own GeoIP service 2/2: Lambda + API Gateway

Conti — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:06:47 +0000

Let's face the second part of our little project which started here.

In the first part we achieved a solution to invoke the GeoIP lambda in local environment successfully, giving us insights about our location. But this is not completed if we can not execute that function in the cloud, so I am going to give you a fair solution which it not the most optimal one, but at least it could point us into the right direction.

Requisites

Remember that you will need a few things installed and working on your machine before starting:

Docker installed on your machine
An AWS active account
AWS SAM CLI working on your machine
AWS CLI

Create our lambda function in AWS

There is so much literature out there with high details to create a lambda function in AWS, so I am going to skip a few steps:

Visita Lambda Dashboard
Create a new NodeJS lambda
Create a test event to be able to test the new function.
Execute the function without any change in it.

So, now we are ready to upload our code to this lambda function.

Manual upload

Assuming we are at the root of the project we may execute a simple ZIP command to bundle the entire project zip function.zip * -r

Now we return to the lambda function dashboard and upload this zip as the code:

After uploading the zip file an info banner will take your attention:

Do not worry about that right now, let's check that the functionality is correct. In order to do so, we run again the function using the Test button in the upper right corner of the UI:

That error was coming whether we liked or not since we built the test event without taking into account the function logic itself. Now we create a new test event and paste our current event.json built for the local environment:

And now we execute the function again:

It works, but this is not the best way to do it, it is far away from a continuous deployment pipeline. We are going to make one step further and build a command to deploy the code to the cloud without using the

AWS CLI ready for service!

Add a new NPM script to your package.json:

{
...
"deploy": "npm prune --production && zip function.zip * -r && aws lambda update-function-code --function-name geoIPNode --zip-file fileb://function.zip --profile personal  && rm function.zip && npm install",
...
}

We are cleaning node_modules folder to upload only production packages, building the zip file, updating the lambda function and re-installing packages deleted in the prune process.

You can safely use npm run deploy to update your lambda whenever you want.

This is neither the best way to do this process, because we can and should improve this process much further, but it will not be in this post. I will leave you some ideas to improve memory and time usage for the function:

Upload GeoIP database (which is the biggest one) to S3 and load it within the code using AWS SDK for JS.
Upload GeoIP database to a EFS (Amazon elastic file system) which can be share through any lambda function.

Both ideas allow you to edit the code in the lambda editor, since the package uploaded will not be bigger than the limit specified.

API Gateway

We just only need an endpoint to attack the lambda function from the Internet. Visit API Gateway dashboard and let's start:

Create a new HTTP API
Fill in the form and click "Next"
Choose the method and a name for the resource path.
Default stage by default with auto deploy on changes.
With your API built, you may access the operational URL served by AWS with our parameter string, such as:

The end

I wanted to give you a broader scope in terms of using a simple AWS service, such as Lambda, to build a solution around something useful. I hope you enjoy the content as much I enjoyed writing it for everyone. Here I link the repository used.

Your own GeoIP service 1/2: Maxmind GeoIP + AWS SAM

Conti — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 10:42:42 +0000

Requisites

This is not a start-from-subzero tutorial, so you will need a few things installed and working on your machine before starting this first post:

Docker installed on your machine
An AWS active account
AWS SAM CLI working on your machine https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/serverless-sam-cli-install.html

There so much literature about using GeoIP third party services, but if you really like to play and test a DIY GeoIP endpoint to use in your projects, follow me across two posts and let's check how to do it.

Let's be clear about the final goal: "My own endpoint which will receive an IP as query parameter and it will return location info such as country and city". To accomplish this goal we will make use of the following technologies/services:

Maxmind

First of all, Maxmind ( https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/ ) offers us a group of free GeoIP (capped) databases to play with. Follow instructions in the URL above and download "GeoLite2 City":

Locate the file "GeoLite2-City.mmdb" to be able to use it later.

Now let's check the usage for NodeJS of their APIs at https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-node, do not worry, we will spare a few lines of code in few moments.

AWS Serverless ApplicationManager (SAM)

SAM allows us to build and deploy serverless applications with little effort. Though SAM is oriented towards offering full REST capabilities in order to build a whole application, we will only use it to manage, invoke and deploy a Lambda function.

Since installing SAM and getting started with it is out of scope for this post, you may follow the official doc to do that https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/what-is-sam.html

Whenever you have SAM working in your machine, follow these steps.

Navigate to your dev playground folder and exec sam init . Setup the project like in the folowing screenshot:
Exec cd geoIPNode
Exec sam local invoke and this will execute the default from template.yml so you should see the following output(Note: you need Docker in your machine):
We already executed a Lambda function in our machine successfully, that is good, really good.

Maxmind again

Let's go back to https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-node and check the NodeJS code from their page. We will use the Buffer example:

const fs = require('fs');
const Reader = require('@maxmind/geoip2-node').Reader;
// Typescript:
// import { Reader } from '@maxmind/geoip2-node';

const dbBuffer = fs.readFileSync('/usr/local/city-database.mmdb');
const reader = Reader.openBuffer(dbBuffer);

console.log(reader.city('1.1.1.1'));

Do you remember where the *.mmdb file is? It is time to put it inside the project folder in order to get a folder structure like this one:

Now add the replace the initial code for this (replace 1.1.1.1 for you IP):

const fs = require('fs');
const Reader = require('@maxmind/geoip2-node').Reader;
 exports.helloFromLambdaHandler = async () => {
    let response={};

    const dbBuffer = fs.readFileSync('GeoLite2-City.mmdb');
    const reader = Reader.openBuffer(dbBuffer);

    try {
        // const ret = await axios(url);
        response = {
            'statusCode': 200,
            'body': JSON.stringify({
                message: 'hello world',
                city: reader.city('1.1.1.1').city
            })
        }
    } catch (err) {
        console.log(err);
        return err;
    }

    return response
}

Note: do not forget to install @maxmind/geoip2-node using Yarn or NPM, for example:

npm install @maxmind/geoip2-node

An exec again sam local invoke :

That was easy.

The second part is already published.