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Starting Over With Purpose — My Serverless Adventure

What it took starting at nothing to getting two completely serverless apps live

Allen Helton
Better Programming
7 min readAug 18, 2022

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Illustration vector created by storyset

Serverless has been quite an adventure for me. It started in early 2019 when I was tasked to “go figure out this whole cloud thing.”

As I mentioned in my last post, my team and I had our work cut out for us. In addition to learning about serverless, we also had to learn about multi-tenancy, NoSQL data modeling, CI/CD. Pretty much every buzzword related to the cloud was on our radar.

We spent about a year learning and building proof of concepts until we finally began building “production-ready” software. The first day we started building for real. The team showed up to work all gung ho and ready to code. It took until around noon before we regrouped, and we all mutually felt like we weren’t ready.

There was so much to consider that proof of concepts hadn’t prepared us for. But we were an R and D team. We were pioneering this space for our company. We didn’t have a team of experts to turn to when we had questions.

So, we just….did it.

We went with what we knew, or thought we knew at the time, and tried to solve the business problem. We’d learn as we go and promise to return and improve our solutions…

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Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

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