About Me
Hi, I'm Turner! I've loved building things for as long as I can remember. When I was 4, it was building wooden railroads for Thomas and his friends to chug along on. When I was 8 it was using LEGO bricks to build cool starships and vehicles that would fit in my imaginative storytelling. And when I was 16 I was introduced to the world of programming, building UIs and APIs with little building blocks called functions and classes.
Fast forward to today and I still love building with LEGO. But I'm also a Senior Software Engineer with a passion for building scalable, cost-efficent and secure applications using Amazon Web Services.
When I'm not building things on AWS, you can usually find me playing board games, turn-based and real-time strategy video games, riding my bike or playing songs by ear on my keyboard. I also love all things trains, especially those from the Union Pacific Railroad.
![Turner on his bike](/_next/image?url=%2Fimage%2Fridingbike.jpeg&w=640&q=75)
![Turner's finished LEGO colliseum](/_next/image?url=%2Fimage%2Flegocolliseum.jpeg&w=640&q=75)
![UP Big Boy 4014 front view](/_next/image?url=%2Fimage%2Fbigboyfrontview.jpeg&w=640&q=75)
Why focus on AWS?
AWS is currently the most mature Cloud Computing provider that the market has to offer, especially in regards to its serverless offerings in the compute, database, and hosting domains. One can feasibly deploy an application on AWS using these tools and know that it will be able to scale up and down as needed without lifting a finger.
Why serverless?
Serverless is the next generation of software development and deployment that abstracts away the need to think about what machine your code is running on. It allows you to worry less about configuration and spend more time focusing on the business logic that actually generates value for your organization.
It also radically reorganizes development teams and processes to be smoother and require less resources. Gone are the days where you need a full security team, devOps team, and engineering team all coordinating with each other to release software. Teams can use built-in tooling to deploy changes to their cloud infrastructure in minutes, allowing continuous delivery and keeping developer productivity as high as possible. It is not unusual for a single team member to develop, test, and deploy a feature without needing any coordination from outside his or her team. It is the full enablement of "DevOps as a mindset"
AWS Services I've used in the past:
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB
- RDS
- VPC
- S3
- CloudFront
- IAM
- Route53
- Kinesis
- CloudWatch
- AppSync
- CloudFormation
- EC2
- Amplify
- Cognito
- IoT
- SQS
- SNS
- SES
- CodeCommit
- CodeBuild
- CodePipeline
- Fargate
What's next?
I'm planning on updating this site as I find new cool things to learn about and show off.
I'm currently learning Rust on the side and hoping to slowly start integrating Rust into personal projects of mine and write some blog posts about it.
I am also planning on getting my AWS Solutions Architect - Professional recertification later in 2023.
If you want to know what I've been up to recently, feel free to check out my blog!