A few people asked me to share experience with the Antler program and I’ve decided to put together a little review.

I was in the third cohort of Antler Amsterdam in 2020-2021 and went through the program, received the investment and made it to the demo day.

What is Antler and Who is it for?

Antler is a global early-stage VC enabling and investing in the world’s most exceptional people building the defining companies of tomorrow.

Basically, what they do is take a bunch of smart people with business and tech backgrounds, mix them together and see what kind of ideas for new companies they can come up with. The best teams and ideas get an investment from Antler.

In this blog post we will be looking at what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is and how it can be used in a practical exercise: spinning up a proxy server on Amazon AWS with Terraform.

You might want to use a proxy for various reasons. For instance, I currently live in South America and some US companies block traffic or content for me. For example, LendingTree gives me the 1020 error (probably because they don’t consider me a potential customer) or Netflix hides certain movies and shows (probably because of license agreements). A proxy with a US IP address will help.

Infrastructure as Code

The idea behind Infrastructure as Code is that you write code to define, deploy, update and destroy your infrastructure. You can manage pretty much everything in code, including servers, databases, networks, application configuration, etc. The benefits are pretty obvious:

• Faster time to production/market. When your infrastructure is described in code its management becomes easier.
• Consistency. You will be eliminating manual processes.
• Code as Documentation. Your infrastructure is represented in source files allowing anyone in the organization to understand how things work.
• Change Management. Version control systems such as git keeps track of every modification to the code.
• Reusability. You can package your infrastructure in reusable modules.

You can join the discussion on HackerNews here.

It’s a follow up post to the previous Ruby vs Crystal Performance.

I guess this time it will be a fair performance comparison as both languages are compiled and statically typed.

We will perform a couple of tests:

• Finding a number in the Fibonacci sequence as in the previous post
• Running an HTTP server locally and performing benchmarks with wrk

Language versions installed my machine are:

• go version go1.14.3 darwin/amd64
• Crystal 0.34.0 (2020-04-07)

I’m curious to find out how Go and Crystal perform in comparison to each other.

As a software developer I love working in the terminal where I do most of my work.

iTerm2, zsh, vim, tmux became my favorite tools but there are many others I use pretty much on a daily basis.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

Homebrew

This one you probably already know. Homebrew is a fantastic package manager for macOS and Linux with an active community of developers on Github.

You can install nearly any software using Homebrew. Every command-line tool described in this blog post below can be installed as easy as running

brew install <tool name>

Homebrew also allows you to install Desktop applications:

brew cask install firefox

To search for particular software run:

brew search postgres

AWS Amplify is a development platform for building secure, scalable mobile and web applications. Amplify covers the complete application development workflow from version control, code testing, to production deployment, and it easily scales with your business from thousands of users to tens of millions.

What is a typical workflow for deploying a static website to Amazon AWS? You create a bucket in S3, set up Route 53 and Cloudfront. If you want the site to be built and deployed on every commit you might want to add CodePipeline or a CI/CD tool of your choice such as Travis CI or Circle CI.

But with Amplify you can simplify and automate the whole process and deploy your site with just a few commands.