I recently had the opportunity to participate in the Rocket Program by Startup Lisboa with my startup, Cooper Pet Care. I felt inspired to share my personal journey with you all.

Why I Joined the Rocket Program

The Portuguese startup scene 🇵🇹 is positively buzzing, with innovative solutions making global impacts and events like the Web Summit putting Portugal on the tech map. This magnetic draw of opportunity, learning, and networking was too powerful to ignore for us at Cooper Pet Care.

I am a firm believer in the strength of structured planning and responsibility, which led me to seek further support. The Rocket Program offered just what we needed, with systematic weekly stand-up meetings and retrospective sessions to boost our productivity and focus.

I have extensively utilized Amazon AWS for various applications, ranging from operating an EKS cluster for our Televet product at Cooper Pet Care, to hosting my personal blog on Amazon Amplify.

Regrettably, deployments to my blog on Amazon Amplify ceased functioning unexpectedly. Instead of troubleshooting the issue, I opted to try out Render.com, a relatively new hosting platform I’ve frequently heard about.

One advantage of Render is its free hosting for static websites, in contrast to the annual cost of $20-30 I’ve been incurring on Amazon Amplify.

And the first impression of Render was pretty good.

Several people have asked me to share my experiences with the Antler program. To address these requests, I’ve composed a review encapsulating my journey with Antler.

I participated in the third cohort of Antler Amsterdam in 2020-2021, navigating through the entire program, securing an investment, and presenting at the demo day.

Overview of Antler and its Target Audience

Antler is a global early-stage venture capital (VC) firm dedicated to enabling and investing in extraordinary individuals who are shaping the future with groundbreaking companies.

In essence, Antler unites highly-intelligent individuals with diverse business and tech backgrounds, fosters collaboration to generate novel business concepts, and subsequently funds the most promising teams and ideas.

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.