Amazon Route 53 provides highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS), domain name registration, and health-checking web services. You can register a domain name in different TLDs such as .com or .net. There are two ways of doing so: using the web interface or command line. I’m going to use the latter in this blog post.

To follow along you must have the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) tool installed on your machine. If you don’t, here is a step by step guide from Amazon.

AWS Route 53 uses the us-east-1 endpoint. If you have a different region specified with aws configure (see in ~./aws/config) then it has to be updated to us-east-1 or you can specify the endpoint explicitly in every command.

You can join the discussion on HackerNews here.

I’ve been hearing about the Crystal programming language here and there over the last couple of years but never had a chance to give it a look until yesterday.

What is Crystal? It’s a statically typed, compiled, object-oriented language with syntax heavily inspired by Ruby’s.

The promise on its site is that the language is as fast as C, sleek as Ruby. This statement sounds exciting and makes you want to check how fast Crystal is comparing to Ruby. Of course, it won’t be a fair comparison since one is a compiled language and another is an interpreted one (the Ruby MRI implementation used below).