Chapter 1: Morning Routine and Preparation

The life of an AWS developer is both structured and dynamic. Let's take a closer look at a typical day.

At 7:30 a.m., my day begins with the sound of my alarm. Fortunately, I no longer have to deal with a lengthy commute, as I work remotely. My first task is to prepare breakfast for my toddler, ensuring he has everything he needs for kindergarten.

By 8:40 a.m., I’m in my living room performing a series of stretches to kickstart my focus and maintain my fitness. I find that this routine, which includes a minute of balance exercises, significantly enhances my concentration for the day ahead.

At 9:00 a.m., I settle at my desk with a steaming cup of coffee and boot up my MacBook. Logging onto MS Teams, I'm ready for my morning discussions.

"Good morning, Ralph. Do you have a moment to chat?" I type out, eager to clarify some points from yesterday's code review. I’ve been reviewing a Jira story on securing actuator endpoints in our Spring Boot services. I'm unsure if my review is sufficient to advance the story from QA to completion or if I need to delve into CloudWatch logs or AWS console insights for further verification.

While waiting for Ralph’s response, I realize that removing a feature toggle from our newly deployed requirement is more complex than anticipated. It involves not just cleaning up Terraform and YAML files, but also adjusting more extensive parts of the source code than I initially thought. Caution is necessary here.

By 10:15 a.m., we've wrapped up our daily standup meeting, where we shared our accomplishments, plans for the day, and any obstacles we face. The agile master has begun the sprint review meeting, but our afternoon retrospective is called off due to team members being on vacation.

I appreciate our use of Kanban, which minimizes the number of meetings compared to traditional Scrum methodologies. In my experience, Scrum can sometimes lead to lengthy planning sessions that drain the team's energy without yielding productivity.

Section 1.1: Deep Dive into Spring Actuator

At 11:30 a.m., after a video call with Ralf and Mathias, I feel compelled to deepen my understanding of how Spring Actuator operates. I take a moment to search online and come across a tutorial that clarifies the topic in Spring Boot 2, which is the version we’re currently using.

Feeling more informed, I launch Postman to test our live system by sending REST calls to check the status of our actuator endpoints.

I send a GET request to the /actuator endpoint to retrieve the list of available actuator endpoints under the _links field. I also experiment by creating a new health group called "mycustomgroup" and adding indicators for disk space and ping. This requires a quick update to the application.properties file.

When I call the /actuator/health endpoint now, I receive a JSON response reflecting the new health group. Additionally, I can enhance the details accessible only to authorized users through further configuration.

Section 1.2: Performance Monitoring with AWS

At 3:00 p.m., my focus shifts to evaluating the performance of one of our Lambda functions, which runs daily to import data from another service. I need to confirm that a timeout error has been resolved.

We've recently made optimizations by batching messages sent to SQS instead of sending them individually, which should reduce runtime. I log into the AWS console and access CloudWatch to analyze the metrics.

I execute a query in CloudWatch Logs Insights to assess the Lambda's performance. As a developer who has recently begun learning Python, I find the syntax somewhat challenging, which makes reviewing the source code a bit daunting.

Chapter 2: Continuous Learning and Preparation

At 5:00 p.m., I dedicate time to studying for the "Certified Solutions Architect Associate" AWS exam. I recently purchased an AWS course and open the Udemy platform to finish sections on AWS fundamentals, including RDS, Aurora, and ElastiCache, along with concepts of high availability and scalability.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration of an AWS developer's daily routine! I write about engineering, technology, and leadership for a curious audience. Join my newsletter for exclusive insights, or check out my Medium articles for more content.

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