Over the last couple of weeks, there has been some renewed interest in a project I started a few years back, our Online@VCU virtual assistant (aka chatbot), that is created using Amazon Lex, Lambda, and DynamoDB. We launched the chatbot with maybe 10-15 intents, mostly focused on prospective and current students, but as a part […]
Read MoreAs I frequently do, I’ve been taking a deep dive over the last few weeks into a very cool intersection between the WordPress and AWS ecosystems all in pursuit of the most scalable and turn key database structure for WordPress multisite. In this post, I’ll share some of the results of my research and walkthrough […]
Read MoreOver the past few years, this site has gone through some pretty substantial changes. After getting hacked on BlueHost sometime in 2016, I reworked the entire site architecture using hand-rolled resources on AWS. While this taught me a lot, it has been increasingly expensive and time-consuming. To keep my costs down, I’m really relying on […]
Read MoreIn a previous post, I wrote about some of my experiences building chatbots with the Amazon Lex platform, and I guess this post will represent the culmination of that experimental work into a production ready tool. Throughout this process, I’ve learned a lot more about building applications using AWS services, but it has also helped […]
Read MoreI’m not really sure when this happened, but over the last several years, I’ve started to spend a lot of my personal and professional time working on building out data visualization tools and workflows. In a recent meeting, someone referred to us as data scientists, and we’ve had a good running joke ever since. While […]
Read MoreWhat follows here is an exploration of an evolving project I’m working on to provide some additional touch points for current and prospective students in online courses at VCU. Chatbots, AI, Machine Learning, and other terms with similar connotations seem to be all the rage nowadays, but using publicly available cloud services, we can get […]
Read MoreI’ve been trying to up my sysadmin game over the last several months using a lot of different server configurations on AWS (Linux, IIS, etc.). Mainly I’m writing this post because I’ve implemented this server-side caching setup three times now, and every time I do, I end up having to go back to the drawing […]
Read MoreFor a recent project, I implemented an NGINX proxy server to proxy requests from a WordPress installation on a subdomain so that they appear to come from a subdirectory of the main domain. Good http://maindomain.com/blog Bad http://blog.maindomain.com There a lots of SEO and technical benefits to setting up a proxy server like this, a few […]
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