Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

Build a GraphQL Service the easy way with AWS Amplify Model Transforms

August 29, 2018  8 minute read  

Creating a functional GraphQL API is hard. You have to create a GraphQL schema, decide on authentication and database structures, implement the schema in a GraphQL service, wire up the authentication, hook up the database sources, ensure the whole thing is scalable, worry about logging and monitoring, and then write your app. AWS AppSync helps you with everything except the GraphQL schema and the app. Now, AWS Amplify is helping you with the GraphQL schema by introducing model transforms. Th...

Native Android Development with AWS Amplify

August 27, 2018  5 minute read  

Up until this point, the experience for developing native iOS and Android apps with AWS has been a bit fragmented. There was AWS Mobile Hub; a web console that makes it easy to provision serverless cloud resources and get a configuration file back that describe the endpoints your app needs to communicate with. But because it is a web-based console, it requires the developer to switch back and forth between their local development machine and the browser. There is also the awsmobile CLI, but t...

How to deploy a GraphQL API on AWS with the Serverless Framework

August 14, 2018  8 minute read  

In previous posts, we’ve explored how to deploy a GraphQL service based on AWS AppSync and Amazon DynamoDB using AWS CloudFormation. The articles reinforce how automatic and repeatable deployments are central to moving towards a DevOps mindset. However, there are a few problems with the AWS CloudFormation template. The most notable issue is the inability to separate the schema and resolver mapping templates from the actual CloudFormation template. Overcoming this obstacle requires developers...

Converting types with Room and Kotlin

August 08, 2018  5 minute read  

I’ve been working on a personal project, trying to get to grips with the various Android Architecture Components and Kotlin. One of the things I came up with was the requirement to deal with type conversion when using a SQLite database and the Room persistence library. Room is a nice abstraction to the internal SQLite database that converts models to tables within SQLite. It’s nice because it works alongside LiveData and RxJava to provide observable objects — when the database changes, the ob...

Build a GraphQL Weather API with OpenWeatherMap and AWS AppSync

July 20, 2018  6 minute read  

I love GraphQL even for the small apps. Generating a simple API allows me to change out back end details without re-compiling my front end. It also allows me to rotate API keys easily, handle authentication, and get in depth monitoring of the individual fields being used. So, naturally, when I am building a new weather app (don’t judge — everyone makes one), I naturally want to use a weather API based on GraphQL. Except there isn’t one. So I created one using AWS AppSync — a managed offline ...