In Part 1 of this two-part series, I looked at Forward and Reverse Geocoding using FourSquare's TwoFishes. I provided some background on TwoFishes, and shared some lessons that I learned on building the geospatial database/indices for forward and reverse geocoding. Building the TwoFishes database/indices takes some significant time;

Last year, I created the Amazon Alexa Skill for Cork Hounds which takes a City/State, and responds with the nearest fully dog friendly vineyard. When I first started that project, I re-read Google's Geocoding API terms of service, and confirmed that without a Business/Enterprise account we could only

I recently migrated our four containerized microservices from self managed Docker to AWS ECS. We are adding a lot more vineyards (the addition of California more than doubles the number of vineyards we currently have in our database, and a slew of other states aren't too far behind). I want

This post is a companion blog to a recent post on Building a Hybrid Mobile Application with Adobe Phonegap that I published in January. We recently released our Mobile Application on the Apple App Store. To supply the mobile application with a performant, scalable and elastic backend, I decided to

This blog has been a long time coming, as I've been working on the Cork Hounds iOS Mobile Application for the better part of 2017. I decided to use Phonegap for several reasons: Shortened learning curve using basic Javascript, CSS3, Html5 knowledge Reuse of existing website code and styling Flexibility

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to look into writing an Amazon Alexa Skill using the Java SDK. Alexa was an early entrant into the voice service market, allowing users to interact with the Amazon Marketplace with only their voice, as well as control smart devices to automate your

I'm currently using Postgres/PostGIS for all our Geospatial queries. This works well with our microservices architecture. However, as I build out the backend for our Mobile app architecture using API Gateway and Lambda, I'd prefer not to use AWS RDS. Because I don't want to expose my RDS Postgres

I wanted an easy way in AWS (e.g. using an Elastic Load Balancer) to rewrite/redirect a URL in Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) but had to find an alternate solution. Having the ability to do this is useful when you're setting up a website where you want to accept

Welcome to the first tech blog on our Cork Hounds adventure. While building Cork Hounds has given Peggy and I an excuse to travel in search of dog friendly vineyards with our pups, it has also given me an opportunity to learn about Microservices, Google App Services, Amazon Web Services,