In this blog post, you will learn how to create a Python app using Flask and the Google API which will:

• Support Google Authentication with Python and Flask
• Restrict access via an OAuth scope, so that the app can only view and manage Google Drive files and folders which were created by the app
• Read and write files on the user’s Google Drive with Python.

By the time you get to the end of this blog post, you’ll have built a basic Google Drive file browser which looks something like:

This blog post is divided up into sections which progressively build up an app which interacts with the user’s Google Drive. If you only want to find out about how to do user Authentication with Google and Python, feel free to stop there.

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

I recently attended a presentation by BNZ’s Chief Economist, Tony Alexander.

One of the topics that really caught my attention was his perspective on the things that influenced the housing market over the decades, from the 1950’s until today.

I wrote up a bunch of notes to summarise his points.

If you’re interested in getting a bit of perspective on the NZ property market, and some of the things that caused it’s near-relentless movement upward over time, then read on.

If you attempt to read encrypted data from a DynamoDB table which has been restored from a backup to a DynamoDB table which doesn’t match the original table name, you may see the following errors:

TL;DR the restored DynamoDB table must have the same name as the original DynamoDB table, and be restored to the same account that it was originally created in.

The recommended way to enable HTTPS in Elastic Beanstalk is to use one of AWS’s load balancers such as the Application Load Balancer (ALB) which supports autoscaling, fault tolerance, and other things.

This blog is about hosting a web app prototype on a single EC2 instance, using HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt, without a load balancer.

Using an AWS ALB costs a minimum of about $18 per month, on top of any other charges you currently have, such as $5 for the t2.micro instance that you may be running your prototype on.

So, if you’ve only got one EC2 instance in Elastic Beanstalk for your prototype, and don’t currently want the benefits of an ALB (fault tolerance, auto-scaling, etc), but do want the benefits of HTTPS (protection from interception, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, etc), read on.

When I first started using CKEditor 5 with create-react-app, I installed CKEditor as an npm module, and imported the ClassicEditor build as recommended by the quickstart.

Development mode (via npm start) worked well, and I was happily integrating CKEditor with React, but as soon as I ran npm run build (which generates the create-react-app production build), I ended up with the following error:

> [email protected] build c:\Dev\scratch\ckeditor-integration
> node scripts/build.js

Creating an optimized production build...
Failed to compile.

Failed to minify the code from this file:

        ./node_modules/@ckeditor/ckeditor5-build-classic/build/ckeditor.js:5:7350

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2tRViJ9

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! [email protected] build: `node scripts/build.js`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] build script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

Ruh-roh. What to do next? How can I solve this? Is this solvable? Is there another way?

I completed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam in November 2017, after about eight weeks study, with a score of 85%.

Below are a series links to blog posts containing all my study notes, and finally, another blog post containing my thoughts on the exam, as well as some exam feedback and tips for those who will sit the exam after me.

I’ve been hosting this blog on Amazon S3 for a few months now, and thought it would be a good idea to write about how it’s set up, in case future me needs to refer to it, and to give pointers to anybody else who is interested in setting up their own website using Amazon S3, HTTPS, and the CloudFlare CDN.

Hosting this website costs cents per month, and avoids security risks of other blog platforms such as Wordpress by being purely static, consisting just regular HTML files, JavaScript, and images; which means no PHP, .NET, etc. This works well with what I need in a blog.

After heaps of study, I passed AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, with an overall score of 85%.

Here are my notes on how I studied for the exam, and tips for preparing based on my experience in the actual exam.

These notes were written while working through the A Cloud Guru AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate online course. These notes are partly from the videos, and also from various other online sources. Primarily, they’re notes for me, but you might find them useful too.

Since the AWS platform is changing so quickly, it’s possible that some of these notes may be out of date, so please take that into consideration if you are reading them.