Why I built a AWS Amplify Plugin

This past weekend I published an AWS Amplify plugin called amplify-category-data.

Wait- what's AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify is a framework for building awesome mobile and web apps. It's what I call a "full-stack framework" because it takes an opinionated aproach to full-stack development which substaintially simplifies the workflow of building and maintaining the frontend, backend, and CI/CD infrastructure and code.

So if it's such a great framework, why make a plugin for it?

It's all about the data

Amplify is great at replicating backend environments in the cloud through its clever use of infrastructure as code. I noticed it had no obvious solutions when it came to seeding those newly created environments.

After a bit of research on different approaches for importing data into DynamoDB, and found a AWS cloud architecture blog detailing a cloudformation template that could simply the process of importing data.

Work hard so I can be lazy later

I do not enjoy manually generating test data. Multiply that by 10 when simultaneously building a UI and schema to generate the test data. Turns out dealing with enough projects like this was the motivation I needed to refactor and cleanup the cloudformation template into a reusable amplify plugin which could generate and deploy the resources with a few simple commands.

Try out amplify-category-data with your project

If you have an Amplify project, I encourage you to check out amplify-category-data, the newest AWS Amplify plugin.

If this is the kind of thing you want to use or learn more about, I welcome you to contribute to the project. With over 500 downloads within the first few days of publishing, I could definitely use the help!

If you use AWS Amplify make sure to like and follow me for more content- I'll be sure to follow you back!