 Developer and Cloud Tools

AWS cloud development at St. Thomas focuses on using shared tools, serverless services, and automated workflows to create secure and maintainable applications. This article introduces the key practices, architectures, and resources that help developers build scalable solutions on a consistent foundation.

Information about DEVEX Developer and Cloud Tools at University of St. Thomas.

Front end development at St. Thomas involves working across several frameworks and vendor platforms. When starting new projects, developers should choose the framework that best meets the long-term needs of maintainability, accessibility, security, and sustainability. By using modern build tools, maintaining version control, keeping packages up to date, and following standardized practices, developers create

Information about DEVEX Developer experience at University of St. Thomas.

Starting a new back-end development project, or even being tasked with improving an older one, can be daunting. This checklist will help you improve your starting point and advance projects through an iterative improvement process. Not everything will be perfect, but you can always leave it in better shape than you found it.

When building applications in AWS, it’s important to follow consistent practices that improve security, reliability, and maintainability. These guidelines apply to all developers working with cloud resources in our environment.

When developing cloud applications in AWS, assign only the minimum necessary permissions for the application to perform its task, reducing the potential impact of security breaches. For example, do not grant your application full control of an S3 bucket or all S3 buckets if it only requires read permissions. Learn how to properly scope permissions for your application.

Many CMS platforms allow content editors to switch to a Code View where HTML can be edited directly. This guide covers the most common HTML elements used when editing page content. The goal is to produce clean, accessible HTML5 markup that works well with the site's existing templates and styles.

It is essential to provide documentation in your code repositories so that others know what the code does and how to use it. By understanding the power of Markdown for creating files such as README, CHANGELOG, and TODO you can ensure your code (and hard work) is helpful to others.

The University of St. Thomas ITS Cloud Team promotes AI-Assisted Engineering using well-established practices such as planning, requirements gathering, implementation, documentation, testing, and deployment (DevOps) over "vibe-coding" for official university projects.

Opinionated DevOps platforms give AI coding assistants the consistent conventions and structure they need to generate trustworthy, reliable output. Pairing AI-assisted engineering accelerates scaffolding, lowers cognitive load, and strengthens guardrails against AI-introduced drift across the DevOps lifecycle.

An opinionated Internal Developer Platform like Atlantis makes deliberate choices about tooling and workflow so teams spend less time on infrastructure decisions and more on business logic. Key benefits: faster time to value, built-in best practices, and team consistency.

An internal developer platform removes the guesswork from building on AWS by giving teams pre-configured golden paths, reusable starter code, and infrastructure templates. An introduction to the Atlantis DevOps platform adopted at St. Thomas, explaining why it was built, what it provides, and how to scaffold and deploy a production-ready serverless project in minutes.

Spec-driven development (writing formal requirements, design documents, and tasks before code) gives AI coding tools like Kiro a clear, unambiguous target instead of a vague prompt, reducing hallucinated logic and costly rework. Before starting a spec-driven workflow, we recommended a Learn, Iterate, Plan workflow for getting the most out of Kiro's requirements, design, and tasks phases.

DevOps is a culture and practice that unifies planning, development, testing, and deployment into a continuous, collaborative loop.

Whether using AI coding assistants for peer programming or vibe coding, it is essential to use the right tool for the task, set expectations and safeguards, and ensure that the generated code serves its purpose. If going into production, the generated code must be secure, reliable, and follow the cloud team's guidelines.

Kiro is an AI-powered IDE that enables small teams and individuals to achieve outcomes typically associated with larger organizations while maintaining architectural rigor, test coverage, and long-term maintainability. To be effective, Kiro requires deliberate guidance, thoughtful review, and a shift in mindset from ad-hoc coding to structured, specification-led development.

Using NVM from the start can prevent headaches and frustration over compatibility issues when managing multiple scripts and projects that utilize various versions of Node.js.

Starting a new front-end development project, or even being tasked with improving an older one, can be daunting. This checklist will help you improve your starting point and advance projects through an iterative improvement process. Not everything will be perfect, but you can always leave it in better shape than you found it.

Git repositories are critical to storing, versioning, and sharing code. Understanding the basics of how Git is used at St. Thomas will ensure your projects meet proper standards and best practices, making it easier to maintain, document, share, and deploy projects.

Git is the source of truth for both application code and infrastructure. Every change must be version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed via automated pipelines.

GitHub repositories can be used for code and script examples, classes, collaboration, and version control of text-based files. Critical infrastructure, enterprise applications, and projects deployed to AWS should use CodeCommit.