Blog

Hackathon Collaboration with Live Share on Visual Studio

One of the challenges of participating remotely in a Hackathon is the ability to cooperate with your team in anything like being there in person. No looking over someone's shoulder. No borrowing the keyboard to fill in a bit…

AWS MediaLive + Drones = Hackathon Fun

Hackathons!  Weeeeeee!!!!!  Am I right? I work in tech and I love it!  I do not come from a technical background.  Nope.  I have decades of business management experience under my belt which helps me navigate...

AWS Media Services + AWS Amplify

YouToad For the first Metal Toad hackathon of 2020, our goal was to build a web based social media platform for on demand video using AWS Media Services and AWS Amplify. Amplify allows users to store media in s3 buckets…

Metal Toad & AWS Media Services: What We Hacked

Wednesday, May 6th at 9:00 am: Toads are poised at the starting line. Metal Toad’s AWS Media Services hackathon is about to begin!  

Metal Toad Office in Beverly Hills

After several years of operating in Los Angeles, in the nearby Century City neighborhood, Metal Toad has moved its central Los Angeles AWS Cloud Consulting operation to the city of Beverly Hills.

How Cloud became the most important buzzword in business

Cloud is not the first (and probably not the last) disruptor to business via software.  Over the past 50 years or so there have been four major epochs of software, with Cloud being the latest. SaaS software is dying and the…

Lambda: javascript vs python

For this hackathon we created a product, YouToad, using Amplify (S3, React, Lambda) and AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Since we were using React and I wanted to learn JavaScript.

Metal Toad Hackathon - A unique (non-technical) experience

Have you ever felt happy, nervous, motivated and excited in just 48 hours? If your answer is no you have never participated in a hackathon before!

Metal Toad’s AWS Media Services Hackathon

This is an exciting week at Metal Toad—it’s hackathon time! Twice a year, the Toads devote two full days to rapid innovation, and it’s always a blast. And since we’ve been a remote-first company since last fall, we’re well…

Cloud + Live Events

As CIO at sports and music entertainment giant AEG, Bill Martin drives the convergence of business and technology to deliver innovative success. Bill and I got together to talk about how businesses are actualizing the…

The Value of Values

Given the times it seems appropriate to lean back into some of the unique aspects of Metal Toad's work culture that I've had time to observe. In my role as Director of Accounts I hold space in both sales and account support…

What is AWS EC2?

AWS EC2 is short for Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud.  If we dive a little deeper, AWS EC2 is a web service that allows you to rent increments of processing power (CPU) and computer memory (RAM) within AWS’s giant…