Learn By Doing Newsletter

This week I focused a lot on actually taking a break from technology and coding outside of work. The weather has been fantastic here in Oregon, we get really excited for 80 degree days around here. So when the 🌞 is out I like to take a break from the computer screen and enjoy a beer with some BBQ.

But I couldn't resist sharing volume 3 of this newsletter with you. I am very excited to share that I recently launched the Learn By Doing Newsletter landing page on my site.

☁️ Cloud

AWS Lambda Internals Part 2 Gal put together a follow up post to Part 1. This one is quite fascinating as he uncovers what may be potential AWS Lambda features in the future.

Intro guide to developing REST APIs using Lambda & API Gateway For all you serverless newbies out there that prefer the GUI over command line, this post is for you. It walks you through creating a Lambda + API Gateway configuration via the AWS Console. I can't say I would build production systems this way, but it's worth a read anyways.

How Netlify migrated to a multi-cloud infrastructure This is a great in depth look at what I predict will be the common theme as it relates to cloud in the coming years, multi-cloud infrastructure. Here Netlify walks through how they moved their nodes from RackSpace to Google Cloud Platform with the ability to fail over to AWS.

Solving Complex Ordering Challenges with Amazon SQS FIFO Queues and Message Groups FIFO queues to me are that tool you need every once in a while, but you never have it when you do. Luckily AWS SQS now supports FIFO and it even has the ability to group messages.

I’m afraid you’re thinking about AWS Lambda cold starts all wrong This post is from a few months back, but always worth a read. Everyone wants to move to serverless because its cheaper and scales on demand. But like everything in life, there is a trade off. Cold starts are that trade off to serverless. You should understand them if you are going to move to a totally serverless architecture.

Vue powered live CloudWatch Dashboard Everybody likes creating their own dashboards, admit it. This is a slick one that was built using Vue and is meant to replace the quirks of CloudWatch dashboards.

📣 Blockchain

Stratis Unveils Alpha Release of C# Smart Contracts Blockchain smart contracts are becoming all the rage as of late. It seems like more and more companies want to create their own version of them. One driver for that seems to be that folks don't want to write them in the Ethereum created Solidity. As a .NET developer, I am excited about the idea of writing them in my native tongue, C#.

Languages

Programming Conway's Game of Life with React For those that are not familiar, Conway's Game of Life is a zero player game that evolves passed on its initial configuration automatically. This is a great post that recreates the game via React.

Leveraging the type system in Scala to avoid mistakes Have you ever created a function like this, function(x: string, y:string)? What happens if the caller passes y in for x and x in for y, does your function break? Most likely, yes. This post does a great job of outlining the problem here and how to solve it in Scala.

Adding a code coverage badge to a PowerShell project If you are working in a Microsoft shop you are most likely going to encounter PowerShell at some point. This is a good read on how to 1) write tests against your PowerShell code and 2) how to produce code coverage metrics from those tests.

Algorithms Behind Modern Storage Systems Roll up your sleeves and go deep into the nitty gritty of B-Trees and LSM-Trees. This post on ACM highlights the tradeoffs between each of them when it comes to choosing the right storage system for your application.

Thou Shalt Not Depend on Me With all of the data leaks and security vulnerabilities out there it seems paramount that we need to be mindful of what our own code is depending on. Do you know what vulnerabilities exist in the open source projects you are using?

The Front-End Tooling Survey 2018 - Results Which javascript library or framework is essential to you? The second leading answer, "None of them are essential – I feel comfortable using native JavaScript on my projects".

😎 Cool find of the week

Nengo AI Machine learning and AI are two trends that are being talked about almost around the clock. I have been poking around with AWS SageMaker in my free time. But I also came across Nengo, a python powered neural simulator. They have a fantastic looking course that walks you through how to "build" a brain.

Hungry to learn Amazon Web Services?

Do you want to start accelerating your learning of AWS? Do you hate drowning in a sea of documentation? Me too. So I created an ebook + video course focused on learning Amazon Web Services by actually using it. Grab any package today at 35% off list price.