Learn By Doing Newsletter

Here we are one month into the Learn By Doing weekly newsletter and the following has already doubled! Thank you for taking an interest in my projects and allowing me the opportunity to share my knowledge with you.

I also opened my email yesterday and found an email titled, "Welcome to the Amazon Aurora Serverless Preview!". Obviously there is going to be a blog post or two covering what I learn playing with Aurora Serverless. But for now, here is volume 4 of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

aws-with a CLI tool for managing complex accounts Once you start to scale up the next Twitter for cats in AWS you are likely going to have more than one AWS account to maintain. aws-with looks like a great CLI tool for managing those more complex organizations that have multiple accounts.

Kubernetes Is Hard: Why EKS Makes It Easier for Network and Security Architects If you have never deployed your own K8s cluster than you might not be familiar with everything that is involved. This is a great post that walks through the gotchas as it relates to network configuration for K8s clusters and how AWS EKS can help.

Netflix is open sourcing Zuul 2 Just when you think the streaming giant couldn't have more cool open source projects, they release Zuul 2. This is a very cool networking project that fronts all traffic into the Netflix cloud. There is some particularly cool features in here like origin concurrency protection.

Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster This is an oldy but a goody. Adam Drake explores why running Hadoop clusters for EMR jobs might not always be the most efficient or cost effective.

Revisiting “Serverless Architectures” Mike Roberts revisits his original post from May 2016 to highlight how things have improved in the serverless world and how somethings have not. It is really eye opening to see just how fast the technology has moved in two years.

Building AI Enabled GraphQL Applications Great introductory post that steps through using AWS AppSync, AWS Amplify, and Lambda to create a React Native app that can stream mp3's via a GraphQL endpoint.

Beyond CPU: horizontal pod autoscaling with custom metrics in Google Kubernetes Engine A long requested feature of GCP Kubernetes Engine has been the ability to scale based on things other than CPU usage. Well now you can, and it is sweet! You can scale K8s clusters off of custom metrics now.

📣 Blockchain

Universal Dapp Store As blockchain becomes more developer friendly, applications are being created that are decentralized. Think web apps, but on the blockchain. The Universal Dapp store is your one stop shop to see what Dapps are available today.

How to Run a Blockchain on a Deserted Island with Pen and Paper Don't quite understand blockchain? Your not alone. Tal does an incredible job of taking a complex topic like distributed ledgers and breaking it down into a story we can all understand.

Clustering Cryptocurrencies with Affinity Propagation This is a very interesting look at the cryptocurrency market and how coins cluster to various industries and use cases.

Languages

We migrated to Next.js to serve our home page 7.5× faster React is a frontend framework that has been known to have some performance issues. In this post Manifold explores how they switched to Next.js, a progressive web app framework, and made their landing page 7.5x faster. Needless to say, I think PWAs are going to be a thing going forward.

Visual Studio Live Share Like pair programming but don't want to sit next to your smelly cube mate? That's ok, now you can just use VS Live Share and pair program just like you would collaborate on a Google Doc. Double bonus, it's available for VS Code.

Dynamic Programming – 7 Steps to Solve any DP Interview Problem No one really likes whiteboard programming. But as it turns out most whiteboard interviews can be solved in 7 steps because they are usually a dynamic programming problem. Worth a read if you have a technical interview coming up.

Introducing Guess.js - a toolkit for enabling data-driven user-experiences on the Web Morrrr optimization! Guess.js is a slick idea that does predictive pre-fetching based on previous user behaviors. I could see this being very handy for React and Angular applications.

Microservice Testing As microservices become the new architecture everyone is pushing towards I see a lot of people overthinking and over complicating their testing strategy. This is a great post from 2014 that lays out terminology and ideas on how we should all be testing our microservices.

Introducing Git protocol version 2 Is it surprising that Google wants to optimize Git? Not really. Did you know that the fetch command was as inefficient as it actually is.

The simplest web site that could possibly work well As a static website fan I have become a follower of static website generators. This is a cool post on how the NEJS conf created their website for 2018 with the static website generator Eleventy.

😎 Cool find of the week

12 “Manager READMEs” from Silicon Valley’s Top Tech Companies As a former manager myself, I find it fascinating to learn how others have approached the position. This is a cool post on how managers in Silicon Valley set themselves and their teams up for success.

Hungry to learn Amazon Web Services?

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