Learn By Doing Newsletter

The Microsoft + GitHub acquisition has largely dominated tech world news this week. Which is why there is nothing related to it in this weeks newsletter! We don't need to talk about what could or might happen, let's enjoy the awesome posts that are not related to that this week.

This week Coin Base made waves with their announcement of upcoming SEC regulated crypto securities. Amazon Web Services almost broke /r/aws on Reddit with the General Availability of AWS EKS. Lastly, apparently writing C & C++ for the browser is quickly becoming a thing with WebAssembly.

Check out those articles and more in Volume 6 of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

A brief overview of the benefits of AWS EKS If you are new Kubernetes and why exactly AWS decided to create their own managed service for it, this is a good read to catch you up. I think Ed does a great job at explaining what managing your own K8s cluster is like and how AWS helps you solve that problem.

How to build a multi-region active-active architecture on AWS This post is jam packed with not only tips for designing active-active systems across multiple regions, but also about the concepts and principles your apps must follow to support that setup. There is also some explanation on how new DynamoDB and Aurora features support this use case.

SRE vs. DevOps: competing standards or close friends? SRE implements the DevOps interface. This is a great analogy that I found helpful when thinking about the differences/similarities between site reliability and dev ops practices.

Building your personal translator with Amazon Translate and Amazon Polly I have literally been learning French for the past three years and I am still not as fluent as I would like. Therefore, this idea of writing my own translator using Polly and Translate hit home for me. Of course mine would probably just say "speak slower".

Getting started with AWS EKS via Terraform It is very cool to see a tool like Terraform coming out with a "how to" guide for developers when it comes to getting started with AWS EKS. It is even more impressive that they got this published and in our hands right after the initial GA announcement.

Secure access to 100 AWS accounts Managing one AWS account is tricky enough at times if you have a large team. Segment is managing over a 100 different AWS accounts and they have automated the creation of them as well. This is a great post if you are thinking about having one AWS account per micro-service. I found the bit about no user in their accounts have AWS keys quite interesting.

The hidden costs of serverless With the release of the latest Gartner report the talk around AWS cost optimization is coming up again. I found this post from the CEO of Spotnist to be a nice summary of how Serverless can quickly become much more expensive than you might think. Especially when you introduce API Gateway with it.

📣 Blockchain

Coinbase is working on listing SEC-regulated crypto securities It isn't a big secret that cryptocurrency has been waiting for the SEC hammer to drop for a while now. But this is a very interesting spin, Coinbase is setting out on listing SEC-regulated crypto in the not so distant future. Even going as far to say that they could see themselves working with regulators to tokenize existing securities.

Serializing string arrays in solidity You can't really talk about Ethereum without talking about smart contracts and Solidity, the language smart contracts are written. I don't think any developers actually like Solidity, but this is a great post that demonstrates you do what you can with what you got.

Code && Languages

Mastering Image Delivery With Cloudinary Having never used Cloudinary before I found it interesting that they natively supported this workflow out of the box. It would be slick to see something like this implemented for CloudFront with Lambda at the Edge.

Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio WebAssembly has been picking up steam lately with advancements in Rust. I still don't know that I want to write C/C++ in the browser, but it's good to know there is some tools coming out to let me if I ever have the need.

Getting started with Elasticsearch in Python Elasticsearch is a very powerful tool to use, but it can also be a bit complicated to wrap your head around. Here is a good post that walks through some fundamentals and then shows you how to do some web scraping with Python and insert the results into ES.

StaticGen - A List of Static Site Generators for JAMstack Sites Looking to branch out of your current static site generator? Or are static site generators totally new to you? Check out this site put up by Netlify of what the top trending static site generators are.

Memory Efficient Data Structures If you find yourself forgetting some of those Computer Science data structures from college or you never even had that class, Frank is doing some awesome writeups on different data structures and RUM conjecture.

Torus: A Toolkit For Docker-First Data Science Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are certainly very popular right now. Manifold just open sourced some their tooling, Torus, which lets you spin up Docker containers in ~5 minutes to start processing ML jobs on your machine. This is a huge step forward for the ML community because they have felt a bit left behind in the Docker move.

A coffee-break introduction to time complexity of algorithms I have never read such an amusing article as it relates to the Big O and time complexity. The food analogies and sample code totally seal the deal for me. I will be sharing this with any folks I mentor going forward.

😎 Cool find of the week

otseca - Open source security auditing tool This is a cool open source tool that facilitates the collection of system configuration in order to analyze it for security vulnerabilities. I could see this being incorporated into other config mangement solutions or being ran via Packer.

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