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

Build a Serverless GeoSearch GraphQL API using AWS AppSync & ElasticsearchThis is a very in depth article put together by the folks at Serverless. There is some cool tidbits in here about provisioning Elasticsearch clusters and AppSync via Serverless obviously. It is also a simple introduction to GraphQL and using Velocity templates.

Titanium-LambdaTitanium Lambda is an opinionated and robust set of tools, processes, and beliefs in how AWS Lambda functions should be implemented, tested, and deployed. There are some interesting tid bits in here around CodeStart, CodePipeline, and performing load testing via Gatling. Worth checking out if you are like most developers and quickly need to bring your serverless devs up to an enterprise level.

Self Enforcing, Self Documenting, Infrastructure Change Management with CodePipeline and CloudFormationI really do think CodePipeline is the way forward when it comes to any kind of deployment in AWS. They are rapidly developing new features and this post really highlights the power it offers.

AWS DeepLens is now available for purchaseI remember at re:Invent when DeepLens was first announced. As soon as the announcement happened special sessions were opened up to attendees to get the first look. Lines wrapped around the Venetian trying to get into these sessions, why you might ask? Because each session attendee got a free DeepLens. It was madness. But, now at last, you can skip the line and order your very own DeepLens.

Grassbian: AWS GreenGrass on the Raspberry PiI have never deployed Green Grass onto a Raspberry PI, but those I know that have say its more complicated than you might think. I think Grassbian is a great idea in concept, but reading through the setup, I don't know that this is much simpler. Either way it is worth a read and I will certainly give this a whirl in the near future.

Introducing QUIC support for HTTPS load balancingThis is a slick new feature for load balancers in Google Cloud. You can now flip a switch and have QUIC transport on your HTTPS load balancers. It essentially reduces the handshake down to two steps instead of the 6-8 normally.

📣 Blockchain

Everything they don’t want you to know about EOS.Block.one has certainly been making headlines for the amount of money they have raised for EOS. This article does a great job at analyzing the tradeoffs EOS is making to be more scalable than Ethereum. The biggest tradeoff that is talked about the most, less decentralization.

Adding Ethereum Classic Support to CoinbaseI don't typically believe in posting about what crypto currencies are being listed where. But, this announcement from CoinBase came as a surprise for a few people. A lot of speculation has been going on about what the next coin to be listed would be, and I think most people were guessing it would be Ripple.

How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the BlockchainThis is a hilarious post on how the author claimed to be the owner of the Mona Lisa by manipulating the tech of a blockchain startup. While this is just an example, it does shine a light on the use case of global logistics and why we might need at least one person in the middle to gurantee authenticity.

Why Blockchain is HardBlockchain can be very confusing for not just business folks but for even deeply technical folks as well. It is incredibly easy to fall into the hype trap and think blockchain is the solution to everything. The reality is that it's not, and it is actually very complex to implement, maintain, and scale.

Code && Languages

Embedding Machine Learning Models to Web Apps (Part-1)Obviously I am a big fan of articles that enable the reader to jump into a project and start building something. If you are new to machine learning models and classifiers than this post is for you. In it you get an opportunity to build a movie review classifier and deploy it to a Python Flask app.

100 Times Faster Natural Language Processing in PythonWhen algorithms become slow, like in this case for language processing in Python, there is almost always a bottle neck in a loop somewhere. This post highlights just that, but also how to solve it with Cython.

raspberry-pi-os: Learning operating system development using Linux kernel and Raspberry PiIf you follow me on Twitter you might have seen me tweet about this GitHub find. Sergey started raspberry-pi-os as a way to learn more about creating operating systems. If you have never had the pleasure of learning how a Mutex or Semaphore works, consider checking out this repo.

Better API testing with the OpenAPI SpecificationContract testing is a hot topic in my day job right now. I found this post about how it can be done by using the OpenAPI spec, aka Swagger, to run automated contract tests via Prism. If you are starting down the micro-service path I would consider reading this as I found it quite helpful.

Guide into Static Site GeneratorsI think there might be a new static site generator coming out every week. This is a great write up by the folks at Bejamas on the popularity of each one and the tradeoffs associated with them.

Perfect Pulled Pork with React Native, Expo, and ExpressNot only is this title hilarious, but the actual project is quite awesome as well. Sure there are much simpler ways to check on your smoker, like a digital thermostate, but I love the idea to just start building something. If you read one thing all weekend, read this.

Introducing Polly.js a Netflix open source project that records, replays, and stubs HTTP interactionsIt's not really a weekly newsletter if we don't talk about Netflix at least once. This week they open sourced their internal tool for recoding, replaying, and stubbing HTTP calls from client side apps. Polly.js looks promising if you are looking to mock out your HTTP calls and run tests against them.

😎 Cool find of the week

The GraphQL StackGraphQL is very popular right now and for a lot of good reasons. However, like most new-ish technologies, folks get a bit of information overload as it relates to tools and the like. I thought this was a cool idea to consolidate all of the tools into one place so you can choose the right one for your work.