Learn By Doing Newsletter

Week 8 of the Learn By Doing newsletter is here! The tech world is alive with activity happening in almost every corner. This week we dive into a lot of Code and Cloud articles that are fascinating from a developer and architecture stand point. From doing realtime video analysis using AWS DeepLens to a deep dive on where AirBnb is at with React Native.

I want to say how excited I am by the traction that this newsletter has received already. A special thank you goes out to you for being one of the early participants. If there is something you would like to see added to this weekly distribution, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. This newsletter is all about sharing the fun and interesting things happening in tech. So if you got something to share, let's get it in here!

With that, let's jump into week eight of the weekly Learn By Doing newsletter, enjoy!

☁️ Cloud

Video analytics in the cloud and at the edge with AWS DeepLens and Kinesis Video StreamsNow that DeepLens has been officially released, be prepared for the onslaught of machine learning video posts. This one of course centers around detecting your dog inside your house, but its tested with a picture of a dog? Weird.

How to choose the best event source for pub/sub messaging with AWS LambdaYan does a great job in this post of analyzing the various publisher method for Lambda. The gut says instinct is the use SNS and for a lot of workloads that makes a lot of sense. But Kinesis is equally powerful if you can handle some of the caveats and complexities.

StreamAlert - A realtime data analysis framework from AirBnbStreamAlert is a new open source serverless alert framework that allows you to ingest, analyze, and alert on any data in your AWS environment. Launch it in your account, setup some rules, setup some alerts, and prosper.

Save on your AWS bill with Kubernetes IngressRunning a Kubernetes cluster is expensive when you need high availability. This is one of the reasons there was sticker shock when AWS EKS was released, the control plane is by default HA. This is a slick post on how one can achieve HA and lower your AWS bill by using an ingress controller.

What we like about Amazon's Elasticsearch on AWS?As someone that has built a product around AWS Elasticsearch I can't say I absolutely love the service. Is it better than running my own cluster? To an extent, yes. But there are some feature lacking around reindexing, ES versions, and the ability to run scripts. That said, I think this post does a nice job of hitting on some of the positives.

GCP arrives in the Nordics with a new region in FinlandAWS added a CloudFront region to Africa, well Google Cloud upped them this week by rolling out their new region in Finland. While Amazon is still adding regions and availability zones, the other providers seem hungry to beat them to it.

Architect, The Killer Serverless FrameworkHave you ever heard of the Serverless framework, Architect? I hadn't until I came across this blog post on Medium. It seems very streamlined and easy to use, I love that everything is represented in a plain text .arc file. Is it better than the others out there? TBD. I will certainly be giving this a try on an upcoming project.

The best ways to test your serverless applicationsThe conversation around how to test severless applications is an ongoing one. More tools, frameworks, and processes are being released almost weekly in an attempt to solve what is a fundamental development process, testing continously. This post does a great job at diving into the various ways of doing this today that you might want to consider.

How AWS uses automated reasoning to help you achieve security at scaleZelkova is a terrible name for the internal AWS math engine that automatically verifies access policies. That aside, this is a very interesting read about how mathematical proofs are being used to determine how permissive IAM and S3 policies are.

📣 Blockchain

Exploring Stellar Lumens — Development TutorialBlockchain is a fascinating technology, but at times it feels unapproachable to developers. This is exasperated by the wide variety of technologies and varying developer friendliness. I find Stellar to be the most developer friendly and this article does a nice job of highlighting just how easy it is to get started using the JS SDK.

Code && Languages

How we spotted--and fixed--11 errors in our docs with our new markdown prooferI always like a new take on an existing tool or process that is creative and solves a problem. Ricardo from Circle CI wrote a quick tool for sanity checking code blocks in their Jekyll markdown to make sure the snippets actually work. It would be neat to see this incorporated into a build process.

Assessing Loading Performance in Real Life with Navigation and Resource TimingIf your a bit a data geek, like me, then you will likely enjoy this post from Jeremy Wagner. It is a very in depth look on how we can measure all sorts of performance metrics for front end development. It dives very deep into the native navigations and resource timing objects and how we can measure performance of a variety of metrics from properties stored in those objects.

Why you should learn just a little Awk: An Awk tutorial by ExampleThis post goes all the way back to 2010 but is very relevant to todays work still. Everyone has their favorite Linux/Windows commands for diagnosing logs. Some folks use grep exclusively, while others use Powershell. But this was the first I had seen that used lesser known command Awk. After seeing these practical snippets, I am going to have to give this a try.

How to Write a Git Commit MessageI was working at a client recently where their commit messages were literally just "added variable". So I thought it was fitting to share some thoughts on why good commit messages matter. I'll let Chris Breams take it form here.

JavaScript engine fundamentals: Shapes and Inline CachesJavaScript historically has gotten a bad rap for its robustness and perceived performance. Luckily for us, this belief has largely changed over the years and it is now a developer favorite. This is a fascinating read about how JS is operating underneath the hood for objects that have the same 'shape'. Fair warning: this post dives pretty deep.

The 7 Biggest Lessons I’ve Learned By Building A Twitter BotThinking about spamming us Twitter users with your big idea for a bot? Might want to give this a read so that at least I get something out of your automated "thanks for following me".

Kubernetes' ComplexityIf you have never read something from Jeff Geerling, you are missing out. He does a fantastic job of writing as he is learning something, so you get an authentic view of what it's like to learn that particular technology. In this post he tackles Kubernetes and does a great job of highlighting the problem areas and the use cases.

React Native at AirbnbIf you have been on the fence about React Native, or if you just want to know how it has worked at scale you should read this series from AirBnb. The choice they made to choose React Native and the reasons for doing so really resonated with me. Jump to the bottom of this article to get to the other posts.

Finding my new favorite song on SpotifyThe title of this article does not do Eric justice in the awesomeness department. But this is an awesome post on how he used the Spotify API to analyze what music he likes listening to using data analysis.

😎 Cool find of the week

Blockchain Demo 2.0This is a very cool visual demo of what is actually happening on a blockchain. It walks through the high level concepts from genensis block all the way through 51% attacks.