Learn By Doing Newsletter

Week 16 of the Learn By Doing newsletter is here and with it is another set of awesome curated articles relating to the Cloud, Development Tools, and General Coding.

This week has a very cool find from the team over at SpaceX, they made their API publically available so you can check in on Elon Musk's roadster as it is orbiting around us. We also have a cool Android project from the development team at Google that builds the Google Next app every year. I also released a new blog post this week that focuses on running browser tests as part of your AWS CodePipeline using Cypress and CodeBuild.

☁️ Cloud

How To Run Browser Tests via Cypress in Your CI/CD Pipeline with AWS CodeBuildIn my latest blog post I explore how we can incorporate Cypress.io browser tests into our AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild setup. This was yet another simplified AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline tutorial that shows you the power it offers.

Pick a serverless fight: A comparative research of AWS Lambda, Azure Functions & Google Cloud FunctionsIf you didn't get a chance to read through, Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms, back in Volume 14 of this newsletter than this article is for you. Consider this your cliff notes version that explains the performance, cold start, instance lifetime, and a slew of other metrics across the various serverless platforms.

Use serverless functions and CDN to speed up API data callsThis is an interesting use of Azure CDN combined with Azure functions to store a session file. The use case here appears to leverage CDN caching in order to make frequently requested data like session data very quick to load.

What the f*** is the edge?So what the f*** is the edge and why does everyone keep talking about it? In simple terms it's the computer that is closest to you. This is a great post that dives into the nitty gritty details of edge computing and why it's important.

Scaling your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWSEveryone at this point should know that I am a sucker for a good static website blog post. In this post Elliot Forbes shares his experience in transitioning Tutorial Edge from a Laravel app to a Hugo static site. He shares how this helped him scale his infrastructure and cut his AWS costs.

Getting started with the Secure DevOps Kit for Azure (AzSK)AzSK is a collection of scripts, tools, and automations that dev ops teams using Azure can leverage to secure their workloads. This is an excellent video with Scott Hanselman and Mark Jacobs about how the tool is used internally at Microsoft.

How Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity accommodates uneven data access patterns The partition key has always played a major role when setting up DynamoDB workloads. It is still an important factor, picking a good partition key for querying and writing will never totally go away. However, adaptive capacity in DynamoDB has solved at least a portion of the write capacity when you end up sending all of your data to one partition.

Aurora Serverless: The Good, the Bad and the ScalableAurora Serverless came out a week ago and the internet went crazy for it. But it's not all rainbows and unicorns, there are a lot of limitations that will likely be addressed in the future by AWS. Give this post a read/listen from Jeremy Daly on those limitations and why the future looks bright.

🔨 Tools

go-tooling-workshop - A workshop covering all the tools gophers use in their day to day lifeI still find it a bit odd that Go developers refer to themselves as gophers, but to each their own. This is a cool open source repo that was created that covers a bunch of tools that folks who program in Go day in and day out utilize.

Open Sourcing fogg: Opinionated TerraformingIt turns out the same coding best practices like consistent naming, project layout and isolating components applies to infrastructure as code best practices as well. The folks at CZI released their open source tool, Fogg, to help you enforce such policies.

rb - Turns Ruby into a versatile command line utilityRuby is a really useful language and this tool is yet another example of the versatility it offers. 10 lines of code and you replace most command line tools that you use to process text in the terminal.

The A11Y Project - Patterns - An accessible widget & pattern libraryAs developers its critical we make the web accessible to everyone. This is a great collection of patterns from The A11Y Project that focuses on how we can make the web an inclusive place by making it accessible to everyone.

graphql-aws-pricing-api - AWS Pricing API in GraphQLAnother cool open source project from Bjorn Stange. This is a GraphQL powered EC2 pricing API that allows you to get the per hour price of an EC2 instance type. It supports both on demand and spot instances.

VerbalExpressions - RegularExpression made easyThis is a cool post for those that despise writing RegEx from memory. It introduces the library, VerbalExpressions, which is a cool abstraction of RegEx that lets you build complex expressions via a clear DSL.

Code && Languages

Google releases source for Google I/O 2018 for AndroidEvery year Google releases the source code for the official Google I/O Android app. This year is no different, but the app does include a major rewrite. It looks like the team made the switch to their own Android best practice by leveraging Architecture Components. O...it's also written in Kotlin which I would recommend to anyone creating Android apps.

C# Features: Innovations or Imitations? – Part 1If the history of C# programming and .NET peaks your interest, give this post a read. It is an excellent journey through how C# came to be, how it innovated along the way and how it imitated other language features.

The Total Beginner's Guide to Game AIGame development is quite a fascinating interesting. Probably the most interesting part to me is building AI into games. You can create an interface for a player to play a game, but creating an AI that plays with the human is fascinating. Consider this your introduction to Game AI.

F# 4.5 has officially been made generally availableIf functional languages is your jam, you might want to check out the latest version of F#. New features include things like Span, match!, and looser rules for list/array expressions.

Exploiting TypeScript ArraysTypescript is becoming more mainstream and for good reason. It provides safety and extensibility in many areas that make our lives easier. This post explores the power you have over Arrays in TS. More specifically how you can implement/override behaviors by extending to your own array interfaces.

How GitLab switched to Headless Chrome for testingLearn how GitLab made the switch from PhantomJS to Headless Chrome. If you are writing automated tests in the browser, this is definitely worth a read. There is a lot of details about the problem areas the team ran into in switching to a Selenium/ChromeDriver implementation.

Exploring Error Handling Patterns in GoKyle Krull explores the topic of error handling in Go. Initially error handling is a bit foreign in Go if you come from other languages like JavaScript or C# where there is a try/catch statement. But as Kyle covers in this post, there is a method behind the madness here.

😎 Cool find of the week

SpaceX-API - Open Source REST API for rocket, core, capsule, pad, and launch dataSpaceX rolled out an open source project that provides public access to their data. It is a cool API you can query to get upcoming launches, past launches, and even data on Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster. I could see some very fun projects to release to the world with this data.