Learn By Doing Newsletter

Another week, another awesome Learn By Doing newsletter packed with content to keep you busy this weekend.

This week I curated a high quality set of articles that you can focus on for the next week. We dive into how to learn Kubernetes by actually using it in a sand box environment. There is some hot takes coming out of GopherCon 2018 that are worth a read, they certainly made me more interested in Golang. I also discovered a very cool open source project from Nordstrom that walks through creating a real-world serverless application.

A huge thank you to our sponsor this week, Linux Academy! I have used their courses to prepare for AWS certifications, learn Ansible, and explore other cloud providers. So show your support for them by checking out the link below.

How to Use Your First Microservice with AWS Lambda Services like AWS Lambda need to be integrated into the front end, and because AWS is so widely used, it’s important for web developers to have some familiarity with how it works. This step by step guide is for web developers who want to know more about microservice architecture but aren’t ready to learn the whole AWS platform from the ground up. If you're ready to get started with self-paced AWS training, get $150 off at Linux Academy (for a limited time)!

☁️ Cloud

Introducing Two New Bonus Chapters on Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD for Learn AWS by Using ItOn Monday I released two new bonus chapters for my Learn AWS By Using It course! These chapters focus on more advanced AWS topics like Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. If you are just beginning your cloud journey, consider checking out my course. You can get full details on the course and the bonus chapters in this post.

Running AWS DynamoDB Locally for .NET Core DevelopersDynamoDB local is an awesome way to run your applications locally with a real representation of your data storage. This is a great post from Steve Gordon that demonstrates how to setup the DynamoDB local docker image for your .NET Core applications.

Learn Kubernetes by doing.Kubernetes continues to have a steep learning curve for developers. It is simple to get started with but the closer you get to production ready the more complex it appears to be. This is a cool service that looks to apply the "learn by doing" mantra that I am a big fan of to the K8s world.

Creating Serverless Applications with ClojureScript and Firebase: Jake McCraryDo you like serverless? Do you enjoy programming in clojure? This video is for you. Jake McCrary demos how you can create a serverless application using Clojure and Firebase.

🔨 Tools

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should KnowHave you ever thought about the performance of an algorithm or a design you thought up? Most of us take a quick look at it and chalk it up as reasonable. This is a cool project that some folks at Berkeley published that shows exactly what different types of latency look like and how to calculate them. It is worth keeping bookmarked the next time your working on a complex algorithm.

Snowy - A new image library for PythonThis a new image library that was written for Python. It looks very similar to things like ImageMagick but has a more intuitive collection of APIs. This appears to be a smaller tool for those image cropping, blurring, and composition jobs.

Hello, Retail! The serverless workshopThe folks over at Nordstrom created this open source project that covers creating a real world serverless application. One of the questions I hear a lot is what does a serverless application look like in the real world? I think the folks over at Nordstrom have done a great job here in representing a few basics as well as more advanced topics.

Code && Languages

GopherCon 2018 - Machine Learning in GoGopherCon was last week in Denver and there is a ton of awesome content coming out of it. This is a live blog from Steven Klassen that explores applying machine learning to Go, not using machine learning in Go. Yes, imagine apply machine learning to your Go code bases to detect those "weird" pieces of code that just don't feel quite right.

GopherCon 2018 - Implementing a Network Protocol in GoAnother hot take out of GopherCon, this time on how we can implement a network protocol in Go. This is a fun live blog on how we can implement an IPv6 protocol in Go. There is quite a few code snippets in here to follow along with.

How to conditionally build an object in JavaScript with ES6I always enjoy quick reads on how to simplify and cleanup mundane pieces of code. This take from Knut explains how you remove all of that conditional logic for building up objects with new features of ES6.

😎 Cool find of the week

Terminal version of the game "2048" written in C++ 11We seem to be going full circle with a lot of technologies lately. We can run Windows 95 inside of Electron which is both cool and gross all at the same time. This is project that brings back the famous 2048 game that you have likely seen on your smartphone. Only now you can play it directly in your terminal. Could be a good way to kill some time while your waiting for your builds to finish.