Learn By Doing Newsletter

Welcome to another week of the Learn By Doing weekly newsletter. I have some great content for you this week that focuses on Kubernetes, Serverless, and infrastructure as code.

Cloud Forecast (our first sponsor) returns this week with a good article on the power serverless gives new companies trying to get a product out the door. We also have a brand new tool from Chris Lewis that prettifies Terraform output. If Docker is your jam your going to want to check out a new post this week that dives into keeping your container images small.

Also if your looking to accelerate your learning of Amazon Web Services, you can still grab any package of my course at 35% off. All packages now include two new bonus chapters that focus on Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD in AWS.

☁️ Cloud

How to Easily Boost the Delivery of Static Websites in AWSBetween sipping coffee and eating croissants here in France I somehow managed to finish a new blog post. In this one we explore a topic from my Learn AWS By Using It course in deeper detail, CloudFront delivery.

Announcing Lambda Support for PowerShell CoreSomehow this release snuck past me last week. It looks like the folks over at AWS Lambda have released another language for us to leverage in our serverless environments, Powershell. This one is a bit surprising, but when you think about enterprise customers and their Microsoft environments, it makes sense.

How we saved over $1,000 by building CloudForecast.io with Serverless and AWS Lambda.Sponsor alumni, Cloud Forecast.io, released a brand new article that dives into how they leveraged Serverless Framework and AWS Lambda to build and launch a brand new product. This post explores how they made the decision to choose Lambda.

🔨 Tools

Google Auth + Kuberos for kubectl authenticationWhen it comes to administering Kubernetes clusters, kops or kubectl are typically the first two tools folks use. This post aims to simplify the onboarding of new team members by hooking up K8s authentication to Google Auth.

You don't (may not) need Moment.jsIf there is one thing that can rub developers wrong it is often dates and timestamps. Because of this we use a lot of different libraries in our frameworks to make handling, parsing, and creating dates super simple. Moment.js is one of those tools and its fantastic, but has this repo points out, it comes with downfalls.

prettyplan - Prettify your Terraform plan outputIt would be cool if this had an API that build systems could leverage as well in order to sign off on a Terraform plan. Nonetheless this is still pretty cool and makes reading the plan output simpler.

Code && Languages

.NET Conf 2018 - Build Great Libraries using .NET StandardThis is a great video out of .NET Conf 2018 that dives into .NET Standard and how it can be leveraged to build class libraries. There is a lot of great information in here that explains the basics of .NET Standard and how it spans multiple verticals.

3 simple tricks for smaller Docker imagesNot unlike serverless functions, Docker images should minimize dependencies and be as lightweight as possible. This is a very approachable article that explains three different things you can do to keep your container images small.

All the Little Things by Sandi MetzI actually came across this video from Sandi Metz via this week's Cool Find. This is one of the best coding patterns and best practices video I have ever seen. Sandi does a great job of demonstrating how we can use very basic concepts to drastically improve our code.

😎 Cool find of the week

The best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervalsThis is a cool resource that ranks the best tech talks based on machine learning. There is a lot of awesome talks here that you might not have heard or seen before. This is incredibly helpful if you are looking for resources to learn a particular programming language or concept.