Learn By Doing Newsletter

I am officially back in the US after a nice couple of weeks in France. This week I have some choice articles for you that cover a lot of AWS Lambda.

First off we have a great post from Vicki Boykis on the curious case of the broken Lambda function. There is also a deep dive into implementing your own debugger using ptrace from Liz Rice. To cap things off we have three excellent tools this week to level up your design skills and improve the performance of your React Native applications.

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☁️ Cloud

The Case of the Broken LambdaThis a different take on AWS Lambda than what we typically see around the internet. Vicki explores how to leverage S3 PutEvents to trigger a Lambda function to transform some data. There is also a great deep dive in here about Python wrappers around C libraries and how those work in a serverless environment.

Concerns that go away in a serverless worldAt this point everyone is pretty familiar with serverless and you have likely read an article or two about the benefits it provides. What is often missing is how exactly serverless compute makes our lives easier. Paul does a great job of giving a few examples/scenarios in a server world that are no longer relevant when using something like AWS Lambda.

How To: Tag Your Lambda Functions for Smarter Serverless ApplicationsResource tagging is a key concept that can give you great insights in your AWS spend. This article from Jeremy explores this concept for serverless applications. He gives some pointers on the tags you should leverage and how they can benefit you.

🔨 Tools

WatermelonDB - Next-gen database for powerful React and React Native appsWatermelon is a fully observable SQLite database for use in React and React Native projects. This is meant to replace or extend the simple use case that Redux or MobX solves with a persistence adapter.

Colorbox by LyftIf your design skills are lacking like mine you will likely find this new tool from Lyft to be helpful. Build out visually appealing color schemes with a very easy tool.

Designing with real datSolid UX is a must have nowadays. Big companies like Dropbox have known this for quite some time. Here the design team from Dropbox details how they use Framer X to build out new designs using real data.

Code && Languages

A debugger from scratch — part 1Have you ever implemented your own compiler? Built a debugger? This is an intricate post from Liz Rice that explore how you can implement a debugger using ptrace. I wish this resource existed when I was in college.

Introduction to WebSockets in NodeWebSockets provide two way communication between the client and server in realtime. It can be a bit to wrap your head around if your wheelhouse is HTTP. But Marcin does a great job of explaining the protocol and how to implement an example in Node.

oasgraph - OpenAPI specifications into GraphQL interfacesCreating GraphQL interfaces has seemed a bit to manual for me and then I stumbled on this open source project. Oasgraph takes your API specs and generates the interfaces for you.

😎 Cool find of the week

30 seconds of codeThis is a cool project that is sponsored by DigitalOcean. It is a curated collection of useful JavaScript snippets that you can look at and understand in less than 30 seconds. There is some real gems in here like a momize function to create a simple cache.