Learn By Doing Newsletter

It's another volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter with some fascinating content this week. I had to make some tough decisions this week as there was a lot of spectacular content this week.

A few that made it in this week, an awesome article on stateful Azure Functions courtesy of Sarah Drasner. A nice defense of functional CSS courtesy of Mike Crittenden. A history lesson on joins in SQL courtesy of Dimitri Fontaine.

I also rolled out a new blog post of my own this week that explores how to track your fine grain AWS costs using a bit of Terraform and the underrated Budgets feature. A special thank you to our sponsor this week, Linux Academy. Checkout their content below and if you have never tried out their service, I highly recommend it.

Understanding the Internals of Kubernetes When your containers aren’t starting up and you have to look at logs and error messages to figure out why, you need to know how Kubernetes works behind the scenes. If you don’t have some knowledge of the internals, you won’t know what basic troubleshooting steps to take, or how to get useful information about what is broken.

☁️ Cloud

How to Better Watch Your AWS Costs Before You ForgetAWS costs continues to be a popular topic throughout the community. There are several third party tools that you can buy that allow you to track your costs, but they can be expensive. So in this post I give an example of how you can monitor your fine grain costs using AWS Budgets.

Track the number of coffees consumed using AWS DeepLensThere is no way I will be implementing this. I might make DeepLens lose count of how much coffee I drink. Nonetheless, this is a cool post from the folks over at Amazon that gives a practical example of how DeepLens can be used.

What are Durable Functions?This is a fantastic post from Sarah Drasner that explores how you can write stateful Azure Functions. Think of stateful functions in Azure being akin to step functions in AWS. Give this post a read and make sure you check out the slick animations.

🔨 Tools

reinvent-planner - Plan your AWS re:Invent 2018 sessions by visualizing itWhy something like this isn't baked into the actual re:Invent scheduler is a bit surprising. But, kudos to Carlos for giving re:Invent folks a better way to visualize their calendar on that crazy week.

Muze - Composable data visualizations in JavaScriptMuze is a new charting project for the web that is meant to be somewhere between low-level d3 and higher level FusionCharts. It looks very intuitive in the code by passing along the data model (schema) and the actual data.

marko - A friendly and fast UI library from eBayIt's interesting to explore front end projects and learn what others are building with. Up until this week I had never even heard of marko. It is another front end framework that is sharing their idea of how to build web apps. It looks quite fun and interesting, check it out.

Code && Languages

Turn the web into a database: An alternative to web crawling/scrapingMixnode is aiming to turn the web into one big database that can be queried with SQL. It appears to be an alternative solution to web scraping/crawling. They do all of that for you, so just ask for the content you want.

In defense of Functional CSSIf you have been following this newsletter for a bit you know that I am a fan of Tailwind CSS. But there is still a large chunk of folks who don't believe in functional CSS. This is a fantastic write up on some of the power it brings and why some issues with it are outdated.

A history lesson on SQL joins (in Postgres)I enjoy reading about how the languages I know today came to be. I certainly wasn't using SQL when joins didn't exist. So its interesting to read about how they came to be and their evolution since.

😎 Cool find of the week

What's a CPU to do when it has nothing to do?This week's Cool Find is a bit deeper down the technical track than previous weeks. However, it's because I still find this topic quite interesting. If you have never explored the internals of operating systems or written low level assembly code, it's worth reading up on. This article digs into what various OSes are doing when a CPU is idle.