Learn By Doing Newsletter

I know this week was Halloween, but don't be spooked by this weeks volume title there won't be a test at the end of this. However, there is some very good serverless content in this weeks cloud section.

In Volume 27 we have an interesting white paper from researchers at UC Berkeley and UW Madison that have created their own language for computing Linear Algebra on serverless platforms. We have a nice introduction into the newly released React Hooks. We also have some nice tools this week and some that you should use with extreme caution.

I hope you had a great week this week and that you enjoy checking this volume. If you have articles that you think I should be checking out be sure to reach out to me @kylegalbraith on Twitter.

☁️ Cloud

My Serverless AdventureOften times I post interesting serverless articles here that are more geared towards folks that are already ramped up on the concept. This post is more of an introductory post into the world of serverless with some very common mistakes that most folks don't write about.

AWS Lambda Security Quick-Start GuideIf the previous post was your introduction, consider this one your paranoia peek behind the curtain. Serverless is fantastic, but it's not bullet proof. You still need to account for security and the folks over at Puresec have created a nice list of things to watch out for in a serverless security world.

numpywren: Serverless Linear AlgebraYes, this weeks cloud section is all about serverless. That wasn't exactly my plan, but this is a very interesting white paper from some researchers at UC Berkeley and UW Madison. They have a created a way to run complex linear algebra in a serverless environment using their own language LAmbdaPACK.

🔨 Tools

cloud-nuke: A tool to delete all resources in your AWS accountI think having "nuke" in the name implies you should be very careful using this. However, it is a nice tool to have in your pocket if you ever need to scrub your AWS account of all resources. You could also use AWS Organizations and be able to do effectively the same thing.

vue-dark-mode: Minimalist dark design for vue.jsVue continues to grow in popularity and this seems like an interesting library to use with it. I am not the most aesthetically gifted person, so if I can use a framework/library that makes my life easier I tend to look into it. For those that love the new dark mode on Mojave and Vue, this might be for you.

howler - Audio library for the modern webThis is a very nicely crafted library that makes working with audio on the web enjoyable again. I'm personally going to look into adding this to a few projects myself.

Code && Languages

Microservice Architecture at MediumA lot of folks are facing the problem of decomposing an old monolithic application in microservices. Medium is no different in this regard. But moving from monolith to microservice needs business justification. I feel that the "Why now?" section of this post is a well thought out approach to deciding when to make a big change like that.

Making Sense of React HooksSo React Conf went down this week and with it came a big announcement around React Hooks. While I won't be going and refactoring my React apps right now, hooks do look very promising for making pieces of logic in a single component into reusable pieces of code.

Architecture as a burdenNot everyone gets to build software that is the latest and greatest using the latest enhancements in technology. Actually, quite a few of us have to work on legacy software that is often passed down from one developer to the next. Unwinding some of the decisions made in a legacy project can be challenging, not impossible, but certainly not easy as well.

😎 Cool find of the week

GitHub October 21 post-incident analysisIf you or your company are all up on GitHub you likely experienced some pain last week when multiple services went down for the better part of a day. This is an analysis, a deep dive, into what caused the initial issue (a 43 second network drop) that had compounding effects throughout the entire GitHub ecosystem. It is a great read on the internal systems that exist at a company like GitHub.