Learn By Doing Newsletter

Another week and another stellar volume of the Learn By Doing Newsletter! This week we have a lot of interesting things across the cloud spectrum as well as some deep dives in the coding space.

This week Graham Lyons dives into AWS networking and tries to pull us out of the confusion that is introduced anytime we hear the term VPC. Taryn over at Stack Overflow gives us the rundown on what it took to upgrade SO to SQL Server 2017 and how it is approaching a 2019 upgrade. Michael Lynch explores the other side of TDD, writing good tests versus bad tests and how we can be better test driven developers.

There is also an awesome Cool Find this week that allows you to travel the world via radio stations. Check out all these and more in this weeks volume, enjoy!

☁️ Cloud

6 Interesting Things You Need to Know from Creating Serverless MicroservicesI put together this new blog post earlier in the week. In my free time I have building out parler.io, a text to speech conversion service for content producers. This explores the serverless architecture that is backing the current alpha release. These are my observations from building out Parler entirely serverless and some lessons I have learned along the way.

Everything You Need To Know About Networking On AWSVirtual Private Cloud (VPCs) is a common term when speaking about AWS. It's also a term, that when heard, causes people to tune out and their eyes glaze over just a bit. Networking in AWS is critical but it's also complicated and takes a bit to wrap your head around. Here Graham gives a thought out breakdown of all the pieces that you will come across when setting up your networking in AWS.

Cloud Computing without ContainersWhile everyone is pushing to containers, serverless, or even both, CloudFlare looks to be going a different direction. In this article we get an overview of the underlying architecture backing CloudFlare Workers. Essentially, there is no containers underneath the hood. Instead these Workers use the Isolate idea from the Javascript V8 engine instead.

🔨 Tools

Slate - A completely customizable framework for building rich text editorsIf you have ever had the pleasure (or pain) of implementing rich text editors in a web application you may be interested in what Slate has to offer. Unlike others in this space, Slate aims to abstract itself from your data. This allows you to control what the editor does but still lets the editor handle a lot of the painful stuff for you.

sr.ht, the hacker's forge, now open for public alphaThis is a very cool project that looks to offer an alternative to GitHub or GitLab that is entirely modular and open source. You can install and run it on your own hardware or your own cloud. It is flexible to your needs and doesn't pin you into any one way of completing or tracking tasks. This is a very cool idea and a lot of work has been put into it already.

vue-lazy-image-loading - Vue lazy image and background loading pluginIf you are on the VueJs train, this open source project is for you. Progressive image rendering and lazy loading images is critical to improving web performance, especially for mobile devices. This library introduces this concept to Vue and makes it super simple to add to any application.

Code && Languages

How we upgraded Stack Overflow to SQL Server 2017Taryn over at Stack Overflow took the time to write down what it took to upgrade to SQL Server 2017. There is a lot of observations that are useful for gaining exposure to what a massive database move looks like at a large site like SO.

What the heck is the event loop anyway? This is a classic from Philip Roberts that explores the Javascript event loop. If you are exploring JS and find yourself asking the question, what exactly is this language and how does it work? Watch this video and you will be ahead of many other developers just like you.

Why Good Developers Write Bad Unit TestsA lot is made about testing, test driven development, and all of the derivatives of them. But few people focus on what a good test looks like, or more importantly what makes a test bad. I found this article from Michael to be incredibly insightful and there is some great takeaways here that can be applied across languages.

😎 Cool find of the week

Google Earth for live radiosThis is a very cool project I stumbled across the other day. It uses a Google Earth view that you can spin around to a particular country. Once you are on a country you can flip through different radio stations and jam out as if you were sitting in disastrous traffic. I find it quite awesome during work as I can listen to all kinds of music across the globe.