Learn By Doing Newsletter

Volume 30, here we are. I hope folks here in the United States had a great Thanksgiving and are taking the time today to relax before the holiday season sets in.

We have a lot of awesome content this week. AWS is really rolling out some awesome announcements ahead of their re:Invent conference. If these are the pre-announcements, I can only speculate how big the actual conference announcements are going to be.

This weeks cool find is from DHH that is a timeline of the big Basecamp outage that occurred a few weeks ago. We also have a very cool project that is a micro version of a self-driving car using Raspberry Pi. Thomas Hunter has an awesome post this week that dives into how he migrated from Wordpress to a static markdown site, something I think more and more folks are doing.

Learn Containers by Doing Containers are everywhere now and are incredibly popular because they can simplify and accelerate deployment times. But even if you use Containers yourself, do you know how to take advantage of all the benefits and robustness that Containers offer? From using Docker and Kubernetes, to understanding how Containers work with Google Cloud and OpenStack, the opportunities are just beginning. If you're ready to get started with hands-on Containers training, get $150 off at Linux Academy!

☁️ Cloud

Simplify Your AWS Billing for Multiple Accounts Using AWS OrganizationsIn this blog post I explore how the underrated service, AWS Organizations, makes provisioning, managing, and consolidating the billing of multiple accounts very easy. Add a bit of Terraform for good measure and we have a great way to automate AWS account creation.

Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine LearningAs mentioned above, this week has been on fire with new announcements coming out of AWS before their premier re:Invent conference. This one is very cool, predictive auto scaling of your EC2 instances. They use machine learning against your infrastructure over days and weeks to determine the best scaling strategy. This. Is. Cool.

EC2 Auto Scaling Groups With Multiple Instance Types & Purchase OptionsWhile the world is alive with serverless, there are still plenty of organizations that need the power of EC2 and auto scaling. With this announcement those organizations just got an awesome upgrade. Select multiple instance types for a single auto scaling group.

🔨 Tools

makisu - Fast and flexible Docker image building tooThe folks over at Uber released this new open source project. It is intended to be a new tool for building Docker images in a Kubernetes environment. It looks rather opinionated, but if your looking for a new solution to this problem it might be worth checking out.

Self-Driving Pi Car - A deep neural network based self-driving carThis is a fun project that focuses on creating a self-driving car at a micro scale. It uses Lego Mindstorms NXT with Raspberry Pi to create a neural network based self-driving car. Very cool to checkout and maybe hack on in your free time.

The AWS .NET Mock Lambda Test Tool (Preview)It is rumored that .NET Core is the fastest language to write AWS Lambda functions in. It seems the aws-lambda-dotnet team is looking to lean into this by upping their tooling for developers. This project is Mock Lambda test tool that allows you to execute your function code inside of a simulated .NET Core AWS Lambda environment.

Code && Languages

The State of JavaScript 2018As 2018 comes to a close the latest State of JavaScript has been published. This is very well put together and really shines a flashlight on some of the areas we as a community need to improve on across the board.

On Migrating from Wordpress to Static MarkdownThomas Hunter brings us an incredible post this week. He dives into what it took to migrate off of Wordpress and move to a static markdown site. This is becoming mainstream folks, the big bulky CMS systems are likely going to have to change or risk getting eaten.

Working with dependency injection in .NET Standard: inject your AWS clientsThe world of AWS and .NET mix yet again in this post. This time Aaron Costley walks us through how to make use of Generic Host in .NET Core 2.1 to inject your AWS clients via dependency injection.

😎 Cool find of the week

Update on Basecamp 3 being stuck in read-onlyCool finds are not just fun things that I come across, but also things I find interesting or insightful. This week it's the debrief from DHH on the Basecamp outage that occurred a few weeks ago. This is a full timeline of the outage and how the team responded. I enjoy reading transparent posts like this because it demonstrates how engineering teams can really rally together to solve a complex problem in a short amount of time.