Learn By Doing Newsletter

It's the last day before the Christmas holiday next week and if your like me you are finding odd things to go sharpen up in your code base.

If you are looking to do a bit of reading on this Friday we have some awesome content for you. First, the big headline, API Gateway now supports WebSockets, a big revelation for those in the serverless world. Autodrome is a new project that allows you to develop autonomous vehicle algorithms within a gaming environment, very cool. We also have a slew of cool new tools for you to try out like goldpinger which allows you to visualize your network activity in a Kubernetes cluster.

Check out all of those and more in this 34th edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter. Happy Holidays!

☁️ Cloud

Announcing WebSocket APIs in Amazon API GatewayThis was announced just before AWS re:Invent and it just shipped. This has been a feature request for a bit now and it's awesome to see that we are now going to be able to use Lambda with web sockets in API Gateway. There is even an awesome chat app you can start using right away in the serverless application repository.

AWS re:Invent 2018 Sessions Audio FeedA couple weeks ago I stumbled on re:Watch, an aggregation of all the sessions from re:Invent 2018 in a nice searchable format. Here we have another interpretation on that idea and it even includes a podcast feed. Binge watch/listen to as many re:Invent sessions as you want over this holiday weekend.

Give back with your cloud skills to St. Jude Children's Research HospitalThis is a cool holiday charity Linux Academy has put together. For every learning activity that is completed on the site between now and 12/26, Linux Academy will donate $1 to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. If you got some free cycles before the holiday weekend, consider helping out.

🔨 Tools

shapy - A CSS gradient generatorCSS gradients can really spruce up the design of a site or application. Luckily for us, Victoria put together this awesome tool we can use to visualize the gradient before using it and copy the CSS directly into our own stylesheets.

goldpinger - Visualize the network connectivity of your K8s clusterNope it's not an Austin Powers themed repo. It's a tool developed by some folks at Bloomberg to get a visualization of the connectivity across their Kubernetes cluster. Networking isn't fun and it's certainly a pain to debug, this tool can probably help.

gintonic - A declarative transformation language for GraphQLFolks are finding new and clever use cases for GraphQL, this usually means that a particular technology is beginning to grab hold. This also usually means that new pain points are discovered that were once ignored by early adopters. Transformations is one of those pain points, there is a lot of ways of doing something like that with your GraphQL schemas. Gintonic looks to simplify this even further and make exposing your public apis a breeze.

Code && Languages

autodrome - Framework and OpenAI Gym Environment for Autonomous Vehicle Development This is a very cool project that allows you to continuously train autonomous vehicle models within a simulated OpenAI Gym Environment. This is very cool for folks that want to explore autonomous vehicles but aren't sure where to start.

You Can Do it in SQL, Stop Writing Extra Code for itWho doesn't like a good SQL post? This post from Geshan takes me back to a few relational database projects where I often didn't use as much SQL as I could have. It's interesting to look back on that now and see how powerful it can be to push computations to your database server. Not sure its worth using all of the tips in this post, but there is certainly some that i'll keep in my back pocket.

Why on earth did we choose Jenkins for 2019?Build systems are the foundation of CI/CD and most folks are very opinionated about them. I am not a huge fan of Jenkins, but I do appreciate the transparency from Rookout on why they still chose it given numerous other offerings nowadays.

😎 Cool find of the week

Everything I've learned in 10 years of BloggingThis is an interesting read from the perspective of a 21 year old who has been blogging about various things for quite some time. I don't know that any of these things are secrets but they are a good reminder of what it takes to produce high quality technical and non-technical content. If your a develop/technical person just getting into blogging about your ideas and experiences, give this a read. There is much more that goes into the process than just writing.