Learn By Doing Newsletter

Volume 39 is hot off the press with more cloud, tooling, and coding content to dive into.

This week Yan Cui makes a return to the newsletter with trials and tribulations of subscribing an SQS queue to an SNS topic in another AWS account. Jessie Frazelle makes an appearance to walk us through how GitHub Actions work. Then we have an awesome tool this week, aws-lambda-container-image-converter. It's a mouthful to get out but it could change the way Lambda Layers are developed.

Check out all that and more in this thirty ninth volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

Subscribe SQS to a SNS topic in another AWS account with CloudFormationSounds simple right? You would be surprised how this can be more involved that you might have thought from the outset. Yan Cui does a great job of explaining how this is done in CloudFormation and really highlights the gotchas you run into.

Twitter chose Google Cloud for storageTo be fair this isn't recent news. This actually happened over the past summer but I just came across this brief release this week. Essentially Twitter needed to move hundreds of petabytes of storage to a cloud provider, so they ran them all through the ringer. When things levelled out, they chose Google Cloud.

🔨 Tools

CloudQuery - Turn any website into a serverless APIThis is pretty cool, you can essentially enter in a site, select the content you want to include and then convert that into a serverless API that you can later call. The use cases might be pretty slim here, but the idea is rather slick.

reahl - The Python-only web frameworkI have been spending a lot of my days in Python recently and it's revealing a very robust ecosystem that I never taken a chance to look at. Reahl is a framework I came across that allows you to build your web applications using only Python. While I still like writing HTML, I can appreciate that some folks do not, this is a framework for them.

Take your programming fonts for a test driveI have to admit that I hardly ever change the default IDE font. I know that some folks prefer different fonts over the default, but I have always found it to not be a valuable use of my time. That is until I found this app that lets you preview your code in a particular font. I may have been missing out all this time.

aws-lambda-container-image-converter - Repackage Docker images into Lambda LayersThis newsletter is on a 4-week streak of having something that mentions AWS Lambda Layers. But, this tool was just too awesome not to include.

Code && Languages

Accelerate: Transforming Nike Digital APIs with GraphQLWe see a lot of one off articles introducing the concepts of GraphQL. We even see articles that dive into the comparison between it and something like REST. However, I don't often see articles that provide a glimpse at how it is being used at scale. This is an interesting, albeit a bit vague, read on how Nike is using GraphQL over the top of their existings APIs.

The Life of a GitHub ActionIf you haven't toured the new GitHub Actions yet, I strongly encourage you to give them a try. In this post, Jessie Frazelle dives into what exactly happens behind the scenes with a particular Action you write. It is a bit of comedy, a bit of awesome, and a lot of wow this is impressive.

The Internals of PostgreSQLYes SQL databases still exist and it is still valuable to know how they are working underneath the hood. Maybe not for your everyday type of workloads, but if you are doing big things with Postgres, your going to find this quite helpful.

😎 Cool find of the week

Google Search Operators: The Complete List The generic search input on Google not enough for you? Well, you can use the advanced search controls to really hone in your searching ability. Just note that if you try to use this in some kind of automation script, Google will flag you and make you solve a captcha before proceeding.

Who's hiring

Looking for your next opportunity? Let Triplebyte help you out.If you're looking for your next adventure, check out Triplebyte. They help you get placed in software development roles that you truly want by streamlining the interviewing process. Skip straight to final interviews with their free service. (sponsored)