Learn By Doing Newsletter

Week 41 is about to be in the books for most of us as we are closing out our Friday. This week we have a lot of stellar content across the board, cloud, coding, tooling, we got it all this week.

First up is an exploration of machine learning inside of AWS Lambda, is it possible? Yes, but is it practical? I'll let you decide. We also have a peek into how the Netflix film Bandersnatch was created using JavaScript. Then in the tooling section we take a look at linting your CSS stylesheets, something that I hope will help fix my typos.

Check out all of those and many more in this forty first edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter. Have a great weekend everyone!

☁️ Cloud

slsML: Towards elastic ML infrastructure on AWS LambdaServerless machine learning, once thought impossible is becoming an experimental reality for some workloads. In this post the researchers created a modified version of ResNet50 and proceeded to test it on parallel invocations of AWS Lambda. This is an interesting read into the constraints they ran into as well as the final findings, which in summary point to this workload being better for EC2.

Authentication at Edge with StackPathWe all know about [email protected] and how it can be integrated with CloudFront. But the folks Flosports went a different route, they started using StackPath and it's edge computing technology to authorize users access to restricted content. It's an interesting read into the perceived advantages that StackPath has and how you can get edge compute up and running with that CDN.

Working with AWS Lambda and Lambda Layers in AWS SAMFor those that have never used AWS SAM or its accompanying CLI, it is effectively the AWS Lambda take on representing your infrastructure as code. When you first look at it, it looks a lot like CloudFormation, but it has some niceties built into it. Keep in mind that this is platform specific, but it is interesting to see how Lambda Layers are being incorporated into the various Infrastructure as Code tools.

🔨 Tools

gitin - commit/branch/workdir explorer for gitGit is one of those tools that some people use it out of the box for simple operations and never look back. Others use it for more use cases and tend to find edge cases they don't enjoy. The latter create wrappers around it and create their own tools, this is one of those tools. I tried this out locally on my setup and I have to say that the interactivity gitin has is actually quite nice.

stylelint - A mighty, modern linter that helps you avoid errors and enforce conventions in your styles.A linter for your stylesheets, I'm all for it. Anything that can make my life easier my statically checking what I am writing I am all for. Maybe now I can finally catch all those 'px' typos in my stylesheets.

osaka - Async for rust without the noiseThis is another Rust library that aims to introduce a simplified and easier to reason about version of async inside of the language. I find the development of features like this to be quite fascinating with newer languages because they tend to build off of one another. I especially like that this library makes a very explicit effort to explain why this library has the opinions that it does.

Code && Languages

Netflix JavaScript Talks - Making BandersnatchMaybe this is a cool find instead of a code related article, but nonetheless here we are. This is a peek behind the curtain of how the Netflix 'choose your adventure' film, Bandersnatch was created. Not my favorite movie of all time, but it does point to how technology can be used in a wide variety of places within our daily lives.

React as a UI RuntimeThis React article is not for the faint of heart. It is not a getting started guide, but rather a deep dive into the React programming model and why certain decisions were made. Buckle up if your diving into this one because it's about a 40 minute read.

Data Structure VisualizationsDo you remember those CS books that cover data structures? They had those two dimensional views of a linked list and to this day that is how you still draw them. This is like that, but modernized. Visualize the various data structures that make up a Computer Science course in an animated fashion. It's pretty cool to see how an insert and delete on a Splay Tree is animated.

😎 Cool find of the week

Learn to make the most of the tools that hackers have been using for decades.This is a course that is being taught at MIT that has been open sourced. You can follow along with the lectures and course materials to learn more about the tools hackers have been using for decades now. I find learning this type of material much more enjoyable than traditional CS material because there is a lot of practicality behind it. This is a very cool find, and if you have the time this weekend, definitely worth checking out.

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