Learn By Doing Newsletter

I'm back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things as the week comes to a close. I hope you all had a solid week and got some awesome stuff done.

If you are looking for some reading this weekend, I have you covered with this volume. Dive into the basics of AWS Lambda Layers courtesy of IOPipe. Check out how Intercom uses DynamoDB streams to build up the history of a given row. Up your Regex performance using Hyperscan and explore chaos engineering with Gremlins new free tier.

All of those articles are packed into this weeks volume and many more to go along with them. Check them out, give them a read, and always feel free to send me your feedback. See you all next week!

☁️ Cloud

Cutting Through the Layers: AWS Lambda Layers ExplainedThis newsletter has talked a lot about AWS Lambda Layers and how they can be leveraged or used to create simplified serverless environments. But I found this article from IOPipe to be quite insightful in explaining what exactly layers are in a Lambda environment. This is a great introduction to them and how they can be leveraged to enhance your serverless workloads.

How we used DynamoDB Streams to visualize changes in frequently updated objectsIntercom tracks a users state and they leverage DynamoDB to store the latest state. However, they also need to view the historical state of a given user. This is an interesting problem when Dynamo is your main storage. This is a fantastic example of how Dynamo Streams can be used to keep a running transaction log for a single row in a table.

Improving the TypeScript support in Azure FunctionsWe don't talk a lot about Azure Functions here, but they really are quite powerful. They have a few bells and whistles that other providers simply don't have. One of those bells is the ability to write your functions directly in TypeScript and run them in VSCode with no transpiling. Check out this article to see how its done.

🔨 Tools

hyperscan - High-performance regular expression matching libraryHyperscan isn't all that new, but it finally has a whitepaper to go along with it. It's a high-performance regex matching library that has a C API built into it. It allows you to perform crazy fast parallel lookups across large datasets.

grapesjs - Free and Open Source Web Builder FrameworkNo code web frameworks are becoming a thing and I'm not sure how I feel about them. Regardless, GrapesJS is a framework that allows you to craft websites without writing any code. I could see this being useful for developers who are building these types of tools already and want to use a dedicated library.

Introducing Gremlin FreeChaos Engineering is a fun thing to experiment with, but it should be done with caution in mind. Gremlin made a free version available to developers as of this week.

Code && Languages

11 Programming Books You Wish You Read EarlierRemember back at university when you had to read textbooks because it was required? I look back on those days and kinda miss them. There are a lot of awesome programming books out there that I have never read. I know I am missing a lot of things because I have never read those. So check out this article and maybe you will be inspired to pick up one of these books.

Incrementally migrating over one million lines of code from Python 2 to Python 3If you haven't heard, Python 2 is officially going to reach end of life at the end of this year. That's a big deal as there is a lot of folks who still haven't upgraded to Python 3. This is a look into how Dropbox incrementally moved their Python 2 workloads over to Python 3. I personally will be bookmarking this one for future reading.

Lets LISP like it's 1959I am a big fan of my newer higher level languages. However, it's almost always a fun exercise to go back to the old days for a bit. This is a fun video in which the speaker talks through how he went back and created his own LISP interpreter.

😎 Cool find of the week

immersive linear algebraThe folks at Immersive Math are at it again. This time they are bringing Linear Algebra into the fold. If you haven't tried out this immersive style of learning mathematics, your kinda missing out. Being able to visualize vectors as arrows in real-time is awesome.

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)