Learn By Doing Newsletter

Another solid work week in the books and it's time to start looking towards the weekend. Luckily, we have the 45th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter. Which is quite a bit better than the other 45th we have here in the United States.

This week is loaded with some excellent serverless content. I wrote a post last week that focuses on how monolith applications can be transformed into serverless, check it out if your looking for ideas in this area. Sarah Drasner is back in this volume with an excellent post on learning how to learn. Then the NSA, yes that NSA, makes an appearance with their reverse engineering tool Ghidra.

Check out all those articles and many more in this forty fifth edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

How a Monolith Architecture Can Be Transformed into ServerlessI published this blog post last week. It focuses less on how you can create "brand new" things using serverless and more on how you can transform existing things. Maybe this is your legacy code bases, maybe it's the big monolith you want to break down, or maybe it's just some utility code you have lying around. I was inspired to put this post together because there isn't a lot of focus on how we bring folks that are stuck with these older systems into the serverless world. These are some ideas I have around that topic.

My First Alexa Skill — Lessons LearnedUse a point based system to allocate time for your kids on your iPad? Questionable. Doing it with an Alexa skill? OK, now I'm intrigued.

Serverless Architectures I/III: Design and technical trade-offsTo be honest, I think this post could have gone into a lot more detail around the trade-offs associated with serverless. There is certainly finer grain details here than what is mentioned in this article, but it's a solid place to start.

🔨 Tools

ColorSpace - Another color palette generatorWhy have only one color palette generator when you can have another one? In all seriousness, as a developer that struggles with UI design, I find these types of tools to be very helpful.

Socket Wrench - PostMan for WebSocketsThis is a lot like Insomnia, the desktop app you can use to test HTTP endpoints. Only this app focuses on letting you test web sockets instead of your traditional HTTP endpoints.

Learning to LearnThe Sarah Drasner is back with another great article. This one on CSS Tricks focuses on strategies you can use, or not use, to focus your efforts when learning new things. In essence, it's the idea of learning how you best learn new things.

Code && Languages

Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in RustMemory safety and thread safety are two concepts that have been analyzed in a Rust world. But this post explores the implications of rewriting an entire browser component in Rust. It is a case study of how Rust improved the security posture and also introduced regressions into Quantum CSS. Check it out if your interested in learning how a language/framework change can change things significantly.

Redesigning Github repository pageNikita Prokopov wrote this blog post that focuses on how the GitHub repository page could be redesigned. I think most developers are pretty use to the layout of GitHub at this point. But it is interesting to explore how that layout could be improved.

Building serverless apps with components from the AWS Serverless Application RepositoryTechnically this is probably 'Cloud' related, but since it focuses on the AWS Serverless Application Repository, I'm gonna call it 'Code' related this week. The serverless app repository in AWS is often overlooked, at least for me. But, it has all kinds of hidden gems in it that could be used to expedite any number of applications being built today.

😎 Cool find of the week

Ghidra - NSA's reverse engineering toolWait the NSA made the newsletter? Yes, yes it did. Ghidra is an open source project created by the NSA that is used for reverse engineering. This is actually a very cool open source project that has real monetary gains for folks in the reverse engineering space. Other tools that are out there today are very expensive, but this is 100% open source. While the full source code is NOT open source yet, they are planning on making it so.

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