Learn By Doing Newsletter

This week was the 30th birthday for the World Wide Web. If you were on Twitter you likely saw all of the early incarnations of the web. Things like Geocities and the original Amazon were revisited and celebrated for what they contributed. It's pretty cool to sit here today putting together the 46th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter and think that this is what this technology is for. The presentation and distribution of open knowledge.

With that I am very excited to bring you another awesome volume of newsletter content. This week we explore a big announcement out of the AWS world, Open Distro for Elasticsearch. A huge announcement if you ask me because it looks to be offering the paid features of Elastic.co totally free. Emma Wedekind stops by with her Regex cheat sheet that you should definitely bookmark. Craig Kerstiens makes an appearance with a take that runs counter to the growing trends, maybe keeping your monolith isn't such a bad idea.

Check out all three of those articles and many more in this 46th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter. I will see you all next week with more awesome content!

☁️ Cloud

New – Open Distro for ElasticsearchAmazon Web Services turned a few heads this week with their announcement of Open Distro for Elasticsearch. This appears to be a direct response and challenge to the Elastic company and their paid Elasticsearch offering, a solution that has garnered harsh criticism in the past. As such Elastic put out a response of their own to this announcement. I am excited about this offering from AWS and look forward to seeing how this develops in the near future.

Massively parallel web performance testing on a shoestring budget with Lighthouse and AWS LambdaThis is a great blog post/case study that demonstrates how a serverless architecture can be leveraged to run thousands of Lighthouse performance tests in under a minute. I really enjoy Stuart presents the different options that were considered and why AWS Lambda was the right choice here. There is a lot of great detail and analysis in here that is great to reference for a number of different serverless workloads.

🔨 Tools

VSCode Extension - Peacock v1 ReleasedJohn Papa at Microsoft released this cool extension for VSCode, Peacock. It's an extension that allows you to easily distinguish between multiple VSCode instances you could have running. I find workspaces to be a great answer for this, but I could see where this could be helpful as well.

ffsend - A fully featured Firefox Send clientFirefox Send is a new way to securely send download file links that automatically expire. While the UI is nice, it's not ideal for developers. So Tim Visee created this project that is a fully featured client for Firefox Send that you can use from your command line.

Radicle - A decentralized alternative to GitHub built on IPFSA long standing complaint, valid or not, has been that GitHub as a platform is very closed off. Some are OK with that and others find that discouraging. Radicle is a project that looks to remove the centralized server and is built on top of IPFS. This looks like a very cool idea for peer-to-peer Git collaboration. It includes the repo, issues, and proposals, so it's pretty close to an all in one package.

Code && Languages

Give Me Back My MonolithThis is a great short read from Craig Kerstiens who provides a different perspective. The perspective is that maybe all the hype around microservices isn't what it's cracked up to be. Our tooling and processes have matured, and continue to mature, around the idea of monolithic applications. Even if you don't agree with Craig on all fronts, the points and thoughts behind them are things that get you thinking.

Elastic Cloud Incident Report: February 4, 2019On the topic of Elastic Cloud. They experienced a substantial outage a few weeks back that took some customers offline for hours. This is the incident report from that outage and how it all went down. I find these to be an interesting read as they reveal insights into those architectures that we may not have known otherwise.

Regex Cheat SheetRegex is a beast to try and remember off the top of your head. It's not that folks haven't done it, many have, but many have not as well. This post from Emma Wedekind is a great one to keep bookmarked for all those future regex clauses you have to write.

Building rich command-line interfaces with Ink and ReactThe command-line, once a dull and generic place is far from it nowadays. Everyone spices up their command-line in some form or another, but now the actual interfaces you use can be spiced up as well. By using Ink and React you can create some very rich CLI experiences. I might have to try this out for a future CLI project.

😎 Cool find of the week

Write yourself a Git!Git can be an intimidating tool the first time you encounter it. I think a lot of this is because it has a "brand" around it that tends to make you think that is the case. The reality is that it's not all the complicated once you start using it, but most of us only use bits and pieces of it on a day to day basis. This is another attempt to revisit the core of Git, but instead of talking about it, you build it.

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