Learn By Doing Newsletter

It's Spring here in the northern hemisphere and we are starting to get that glare on our monitors from that glowing orb in the sky. It's a great time of year to be outside, but there is still a lot of really cool things happening that might keep us inside.

This week Ben Kehoe makes an appearance with an excellent article title "Serverless is a State of Mind". I highly recommend giving that one a read if you are even remotely interested in serverless. We have an excellent article from John Otander that presents a different take on how we should compose our code, make it guessable. Nathan Peck, Developer Advocate at AWS, has a very cool new project that allows you to easily search the changelogs of your favorite open source projects.

We have a bunch of other articles this week as well, my personal favorite might just be the post from Stack Overflow looking for a new CEO. Whatever you fancy to learn this week, I'm sure there is something in this 48th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter to sink your teeth into.

☁️ Cloud

Serverless is a State of MindBen Kehoe came out with this excellent after cleaning that focuses on what the true point of serverless is. This is a good read from the perspective of a lot of hype that surrounds serverless architectures, but in the end all of the hype is missing the point. The true value of serverless isn't the functions, the services, cost, or even code.

Amazon Aurora: design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databasesAdrian Colyer is the go-to for just everything Distributed Systems related and this article doesn't disappoint. In it Adrian dives into the inner workings of Amazon Aurora and the backing services, as well as principles, that make it possible.

AWS Deep Learning ContainersThe AWS Summit in Santa Clara happened this week and a few announcements were made. The one that jumped out to me, Deep Learning containers. Spin up Docker containers pre loaded with Tensorflow or MX Net inside of ECS and EKS in just a few minutes.

🔨 Tools

changelogs - A search engine of CHANGELOGS for open source projectsThe name is pretty self explanatory here, it's a search engine that crawls and parses changelogs from open source GitHub projects. This could be quite handy if you are trying to keep up to date with all of the packages that are likely in your own source code.

pyright - Static type checker for the Python languageCreated by the folks at Microsoft, pyright is another static type checker for Python that is meant to address some gaps in mypy. As someone that has been writing more and more Python lately, I think this is a fantastic tool to have handy. I especially like that this is created by Microsoft who knows a thing or two about static type checking.

PreVue - All in One Prototyping Tool For Vue DevelopersI'm not quite on Vue train yet, but I continue to be amazed at some of the tools and ideas it is producing. PreVue is no exception. It is an all in one prototyping tool for Vue developers out there. Create components, preview their code, and then export the whole thing into a Vue component architecture that you can import using the CLI.

Code && Languages

Writing code to be guessableJohn Otander put together this interesting blog post that suggest a different way we should compose our code. We often think of coding as being decoupled, well tested, and fitting the needs of its consumers. All of those principles still apply but John also suggest that our code should be guessable. This is an interesting take, so give this one a read to understand what he means here.

DevOps Is an Evolving Culture, Not a TeamIn my latest blog post I critique a lot of things I see wrong with DevOps today. It is quickly becoming the new "agile" and I wouldn't necessarily consider that a good thing. DevOps is a culture that fosters automation, quick iterations, and breaking down walls. Treating DevOps as a separate team or even a separate individual often does the reverse opposite.

Build an air quality monitor with InfluxDB, Grafana, and Docker on a Raspberry PiTo be honest, this post is a little bit over the top for measuring the air quality in your home. You can likely do that without InfluxDB, Grafana, or Docker. However, I am a huge fan of learning things by doing things so I really admire this blog post. It's a long one as it walks you through the entire setup, hardware and all.

😎 Cool find of the week

The Next CEO of Stack OverflowWhile not a cool find per-se, it is interesting that Stack Overflow is looking to bring back what the community use to be, a safe place for others to learn and share. Surely folks are aware that SO is very much not that anymore and in fact it can be quite unwelcoming and toxic to folks that are new to programming. I am encouraged that this move might change that based on this quote from the article, "In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.".

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