Learn By Doing Newsletter

What a week! It has been quite a busy past couple days with my Learn AWS By Using It course hitting it's one year anniversary and everything else in my day to day work life balance. Nevertheless I have an awesome volume of the newsletter for you this week.

Advanced request routing is now available for AWS Application Load Balancers, a long requested feature that can really up your load balancing game. A historical post this week, PHP: a fractal of bad design, is one I have never read but quite enjoyed (sorry to those that love PHP). Cloudflare made some huge news this week with their announcement of Warp, a mobile VPN service that might not suck.

Check out all those articles and many more in this 49th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

My Course Learn AWS By Using It is 1-Year OldIt's hard to believe that my Learn AWS By Using It course is a year old this week. I created this course to help folks get out of the sea of information that is AWS documentation and jumpstart their learning. Instead of swimming in the swaths of AWS docs, we focus on building real things inside of AWS and learn the services as we are using them. This is a bit of a reflection post I put together on how the course got to where it is today. Now through Sunday you can grab any package of the course at 50% off and get a free t-shirt if you purchase the Ultimate Package.

Advanced Request Routing for AWS Application Load BalancersWhen Application Load Balancers first came on the scene the ability to route traffic to desired target groups based on HTTP headers was quickly requested. Well it looks like wishes have become true. You can now use advanced request routing on ALBs to route traffic to your desired groups on just about any HTTP header, method, query string, or IP address.

A Smart Service to Keep AWS Lambda WarmKeeping Lambda functions warm is not a new idea by any means. However, Renato presents a nice high-level approach of how we could predict the number of Lambda we should keep warm in a pool by doing some log analysis.

🔨 Tools

Introducing Warp: Fixing Mobile Internet Performance and SecurityCloudflare is working on some very cool projects lately and 1.1.1.1 is no different. Only this time they are extending that project with Warp, essentially a VPN for mobile devices.

Sonic - an alternative to ElasticsearchSonic is an interesting open source project out of France that promises to be a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that come with Elasticsearch, but it certainly has quite a few of them. Natural languages normalizing, auto completion search, and clear query results. It's not a document index but rather a identifier index. This could be quite neat to try out for prototypes or smaller projects where Elasticsearch is a bit heavy.

Turn Your Code into Docker Images with Cloud Native BuildpacksInteresting announcement out of Heroku this week. You can now turn your code into Docker images using cloud native buildpacks. It's quite cool in how it works by taking your code and packaging it all up into one Docker image, no Dockerfile needed.

Code && Languages

PHP: a fractal of bad designMany of you may have already been familiar with this well renowned blog post, but I was not until this week. This isn't to poke fun at folks that enjoy PHP, OK maybe it is a little. However, I actually really enjoy the analysis in here on why the design decisions of PHP make programming in it extremely painful.

Domain-Oriented ObservabilityPete Hodgson wrote this post over on Martin Fowlers blog. It's an interesting read on how observability is critical in modern applications, but it is also introducing a lot of cruft to our codebases. It's rather simple remove this cruft, but you have to think about how you want to represent the instrumentation moving forward. Give it a read if you find yourself littering metric and logging statements throughout your code.

Different Approaches to Linux MonitoringA ton of production systems run on Linux. This post focuses on how you can approach monitoring those systems without introducing dinosaurs into your theme park. I really enjoyed reading this one as it is well put together and as a lot of practical advice.

😎 Cool find of the week

thoughter - Push thoughts to others anonymouslyThe idea of thoughter is really interesting, even if it is a bit antisocial and odd. The concept is that you can anonymously push notifications to others and if they mimic a response you can have your answer to any burning question.

Who's hiring

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