Learn By Doing Newsletter

Week 50 is here and the content we have is quite awesome. There is a lot of serverless content to dive into this week but there is also some excellent coding articles as well.

Molly Struve makes a return in this week's edition of the newsletter, she dives into how you can improve indexing performance on Elasticsearch. Lindsey Kopacz returns as well to share her approach to testing web accessibility. There is an awesome deep dive from Alex DeBrie on the intimate details of API Gateway as well.

Check out those awesome articles and many more in this 50th edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

Using Serverless Reapers to Lower Your AWS BillI wrote this blog post over on the CloudForecast blog this week. This is a pattern that ideally you should never have to use, but inevitably you will likely need it. Developers launching resources in your AWS account can get expensive when they forget about them. The reaper idea allows you to automatically kill resources that are not actively being used like available EBS volumes.

OverSketched Newton: Fast Convex Optimization for Serverless SystemsAcademic papers surrounding serverless are becoming a norm lately especially in the machine learning space. Once thought impossible, it is becoming clear that running machine learning computations on serverless architectures is possible. This paper focuses on how to solve the problem of OverSketched Newton in a serverless environment. The results are pretty astounding.

Enriching Event-Driven Architectures with AWS Event Fork PipelinesNo, AWS Event Fork Pipelines, is not a new service over at Amazon. However, it is a name for a reference architecture you may be familiar with if you have built event driven architectures in AWS. The idea is pretty straightforward, an SNS topic acts as this event fan into a pipeline of services that react to an individual event. It's cool to see that this architecture is starting to gain more and more education resources as it is extremely powerful.

A Detailed Overview of AWS API GatewayAPI Gateway is a service that is often thought about in conjunction with AWS Lambda. It provides an HTTP interface to your serverless workloads. But, it's also quite complex and can sometimes feel like your lost in a bunch of configuration settings. Alex DeBrie dives into the intimate details of API Gateway that might help you in the future.

🔨 Tools

Netlify Dev — our entire platform, right on your laptopNetlify is a powerhouse tool for deploying just about anything JAMStack related. They made big news this week with their release of Netlify Dev, a CLI that you can use locally to preview your workload locally. This is a huge step forward as being able to run workloads locally allows you to build confidence that you have things right.

Code Blocks 2.0 - Line numbers and highlightsGetting proper code formatting in presentation is a royal pain. Luckily, the folks at Slides appear to be focusing on this problem. I don't personally use their platform but the fact that is supported peaks my interest.

Code && Languages

Scaling Elasticsearch Part 1: How to Speed Up IndexingMolly Struve returns to the newsletter this week. This is an excellent blog post series that focuses on how to scale Elasticsearch in production environments. This part of the series focuses on indexing in particular. There is some great takeaways here like refresh interval and bulk processing.

My Web Accessibility Testing ProcessWeb Accessibility expert Lindsey Kopacz returns to the newsletter as well. This time she shares the process she following when testing web accessibility on her own projects. There is some great tips, tricks, and tools in here that should be thought about when building our applications.

GRASP – General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns ExplainedMost of us are familiar with SOLID principles as they make up some of the foundational ideas around object oriented programming. But GRASP is another set of principles that are worth considering.

😎 Cool find of the week

Seven databases in seven weeksI found this Carnegie Mellon seminar course while browsing some articles this week. This is a really cool look at seven different databases like Memsql, SQL Server, and Volt DB. Each week there is a deep dive into a particular database and they were recorded for us to enjoy.

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