Learn By Doing Newsletter

We crossed a milestone last week with the 1 year anniversary of this awesome newsletter. I hope everyone got to soak in all the content from last week because I have even more for you this week.

The AWS Virtual DeepRacer League is now open and ready for you to test out your own machine learning/self-driving car chops. Netflix shares how they use Python internally in a wide variety of departments and use cases. We also have a very cool find from Olesya Chernyavskaya that explores the intersection of design and our emotions. The future is bright for all things tech related and it is always awesome to see how quickly things are developing in our space.

Thank you again for being a subscriber! If there is more content that I can provide you or if you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email and reach my directly.

☁️ Cloud

The AWS DeepRacer League Virtual Circuit is Now OpenI have to admit that I geeked out a little bit when this was announced at re:Invent. I have not purchased a DeepRacer yet, but the fact that there is now a Virtual Circuit to compete against others is burning a hole in my wallet. If you have been wanting to dive into machine learning and/or SageMaker, this could peak your interest as well.

Where do you keep credentials for your Lambda functions?Many folks start with very simple serverless workloads that often don't require accessing secrets. However, once you exit the basics you are likely going to encounter the tested problem of grabbing credentials from secure storage. I have seen solutions all across the spectrum when it comes to solving that problem in Lambda. Many of those solutions are articulated in here and could be valuable lessons to learn from if you approach this problem in the future.

AO.com: The path to Serverless FirstThis might be the first article I have read that points to GDPR being a driver to technical change. AO.com started off on EC2, ECS and SQL Server, but over time they have learned how build out serverless services and haven't looked back since. There is a common thread here that is worth mentioning, serverless can, and in fact often does, start with some kind containerization.

🔨 Tools

stretch - High performance flexbox implementation written in RustMore tooling is being released that has been developed using Rust and the cross platform advantages are hard to ignore. Stretch is no different in that regard. It is a cross platform layout engine that you can use in Android, iOS and JavaScript.

CC SearchFor fellow content producers out there like me, you might find this release from Creative Commons quite useful. It is an image search engine that looks over only Creative Commons licensed images, meaning you can use them without others coming after you.

Soul – A language and IDE for audio codingTech meets audio in your browser. Soul is a programming language that allows you to build audio seamlessly in your browser. This feels like a project that could get some serious traction for the folks that are musically inclined and have some tech background.

Code && Languages

Advanced Data StructuresYou won't find any linked lists or basic arrays in this final project brief from Stanford. Instead you are going to find some data structures that you have never heard of and likely won't ever use in your day to day. That said, there are some very interesting structures in here for the algorithm fans out there.

Flow9 is now open source Another programming language has been open sourced this week. Flow9 is a strongly typed functional programming language that comes with it's own baked in UX opinions/options.

Python at NetflixIt's not a huge secret that Python is soaring in popularity. It's always been quite popular in development/data science circles, but as this post from Netflix articulates, it can be used in a wide variety of places.

😎 Cool find of the week

What if a design changed based on your emotions?Olesya Chernyavskaya made this very cool concept where web design meets the mood of the viewer. Here is the full tweet example so that you have some context. This a very cool example of how designs can and most likely will adapt to our moods as we are viewing them.

Who's hiring

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