Learn By Doing Newsletter

Here we are 55 weeks into this awesome newsletter that is made possible by your subscription. There is some awesome content this week in all categories, cloud, coding, and tooling.

AWS had some huge announcements since our last newsletter. Most notably might just be the availability of Node v10 for AWS Lambda, but I think the Spot Instance Advisor is pretty cool as well. I wrote a new blog post this week that explore a subtle bug I encountered while working with Entity Framework in a dotnet core project, always look at what your ORM is doing for you. On the tooling front, GitHub made waves with the announcement that they are introducing their own package repository. This could be huge for open source projects and really provide a shake up in the NPM ecosystem.

Check all of those big announcements and other great articles in this 55th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter. See you all next week!

☁️ Cloud

AWS Step Functions Adds Support for Workflow Execution EventsMore news around AWS Lambda came out this week. This time it's a release around Step Functions, workflow execution events. Now you can send the fact that your state machine transitioned from one flow to another to any services or monitoring systems that you may have.

EC2 Spot Instance AdvisorThis is a slick tool I stumbled across this week. I am sure this has existed for quite a while so I could behind the curve on this. What this advisor shows you is the frequency of a certain spot instance size being revoked from underneath of you.

AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js v10Things are a bit slow on the serverless front this week, but it looks like Node v10 is now available in AWS Lambda. This is a rather big deal, less for the Node update and more for the fact that Lambda function using that version will run on the new Amazon Linux 2 OS.

🔨 Tools

EdgeDB - Simplicity of a NoSQL database with relational model’s powerful queryingEdge DB isn't the first database technology to come out that makes the promise of query power of SQL with simplicity of NoSQL. However, this one looks very neat and orderly. There is a great CLI tool to get you started and some guides on how you can deploy this into your infrastructure.

Introducing GitHub Package RegistryGitHub made waves last week with this announcement and many folks are very excited about this. A hosted package repository provided by GitHub seems like a huge step forward for pretty much all open source projects. The most notable thing to take from this announcement is the question of what will happen to NPM now?

Fundamental design principles for non-designersMany of us may not be as entrenched in design principles on the daily. That's why this blog post could be a great tool to keep open in a browser tab. It's full of help tips that are fundamental but can make a huge difference to the design of our apps and thus our user experiences.

Code && Languages

REST API Design Best Practices for Parameters and Query String UsageReading about best practices in REST is always a good refresher. It seems like everytime I read an article like this one I am reminded of something I wanted to try or learn something entirely new. This is an easy read with some very practical advice.

The Curious Case of nvarchar and varchar in Entity FrameworkI recently ran into a very subtle bug while working with Entity Framework in dotnet core. It should be stated that the bug was totally my fault and not the fault of the frameworks I was using. However, it was an implicit data type that Entity Framework was applying on my behalf that made the performance of a simple database lookup 35-40 times slower.

PHP in 2019A few weeks back we took a look at a classic blog post, "PHP: a fractal of bad design". A lot of what that blog post said is still mostly true today. But, PHP isn't dead and there is actually some interesting things developing over there. There is still a lot of things that suck, but this blog post tries to focus on the things that are actually really great.

😎 Cool find of the week

The Sunset HTTP Response HeaderThis is an RFC that is open and it's very interesting. The idea here is to include a Sunset response header that tells the caller that this endpoint is going to be deprecated and when. It could be very interesting for versioning and deprecating your APIs without having to send mass emails to your callers.

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