Learn By Doing Newsletter

Another week in the books and for some of us, a three day weekend is in our near future. Which means there is an extra day to read some of this weeks articles before getting back to your day job.

There is some great cloud focused content this week like a newly published performance guide from the S3 team. There is also a look into how you can lower your K8s bill by running your worker pools on spot instances. Apple made the newsletter this week with their shady move this week, stashing developer documentation in an archive that can't be searched. There is also some awesome stuff coming out of GitHub this week, make sure you check out GitHub Sponsors down in the tools section.

Check all those excellent pieces and the dozen others in this 56th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter. See you all next week!

☁️ Cloud

Best Practices Design Patterns: Optimizing Amazon S3 PerformanceI don't often link to AWS documentation in this newsletter, for very good reasons like it's typically bad. However, this is an exception to the rule. AWS has put out a new set of design best practices when it comes to optimizing S3 performance. As someone that has run into more than my fair share of performance issues in S3, mostly of my own fault, I think this guide could be very valuable when building new projects from scratch.

The definitive guide to running EC2 Spot Instances as Kubernetes worker nodesRunning K8s clusters can be quite expensive but sometimes necessary or desired. However, you can drastically cut the cost down by using spot instances in your worker nodes. This is a good read on how to get the ball rolling on that front.

Why your business needs serverlessYan Cui returns to the newsletter this week with a higher level look at how serverless can drive your business forward. We focus a lot on how serverless can benefit developers, but those benefits actually bubble all the way through the business. As Yan lays out in this article, serverless is a game changer and can real ROI in your business.

🔨 Tools

aws-auto-remediate - Open source application to instantly remediate common security issues through the use of AWS ConfigThis is an interesting open source project for those of us trying to button down our AWS accounts. It is a serverless stack that will automatically resolve any security issues that AWS Config raises. You can customize the action taken to a config rule or run with the defaults this stack is set to use. For example, it will automatically delete any RDP ingress from the world you have on your security groups.

DeleteFB - Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall postsTired of Facebook making revenue on your past and current data? Someone created this open source project to help you out. It makes no guarantees that Facebook doesn't keep your data cold archived somewhere, but at least it's a place to start.

Announcing GitHub Sponsors: a new way to contribute to open sourceThis is a huge announcement out of GitHub this week. Think Patreon but for open source contributors. Now folks can financially support open source contributors and 100% of the sponsorship goes to the developer. It is going to be very cool to see how this evolves over time as open source is the life blood of development.

Code && Languages

I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in codeBack in college I had to implement my own compiler and the various logical bits that make up an operating system. Things like your L1 and L2 cache as well as mutex versus semaphore were very important. I wouldn't say that I use the things I learned in my day to day, but they gave me an understanding of what is happening under the hood that greatly benefits me today. I think that is why this article is fantastic. The author wanted to understand how CPUs work, so they simulated one in code to further their understanding. Check it out if you want a neat introduction that uses a simple 8-bit computer to coach you along.

Containers, microservices, and service meshesService meshes are a hot topic right now with the rise of containers and Kubernetes. But a service mesh is actually independent of those concepts and can be applied to other areas. This is a fantastic insight into how a service mesh was built from the ground up and what limitations it had. This is beneficial because it can help you gain an understanding of how things like Envoy Proxy are beneficial and why they were created.

The State of Apple’s Developer DocumentationAre you an iOS developer trying to find some documentation? It turns out you're not alone. Apple has moved most of their iOS documentation to an archive that can no longer be indexed by search engines. Meaning it's now even harder to write your iOS apps because, well, you have to fly the plane without a radar.

😎 Cool find of the week

The struggles of an open source maintainerEver wonder what it's like to maintain a major open source project like Redis? Your in luck. However, I should warn you that this isn't the rainbows and unicorns picture of maintaining an open source project. Rather this is a look at the things that can really suck about being a maintainer of a project like Redis.

Who's hiring

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