Learn By Doing Newsletter

Here we are 57 weeks into the Learn By Doing newsletter. This week is more focused on tooling and coding based articles, but there is a solid serverless focused post thrown in as well.

Forrest Brazeal makes an appearance with his 5 tips for building Serverless apps in AWS that have smooth CI/CD setups. A front end engineer at JPL makes the list this week with a great look into what it's like to work at the NASA organization. Comfygure release 1.0 is now available to make your application configuration management a bit more Terraform like.

Check out all those excellent articles and many more in this week's edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter. I'll catch you all next week!

☁️ Cloud

CI/CD, AWS, and Serverless: 5 tips I learned the hard wayThis is a solid set of tips from Forrest Brazeal. I am a huge fan of the CI/CD tools in the AWS ecosystem such as CodeBuild and CodePipeline. I think Forrest does a great of articulating their benefits in a serverless world in this post.

🔨 Tools

Releasing Comfygure 1.0Comfygure is kinda like a Terraform state esque CLI tool but for your application configurations. We all kinda have our own way of doing deployments and managing configurations. But comfygure tries to meet us halfway and at least provide us a clear solution to collaborate on those configurations.

endoflife - A one stop shop for when your OS/Dev tool version is going awayThe name kind of speaks for itself here. There isn't a ton here, but it is an exciting idea. You can see the exact EOL for a given OS or programming language. Useful if you want to point folks to the reason why your code may not be running correctly on their machine ;).

Pollen: the book is a programI have been exploring what the successor to my Learn AWS By Using It course will be. While doing that I have been thinking about some of the hurdles I had to overcome. One of them was formatting the digital version of my book, it was tedious and error prone. I find the idea of Pollen to be incredibly appealing and something I am definitely going to think about trying out.

Code && Languages

What it's like working at NASA Jet Propulsion LaboratoryWe always talk about what it's like to work at big tech company X, Y, or Z. But there are some very cool organizations out there like JPL which are arguably even funner to work at. This is an excellent post from a new contributor that works at JPL and gives us some insight into the tech and culture at the organization.

Handling Authentication in React with Context and HooksThere is a lot more than just implementing authentication in your React app in this article. It's actually a great introduction to the Context API and how it can be leveraged to pass props between components. This is then built upon to incorporate hooks and eventually add in the Auth0 authentication pieces.

The sorry state of OpenSSL usabilityOpenSSL is core to almost any development stack implicitly because of what it provides. Were not supposed to roll our own crypto so we use trusted providers like OpenSSL to help out. But have you ever taken a look at the usability of the command line for it? It's rough as James points out, but it also begs the question, have you ever noticed?

😎 Cool find of the week

All in one mathematics cheat sheetTo call this a "cheat sheet" is grotesquely inaccurate. But, that doesn't chang nerdy coolness associated with this. Imagine every mathematical function, standard unit, and scientific constant jammed into one PDF that is divided up into sensible sections. That is this cheat sheet with a lot of other things thrown in as well.

Who's hiring

Looking for your next opportunity? Let Triplebyte help you out.If you're looking for your next adventure, check out Triplebyte. They help you get placed in software development roles that you truly want by streamlining the interviewing process. Skip straight to final interviews with their free service. (sponsored)