Learn By Doing Newsletter

Welcome to the 58th edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter. Thank you for being a subscriber and supporting me on this awesome ride.

We got some pretty cool news in the Serverless world this week, Aurora Serverless has a new Data API. If that's not interesting enough the esteemed Jeremy Daly has already created a wrapper around it to make using it a breeze. We also have quite a few interesting tools and articles this week. GitHub explains their rational for using Haskell in their Semantic project. Firefox released a data breach monitoring service that will likely make you angry when you see how frequently someone has obtained your email address.

All those are definitely must reads. We also have some great cool finds this week, my personal favorite is the open source game clones. See you all next week!

☁️ Cloud

Using AWS CloudWatch Insights to fine tune your Lambda functionsThis is a post I put together a few weeks over on the Cloud Forecast blog. It explores how you can fine tune your serverless costs in AWS Lambda by taking advantage of the newly released AWS CloudWatch Insights service.

New – Data API for Amazon Aurora ServerlessThe MySQL compatible version of Aurora Serverless as a new data API. With this release the reality of serverless services talking to relational databases gets a huge step forward. I think there was a beta API of this a few months back that had rather terrible performance. But indications of this full blow release point to those performance problems being resolved.

A "DocumentClient" for the Amazon Aurora Serverless Data APIThe Jeremy Daly is at it again with this open source project hot on the heels of the announcement above. Jeremy recognized the pain of querying using this new data API and decided to create a nice wrapper to make all of our lives a little bit easier.

🔨 Tools

Zdog - Round, flat, designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas & SVGZdog is a 3D JavaScript engine for canvas and SVG that makes rendering 3D models a breeze. Unlike other libraries out there Zdog renders flat geometries which makes it small, rounded, and programming very simple.

Firefox Monitor - Find out if your email has been apart of a data breachAkin to the haveibeenpwned site, actually the data for Monitor comes from haveibeenpwned. Enter your email address and find out what breaches it has been apart of and from which companies. Note, this may ruin your Friday so maybe save this for Monday?

Open Source Game ClonesFrankly, this isn't a tool. It is, however, awesome. Imagine all those old computer games you played back in the day but now they have open source clones that you can easily launch and play on your own. Yup, your gonna wanna click this one.

Code && Languages

Linux Applications Performance: IntroductionSometimes the best way to learn is to roll up your sleeves and dig in deep to something that is totally outside your norm. This post fits that description perfectly. This is an in depth series in which you go through the process of implementing your own low level web server written in C that has 0 dependencies.

emu - a language for programming GPUs Emu is another higher level language that is meant to be used for programming GPUs. Unlike others in this category, however, it is designed for embedding in Rust rather than C or C++. In terms of approaching GPU programming this might be one of the more approachable languages/docs I have seen.

Why GitHub Semantic is written in HaskellSemantic is a tool that is used at GitHub to parse, analyze, and compare source code across languages. It can do lots of interesting things like generate diffs, generate call graphs, and even create import graphs. So why is it written in Haskell? Well it turns out that Haskell provides a lot of functionality to make the task of implementing Semantic much easier. Check out this explanation on the repo for all the details.

😎 Cool find of the week

This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.This is an interesting idea somebody had. Let's demonstrate how you can make all the internals of an HTML web page visible. This is a very interesting dive into how HTML + CSS interact to form the experience we have on websites today.

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