Learn By Doing Newsletter

We have a stacked newsletter this week with a lot of great content across the spectrum of cloud, coding, and tooling.

Serverless highlights again this week with two awesome articles. One from Yan Cui that dives into how you can prevent an AWS Lambda bill that makes you cry by detecting run away function. Jeremy Daly also makes a return with his take on how you can go from RDBMS to DynamoDB. Outside of the cloud categories we have great posts from Docker, Karmabot, and Every Layout.

Check out all of those excellent pieces and many more in this 60th volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

How to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB in 20 easy stepsJeremy Daly, Serverless advocate extraordinaire, posted an excellent Twitter thread a few weeks ago that dives into how you can switch from a traditional relational database to DynamoDB. This isn't for the faint of heart and it is definitely challenging, but it's not impossible either. Check out this post for an excellent summary of how you can pursue this adventure.

AWS Lambda: how to detect and stop accidental infinite recursionsWant a sure fire way to run up your AWS Lambda costs? Have a recursive function go off the rails. Luckily the Yan Cui wrote this article this week that helps you detect and stop this "oops" that can upset your accounting department.

How to implement the perfect failover strategy using Amazon Route53Building high availability systems in AWS is about more than just configuring your autoscaling groups to span multiple AZs. This is a great post that explores how an active-active architecture can be achieved at the DNS level using Route53.

🔨 Tools

Relearn CSS layoutMany know that CSS is a beast to wrangle and it's often overly complicated by not understanding what tools and defaults are in play. Every Layout looks to help you relearn the things you are likely missing when it comes to CSS.

readme-md-generator - A CLI to instantly create beautiful READMEsREADMEs are critical to projects large and small. They serve as a jumping off point for someone that is entirely new to the repo to get started on the right track. However, they aren't used as often as they should be and it's a shame. This generator should help lower that bar by making it freakishly easy to get your initial README setup.

Serverless Framework v1.45.0The latest version of the Serverless Framework is out and with it comes some awesome new features. The biggest one by far is the ALB event source for Lambda that many folks have been waiting for. API Gateway Event logs for Websockets are also now supported in the framework.

Code && Languages

The Future of Docker Desktop for WindowsWSL 2 is now in the Insiders Edition of Windows and it's making a lot of buzz. It's not just an improvement to the existing WSL but rather an entire architecture change is involved. Instead of emulation WSL 2 is actually a lightweight VM running a true Linux kernel. This is huge when it comes to using Docker from WSL, a lot of the limitations like volume mounts are now seamless to use in WSL 2.

Building a Web-Based Motion Graphics EditorThis might be one of the most exciting projects I have seen recently. Alyssa is a solo maker that is building a very promising competitor to established motion graphics powerhouse Adobe After Effects. I know folks have been looking for a web based alternative to AE and if this project catches on that might just happen.

Slack emulator for KarmabotKarmabot is a tool used by remote teams to help manage the performance of employees. But many people weren't quite understanding all the features in play. So they build a Slack emulator that allows them to truly demo the power of their chatbot. This is a good read from a technical perspective as it explores how to effectively emulate the Slack desktop client.

😎 Cool find of the week

How to Be Great? Just Be Good, RepeatedlySteph Smith wrote this article this past week and it's an incredible read. I think this article resonates with a lot of developer experiences where being great is a matter of being good and reliable. This is a deep read and not necessarily coding related but it's great nonetheless. I'm a big fan of the inputs/outputs section as it really frames everything in a tangible way.

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)