Learn By Doing Newsletter

What an action packed week this was. It was full of some very cool announcements, interesting new projects, and some very insightful reads.

AWS and serverless were in the headlines a lot this week with new features for EC2 and a refreshed Serverless Framework that looks very cool. There are some great reads in the code space this week, an opinionated piece on manual work producing bugs and a look into how CubeJS built their embeddable analytics framework. To close things out, there is an awesome Cool Find this week that turns a 5" black and white TV into a computer monitor.

Check out all of those great posts and many more in this 65th volume of the Learn By Doing Newsletter. See you all next week.

☁️ Cloud

Serverless Framework in 2019Big news for Serverless Framework fans this week. The framework is now looking to support the full lifecycle of your serverless applications. With this latest version you can develop, deploy, test, monitor, and secure your serverless applications with one framework. Here is a video that dives into each of these.

EC2 Resource Optimization RecommendationsA big launch out of the EC2 team this week, resource optimization recommendations. This is a long requested feature and it's going to make sizing your EC2 instances a lot simpler. Get a monthly report about how much of your instance you are using and receive recommendations on a better solution for your workload.

Ten Things Serverless Architects Should KnowMoving from your traditional applications to full serverless is no small feat. You are often taking on much more than just a move to serverless because the move encompasses many different things. Microservice architecture, event-driven, and workflow orchestration are three things that come with a move to serverless. This post covers seven other things you should be mindful of with respect to serverless.

🔨 Tools

Shortcuts JS - Create Apple Shortcuts using JavaScriptCreate those Mac based shortcuts with a language you know and love, JavaScript. This is a great example of a developer solving a problem they had and it turns out dozens of other people have the same problem.

When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktopHot off the press from the Slack Engineering team we get an inside look into what has gone into creating a brand new desktop client. This post explores why a total rewrite was necessary and how they approached each step of the process. It's a great read on the topic of technical debt and how sometimes the best solution is to start again.

blogger-cli - A cli tool to convert and manage jupyter notebook blogsI am always intrigued by projects that are all about converting their favorite tool/framework into static websites like blog. This one takes Jupyter notebooks and turns them into blogs.

Code && Languages

Manual Work is a BugThe story of manual versus automation is as old as programming itself, most likely at least. This is a solid read on why manual work is error prone and not nearly as reproducible as we all think. It advocates for the fact that we should automate all the things. I mostly agree with this premise but I believe that reduces the errors, not alleviates them all together.

PARTISAN: Scaling the Distributed Actor RuntimeThis might be the most technical piece of content this week. That said, it's an incredible look into the world of distributed system networking within the actor model. I think the authors do a great job of breaking things down into chunks that we can easily follow. Be sure to the check out the GitHub project as well to see the full testing results.

Design Decisions for the First Embedded Analytics Open-Source FrameworkCubeJS is an embeddable analytics framework. It looks to empower Software Engineers to easily integrate analytics into their applications to better serve their users. The interesting bit here is the embeddable portion. This post goes into detail around the design decisions and overall architecture that is needed in order to support a framework like this.

😎 Cool find of the week

Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor Sometimes the cool find of the week is a debrief on a production outage. Sometimes it's not related to code at all. Other times its a very cool hack like this. Is it useful? Not really. Is it practical? Probably not. But is it creative and your going to want one after reading this? Yes, it is definitely that.

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