Learn By Doing Newsletter

You may have noticed that there was no newsletter last week. I am trying something new over the next couple of months, I am going to switch the newsletter to an every other week cadence. This is to provide you with the best of the best content for the past two weeks as I give myself a little more lead time to vet everything.

With that, there is some great cloud/serverless content this week. AWS Step Functions are the theme as Yan Cui, serverless hero, shows how you can perform blue-green deployments with your workflows. DropBox put up an interesting piece that explores the overhead associated with cross-platform mobile development. Hackaday had an awesome DEFCON embed project that mimics the Fifth Element multipass.

Check out all of those great pieces of content and many more in this 68th edition of the Learn By Doing newsletter. See you in two weeks.

☁️ Cloud

How to do blue-green deployment for Step FunctionsYan Cui, serverless master, is back with another great article this week. This time he explores how to perform blue-green deployments for your Step Functions. It's a lot like how you do those deployments in a pure AWS Lambda world.

AWS Step Functions Adds Support for Nested WorkflowsStep functions within step functions are now possible. These are being referred to as nested workflows and it's likely going to cut down on duplicated workflows if that is something you are having to do at the moment. It's a great features addition to the Step Function ecosystem.

Capacity-optimized allocation strategy for Amazon EC2 Spot InstancesYou can now optimize your Spot Instances and EC2 fleets based on the most efficient capacity available. This isn't as clear cut as it sounds and you should read up on spot instance best practices before trying to run with this new feature.

🔨 Tools

Write and read stories instead of documentationCode evolves over time within different contexts. It often has a story or reason behind it's implementation that documentation struggles to convey. That is what StoryTime hopes to help you solve, annotate your code to form the story rather than relying on documentation alone.

Learn Go with testsI have really come to enjoy GitHub projects like this. It's probably because I learn best by "doing" rather than just reading. In this repo you will find everything you need to learn Go via an in depth walk through via testing.

Remote company culture guide for the Slack generationRemote teams are here and I don't think they are going anywhere anytime soon. However, some teams are drastically better to work in than others. I found these tips to be a bit obvious because I believe I am in a high functioning remote team. That said, there are some great reminders in here that are worth reading about.

Code && Languages

The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and AndroidI have to be honest mobile app development is a bit outside my knowledge area. However, I do consistently see the argument for native app development versus things like React Native. This article isn't quite focusing on that, rather it is focusing on sharing code between platforms via C++. They share their experiences in the overhead associated with trying to maintain cross platform functionality in C++. To say there is a lot of overhead would be an understatement.

3 Kinds of Good Tech DebtThis is a piece from Square Space that was published back in March but showed up on my radar this week. It's a great take on three areas that can easily accrue technical debt and why that's OK. It's another solid read on the topic of not all tech debt is bad.

Building a GraphQL server on the edge with Cloudflare WorkersCloudFlare is making all kinds of news recently. This is an interesting open source project that allows you to stand up a GraphQL server at the edge by leveraging their Workers. It's a very cool idea as it pushes more things to the edge of your network. Check out the full project on GitHub.

😎 Cool find of the week

Create your own Fifth Element DC27 multi passFifth Element is one of my favorite movies. In it everyone walks around with a multi pass that gets them into and out of different areas. Well this awesome DEFCON attendee decided to recreate the idea and build their own multi pass for the conference. There is some hardware things involved in here so it's a bit time consuming but the result is awesome.

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