Learn By Doing Newsletter

This week is jam packed with great content across the full spectrum of topics. I had a hard time selecting just a few pieces as there was some great content that came across my feed this week.

There is some great insights into the serverless world with the VPC networking improvements and why serverless might not always be less expensive. Stack Overflow put out a great article this week that focuses on how to make the code review process even better by being empathetic. Cloudflare continues to make improvements with yet another feature, HTML Rewriter, added to their Workers platform. Still not sure about React Hooks? There is a great guide this week that shows you a side by side comparison that I personally really enjoyed.

Check out all of those great pieces and many more in this 71st edition of the Learn By Doing Newsletter. If you enjoyed the content this week please feel free to forward this edition to a friend or colleague. See you all next week 👋

☁️ Cloud

Easily Deploy GraphQL APIs with Serverless ComponentsServerless Framework continues to roll out new and interesting components to make deploying serverless applications a breeze. This is a neat one that came out this week, deploy a full GraphQL API in AWS without any CloudFormation waiting. Take a look and give it a try.

Serverless: 15% slower and 8x more expensiveThis post stirred up quite the controversy last week as many opponents to serverless stood up and said "I told you so". But, this post is a bit more nuanced than that and there are some eye opening insights around the pricing of API Gateway.

Testing improvements to Lambda VPC NetworkingMore posts like this one are starting to come out as AWS Lambda shipped major VPC improvements. This is a great post from Matt Lewis that demos the improvements. I look forward to trying this out in my own applications soon.

🔨 Tools

Memos - Quickly search your screenshots and photosI really hope this gets ported to other things besides iOS because it would be very handy. With Memos you can quickly search all the photos and screenshots directly on your device, they never leave it. Memos does some OCR in the background to make everything quickly searchable for you.

Streamlit - The fastest way to build custom ML tools Struggling to demo your machine learning models? Streamlit looks to help with that. You can build interactive user interfaces that show off your model with a few simple Python scripts. No need for JavaScript, HTML, or CSS, the tool handles all of that for you.

Code && Languages

How to Make Good Code Reviews BetterIt's not very often a blog post from Stack Overflow lands in this newsletter. But this one was too good not to be included. Gergerly Orosz does a great job of walking through what makes a Code Review good and then how it can be made event better. This is the first post I have seen that touches on code reviews in a distributed/multi-timezone team.

Localizing applications with Cloudflare Workers' new streaming HTML RewriterCloudflare has been rolling out all kinds of interesting updates to their Workers platform. This is a big release that allows you to rewrite HTML at the edge of your network. Kristian Freeman does a great job of demoing the power of this idea in this post.

Predictive CPU isolation of containers at NetflixThe number of organizations or services that need to consider this likely isn't very high. However, this gives a glimpse into the world of Netflix engineering where every optimization can have an impact. This is a good read on how they designed titus-isolate in order to make better container scheduling decisions based on past CPU reporting.

Thinking in React HooksReact Hooks have been out for a while now but some folks, like myself, are still making the adjustment. This is a great demo/post comparing class components and function components. I found this guide very illuminating with regards to the advantages of Hooks.

😎 Cool find of the week

Behold: LedonardoThis is a fun post courtesy of Stavros Korokithakis. Stavros wanted to do something new and unique at the intersection of technology and photography. In this post he details how he combined the two to overlay images within photographs via some code, microcontrollers, and LED strip lights.

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