Learn By Doing Newsletter

Welcome to another awesome week of the Learn By Doing newsletter. There is a lot of content across the spectrum this week that is worth digging into.

There are some interesting insights on the Cloud front this week. Promotional credits for open source projects that use the AWS CI/CD tools. A look into how Octopus Cloud was anything but cost-effective in it's initial roll out. Coding more of your cup of tea? Check out the eight habits expert software designers use on a day to day basis. Take a look at how logs are going to be our greatest vulnerability in the not so distant future. If you're looking for more tooling to add to your arsenal, check out the aws-lambda-power-tuning project.

This week is loaded with great content so make sure you check out all the other articles as well. See you all in two weeks for the 73rd volume of the Learn By Doing newsletter.

☁️ Cloud

MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on the launch of Octopus Cloud 1.0News flash, you can build anything inside of an AWS account. This includes good designs, bad designs, and everything in between. I'm not sure where the initial architecture for Octopus Cloud lands on that spectrum. I'm certain they had the best intentions when initially offering a service at $10/month, but a basic cost analysis would have revealed a lot of the problems they encountered. The architecture of one EC2 instance + database per customer surely wasn't going to hold over time. That said, this is a great read about the lessons they learned and how they managed to pivot.

AWS Promotional Credits for Open Source ProjectsAWS is extending it's promotional credits offering to Open Source Projects. This is great news for folks that are contributing to the ecosystem around AWS like OpenJDK and the like. It's a straightforward process to apply and they are promising a 1-2 week turn around.

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly DetectionIt's a little surprising that it took so long for CloudWatch to get anomaly detection. It's a feature that a lot of folks have requested for quite a while now. Regardless, it's here now and it looks promising. Check it out with some of the pre-baked trained models.

🔨 Tools

aws-lambda-power-tuning - Tune your AWS Lambda functions using a Step FunctionThis is much more than your traditional CloudWatch Insights. This is a step function state machine that looks to fine tune your serverless workloads in a data-driven way.

Convert curl syntax to your favorite languageDo a lot of API development? Then you know the pain that can sometimes insue when you try to convert a cURL request into an HTTP request in your language of choice. This free tool is here to help you.

Reaviz - Chart component library for ReactThis is a cool library that makes showing charts, graphs, and the like in your web apps using React out of the box. Underneath the hood it's using D3js, but you can focus on the component level for most of your work.

Code && Languages

Eight Habits of Expert Software Designers: An Illustrated GuideThis is a fascinating read out of MIT Press that explores how great pieces of code or software are rooted in some key habits. I think these are great to read and keep in your tool box. However, it's key to remember how these can be tied back to your own reality which I think this article misses out on.

Dark mode in a website with CSSDark mode is coming to more and more things (thankfully it's finally in Slack). As such there is more support coming to the browser to detect and update your sites style based on their preference. Check out this post from Tom Brow for more details.

Logs were our lifeblood. Now they're our liability.The volume of logs being produced today is hard to wrap your head around. An entire ecosystem of companies exists solely around ingesting, processing, and running metrics on your logs. But the time is coming where the massive amounts of logs we keep laying around could become our downfall.

😎 Cool find of the week

Why you should have a side projectThe debate around whether to work on side projects or not is never ending. I personally get a lot of value from building things on my off days. It allows me to explore new technologies and ideas that I may not get to use in my day to day work. This is a good read from Eric Kuhn on the topic and it's worth giving a once over.

Who's hiring

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