Learn By Doing Newsletter

Happy New Year everyone! It has been a very relaxing couple of weeks with the holidays, but now we are in 2019 and looking to the future.

This week I have some different content for you to dive into. There isn't much on the serverless front this week, but we do have some awesome tools and coding articles that I think you will enjoy. First we have Brian Han with an article on how you can plug Prettier into your Git pre-commit hooks. We have a functional programming language for Python. We also have Jerry Hargrove with his new visual notes on Aurora Serverless.

Check out all those articles and many more in this 36th edition of the Learn By Doing Newsletter. If you found a particular article helpful or have a suggestion for a future volume, feel free to shoot me a note by just replying to this email.

☁️ Cloud

New AWS Certification and Training Opportunities for Alexa DevelopersIt looks like there is a new AWS Certification now available for the Alexa Developers out there. I'm not sure how valuable this will be to employers, but considering some of the tech that goes into Alexa is serverless, it might be worth looking into.

Adding Zap to the Azure DevOps PipelineWe don't talk about Azure very often in this newsletter, but this is an interesting video that integrates some SecOps with DevOps. It walks through how you can configure ZAP to run inside of your Azure DevOps Pipeline.

Amazon Aurora Serverless DiagramJerry Hargrove is back with another incredible service diagram. This time he honed in on Aurora Serverless, something that I think most of the community is still ramping up on. There is some good stuff in here around the scaling events that you might find helpful.

🔨 Tools

flair - A very simple framework for state-of-the-art Natural Language ProcessingFlair is a Python framework that allows you to easily extract named entities out of text in just a few lines of code. This is incredibly handy if you want to build your own NLP models and give certain entities a higher weight than others.

coconut - Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming.Functional programming has arrived for Python. Coconut compiles down into Python and all valid Python is valid in Coconut. I still haven't tried out a functional language in depth, but this one looks quite interesting. I like the pattern-matching example that is included in the Getting Started guide.

txqr - Transfer data via animated QR codesThis is a fun project that a few folks created. It allows you to transfer data between two devices using animated QR codes. You have a library that generates the QR codes for you and then you need to read them with another device using a scanner.

Code && Languages

Algorithms by Jeff EricksonIt is very cool to see so much open source material coming out for computer science. I wish these types of resources would have existed before I completed my university work, but not much I can do about that now. If you don't have a CS degree, or even if you do, this is a fantastic topic area to study an be familiar with.

Using Prettier with a Pre-commit HookI am a huge fan of automating the mundane, but necessary things. This is a fun post from a new contributor to this newsletter, Brian Han. He lays out how you can leverage Prettier and Git to automate the formatting of your code via a pre-commit hook.

How to learn more as a C++ software engineer?C++ continues to be one of those languages that I sometimes wish I got to work in. I studied it a lot back in college but haven't done much with it since. This post has some great tips and resources for continuing to learn more about C++ that I think folks might enjoy.

😎 Cool find of the week

Lessons from Running a Small-Scale Electronics Factory in my Guest Bedroom, part 1: DesignIndie Hacker projects are quite numerous nowadays, but few are actually building hardware/firmware. This is a very interesting read about how the author started a small electronics assembly line in his guest bedroom. Lot's of interesting lessons in here that you likely wouldn't find with a traditional software project.

Who's hiring

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