Year: 2016

“AWS Week in Review” goes open

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon AWS for over two years now. One thing that absolutely blows me away is how much activity there is in Amazon AWS development. Every day there is an announcement of a new services or updates to the existing ones. In order to help people keep up with all the updates, Jeff Barr of Amazon was blogging “AWS Week in Review” for a few years.

Now, imagine this – there is so much new stuff going on that it takes hours to prepare each of those blog posts:

Unfortunately, finding, saving, and filtering links, and then generating these posts grew to take a substantial amount of time. I reluctantly stopped writing new posts early this year after spending about 4 hours on the post for the week of April 25^th.

This is insane! So he almost gave up on the idea, as it is too time consuming. But people want it. What’s the solution? Go Open Source!

The AWS Week in Review is now a GitHub project (https://github.com/aws/aws-week-in-review). I am inviting contributors (AWS fans, users, bloggers, and partners) to contribute.

Every Monday morning I will review and accept pull requests for the previous week, aiming to publish the Week in Review by 10 AM PT. In order to keep the posts focused and highly valuable, I will approve pull requests only if they meet our guidelines for style and content.

At that time I will also create a file for the week to come, so that you can populate it as you discover new and relevant content.

I think that’s a brilliant move. Those weekly review posts are super useful for anyone involved with Amazon AWS. They should keep coming. But the time cost involved is understandable. So crowd-sourcing this is a smart way to go about it.

I hope this will not only continue the blog post series, but also take it to the new level, with more section, content, and insight.

Well done!

How the Internet works

Ars Technica runs a nice overview article “How the Internet works: Submarine fiber, brains in jars, and coaxial cables“. It features plenty of cool images, statistics, and details of the Internet wiring from under the sea to the last mile to the last 100 meters. It’s mostly focused on UK, but it provides a good understanding of what’s involved in the modern day connectivity.

P.S.: On a less serious note, here’s The IT Crowd take on how the Internet works. Thanks to Maxym Balabaev for a reminder.

10k Apart – Inspiring the Web with Just 10k

From this article, I’ve learned about an excellent (for our times) 10k Apart competition:

With so much of an emphasis on front-end frameworks and JavaScript runtimes, it’s time to get back to basics—back to optimizing every little byte like your life depends on it and ensuring your site can work, no matter what. The Challenge? Build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10kB and works without JavaScript.

Think you’ve got what it takes? You have until September 30th.

I can’t wait to see the submissions and all the ways to squeeze the awesomeness of the modern web into just 10 kilobytes. This reminds me of the Perl Golf posts over at PerlMonks and ~~Assembly~~ PC 64K Intro from my ~~childhood~~ early days (here are some examples).

Git Workflow Basics

“Git Workflow Basics” is yet another take on the git workflow. This subject has been covered in a variety of ways before (here, here, and here, for example), but I think it’s super important for every developer to understand, so if all the other attempts left you puzzled and confused, have a look at this one. It’s pretty straight forward.

One thing in particular that I would like to emphasize:

And hey: remember to review your own pull request before asking for reviews of your teammates. You’ll spot a lot of small things you didn’t notice (style issues, typos, etc) and will allow your colleagues to focus on what really matters.

101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers

Following the recent post “10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators“, here is a more generic, but a much more comprehensive resource – “101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers“. It’s not as technical, but it provides a good summary of common interview questions, from the generic ones like “Why do you want to leave your current company”, through brainteasers like “How many gas stations are there in the United States?”, to stress and communication ones like “What did you do when you had a boss you didn’t get along with?”. The good thing is that you’ll find not only the questions, but also the suggestions on how to answer them.

Altogether, it’s a great resource to go through before your next interview. Most of these questions are very common, no matter which position you are applying to.