Skills pay your bills, designing APIs, 6 years for GKE, and Cloud Security remediation guides

Hello 👋🏽

Welcome to my weekly tech musings. Do reply to me on what you liked this week and what you want to see more. In addition, you could access old issues here!

This week, Vivek and I launched a Cloud Skilling challenge for learning Elastic on Azure. It reminded me of my time learning Hadoop in 2013, which helped me foray into Open source, big data, NoSQL, and eventually DevRel. It all started with that one skill.

At that time, I’m neither actively working on Hadoop nor anticipate it, but did a paid course to learn it 😅 Continuous learning helps in many ways. Sometimes to improve your knowledge, or get a new job, or even make new friends!

In recent times, I’ve learned NextJS, TailwindCSS, Javalin, Github Actions, OpenTelemetry, and more. All of them helped in some way to improve my knowledge.

Many over-index on doing tech certifications. Even if you don’t get certified, it is ok, but gaining knowledge continuously by attending meetups, developer events, and participating in one community benefits you in the long run.

Most importantly, learning is democratized today than in 2013, with many folks creating excellent content. You can sit in Imphal, MN, and learn from the instructor in Austin, TX.

Overall, I believe skills do help in paying your bills.

Illustrations, comics, explain-like-iam-five blogs have become a big part of learning. For example, see this DNS works illustration.

I’ve designed, coded, and used several APIs so far. Frankly, designing APIs is an art 😀 especially, if you reach a point where there are many users affected by an even small change in API. I’ve read this advisory piece from Slack Engg on how they design APIs.

Not all might be possible to follow, but some are a must for a great developer experience.

You might not believe it. I’ve first heard about Kubernetes in 2015 at a GDG meetup. It is hard to believe it is a big thing today 😁 while I felt confused with all the pods and selectors terminology. That being said, listen to this beautiful podcast celebrating GKE - 6th anniversary 🥳

It is a no-brainer that the cloud is becoming an integral part of a developer’s workflow. Gone are the days, where your deploy team deploys to your data center in Dallas, TX. In turn, the security of those resources is too important as the attacks increase. So I found these friendly remediation guides from Aquasec, which give detailed steps on remediation common security issues in some cloud services. For example, Open Elasticsearch instance on EC2.

Join Nafiul and me this Friday on PyCharm TV by Jetbrains to learn about “Building Search for a Python Flask using Elasticsearch”. Don’t forget to set a reminder.

If you like this week’s newsletter, rate it with “thumbs up/down.”

Sincerely,

Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽