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7 games that could boost your coding skills while having fun

tellitwithcode — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 22:29:01 +0000

A couple of months ago I played a game that was focused on flexbox. the name of this game was Flexbox Froggy. It was quite fun and I decided to do a little research to come up with a list of free coding games. I have not played all of them yet, but I will try to do that and also update this list if I come across new games.

List of the games

Flexbox Froggy
CSS Diner
Codecombat
Flexbox Defense
VIM Adventures
Checkio
Scratch

Do you have any tip for your favourite coding games?
Write your favourite game in the comments -> we can keep this list updated.

Thank you

Photo by Folu Eludire on Unsplash

AWS Lambda features #1: Event-driven workflows

tellitwithcode — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 22:52:15 +0000

In this series we will talk about the features that come from AWS Lambda. In this first article we will cover one of the feature of Lambda - event-driven workflows.

Before serverless, when the servers wanted to respond to e.i. API call it was necessary that the server was listening on a particular port every minute of a year for a request. Lambda is not doing that.

The new approach that Lambda is bringing is based on event - driven workflow. The Lambda function is invoked by Lambda service when some event happens.

There is a lot of services that Lambda can be awaiting the event from. It could be for example Dynamo DB, Amazon S3 or API gateway. For the specific event for example -> there could be a file upload to Amazon S3 which can trigger the invoke of a Lambda function. It could be also a Dynamo DB table update or API call and many more.

As described above and on the image. Firstly there should be an event source -> which invokes the lambda and then the code within lambda is executed. There is a result from it which can also continue to some of the other AWS services.

Let's describe some use case examples from AWS website.

File processing
Website
Let's say there is a calculator for exchange rates. After entering the from, to amount and the currencies we hit Convert button and there is a request made to an endpoint which route the request to Lambda -> then the result is calculated by lambda and give back the result.

There are lot of other services that can be taken as the event source that will invoke the Lambda function. Find more information on AWS website in this article -> Using AWS Lambda with other services

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Sources:
Introduction to AWS Lambda & Serverless Applications

Serverless 101: AWS Lambda

Common Lambda application types and use cases

7 AWS services that can help create your app

tellitwithcode — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 18:15:15 +0000

Amazon Web Services offers a lot of different services that can be used for building an app. You can search within all of them on this site where you can use different filters to get to services that could fulfil your needs.

You can choose a particular product category or use filter on the left side of page.

There is a possibility to choose from different possibilities:

re:Invent - we can choose from whether the service was launched on re:Invent 2021 or 2022
Free Tier Type - we can choose whether we want to see the services with 12 Months Free, Always Free or Trials possibility
Product Categories - consists of different product categories e.i. Analytics, Blockchain, Database, Internet Of Things etc.

The number of services available is pretty high. Let's dive briefly into 7 of them.

1. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is serverless computing service used for running event-driven and scheduled tasks. It allows users to run code without provisioning or managing servers. One of the advantages is that it can scale automatically and we pay only for what we use. Lambda can be used with these programming languages: Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby code. #2. Amazon Cognito

2. Amazon API Gateway

Helps to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Using API Gateway we can build 2 types of APIs:

RESTful APIs
WEBSOCKET APIs

3 Amazon Cognito

This service is usually used for adding sign-in and sign-up to web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito is an authentication and authorization service.

So basically once we need to add the possibility for registering the clients and then their sign in to their accounts, this service is good to go.

4. Amazon Dynamo DB

As we could also work with some data that we need to be stored, it is always good to have a service that enables us to do so. Amazon Dynamo DB is serverless, key-value NoSQL database. It enables app creators to start small and scale to handle petabytes of data and ten of millions of read and write requests per second.

5. Amazon Appsync

As the clients may have some data within their accounts and after they are logged in they expect their data to be shown. We need to query them from somewhere. Amazon Appsync helps to create serverless API that enables that.

Not only querying is the thing that can be done thanks to this service. Also updating or publishing data through one single endpoint is the thing.

There are 2 types of APIs that can be created with this service:

GraphQL API
Pub/Sub API

6. AWS Step Functions

This service helps with serverless orchestration. Helps with management of workflows with possibility to call over 200 AWS services.

In other words we can have some workflow within our business logic that requires couple of steps to be done. Let's take for example a simple flow where a user of the app needs to upload a photo that will be edited. Steps that could be done

Saving the photo on server
Checking that payment was a success
a. If the payment was a success then running a Lambda function that can edit the photo
b. If the payment was not a success then wait for 3 days for a payment. If there is no payment after 3 days - CANCEL IT
Saving the edited photo on server
Sending the email with the edited photo or with the message that the payment did not arrive and the order was cancelled.

All of the steps could be managed by creating a workflow within the Step Functions. This is just an example of couple of steps, but the possibilities are endless.

7. AWS CloudWatch

This service is pretty useful once you would like to log for example some errors that occur from time to time. But not only that. AWS CloudWatch is monitoring and management
service, which is great for collecting logs, metrics or event data.

Conclusion

These are just a couple of services that can be useful from all the services that are offered by AWS.

Which from the AWS services are you using for creating your apps?

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The only best shortcut every beginner developer should remember when using VS Code on macOs

tellitwithcode — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 21:36:39 +0000

This shortcut could help to discover faster usage of VS Code.

The magic shortcut is

⌘K ⌘S

When you write this shortcut in VS Code on you Mac a new window called Keyboard Shortcuts opens.

You can find a lot of very useful shortcuts that can streamline your everyday workflow with VS Code.

One of the could be

⇧⌘L

This shortcut selects all occurrences of current selection. So for example when you are in a file where you want to replace : with = on all 10 places within the file you can select the first : then hit the shortcut and it will select all of :. Then you can edit it with =. Lovely, isn't it?

In the first column called Command you have the description of the command. You can search within the commands with the search bar above the table. The keyboard shortcut combination is right to the Command column in the Keybinding column.

On the right side within the search bar there are 3 icons:

The first icon enables you to record keys you hit on you keyboard and if the combination is valid shortcut it will search it in the list.
You can change the alphabetical order of the shortcuts
When you write something in the search bar and you want to delete it you can hit the last third icon. It will clean the search bar.

Changing the shortcut according to your preferences

On the left side within each line of the table there is a small pencil which enables you to edit the shortcut.

You can write your own preferable combination and after hitting enter you can use it. When there is a match between your new combination and any of the combinations within the table it will give you a hint.

Other sources of shortcuts

Of course there are lot of videos and articles about the shortcuts for VS Code and macOs. For those who prefer to have the shortcuts within one PDF there is a one right from VS Code. You can find it here Keyboard shortcuts macOs

What is your favourite shortcut when using VS Code on macOs?
Inspire us all in comments :)

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Photo by Juan Gomez on Unsplash

6 ideas about why learning to code is worth it

tellitwithcode — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 20:23:27 +0000

Coding as a tool of communication

As a fan of communication and foreign languages I found the reason why coding could be interesting for me as a way of communicating with computers.

Coding as a way to freedom and saving more time

Coding is a skill that could be done from anywhere, but not only that. The code helps to create tools that are used for repeatable tasks. I think that when we can automate some repeatable tasks we gain time. We can then use it for different events in our lives than working on repeatable tasks.

Coding has high earning potential

Coding is a skill that belongs to skills of high-income potential right now. It is not the only motivation but I think it is something that could be a pleasant result of it.

Coding is a way to train the brain

I think that as we train muscles we also need to train our brain and this is a good way to do it 🙂 Not the only one, but one of them.

Coding as a way of craftsmanship

I always admired skilful craftsmen who could build things from scratch. While admiring others, I also wanted to know how to build something. I chose to learn how to build software as I see the future in it 🙂

Coding as a tool for problem solving

This can be very useful also in every day life. Defining the problem and finding the right solution approach could be applied also in a lot of situations that we face in everyday life. Practicing this skill thanks coding is a win.

What is your #motivation and #why you think learning to code is worth it?