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Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

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Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#61

Post by jrockway »

vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Sometimes I wonder if the old world where you had to buy computers and drive to the datacenter at 3 in the morning to replace dead hard drives was really so bad.

I guess it was really so bad. Everything you have to build for yourself in the cloud is something you probably needed in your self-hosted stack -- a directory of users, permissions (and escalation), firewall rules, SSH key material, etc. I feel like no matter what production stack you choose, you're always in that "6 of one, half-dozen of another" state. Lots of stuff to interfere with getting your code out there and keeping it running.

(My real question is why the cloud providers don't offer these things for you -- they give you the tools to build solutions, not solutions. But I just want to work on my app. I wonder why things like App Engine never really caught on. I guess being opinionated drives more people away than it brings in with the promise of more simplicity, though to some extent App Engine was too simple, which is always bad. Meanwhile, what cloud providers offer certainly lets you bring your own opinion and build it out yourself. I wish there was a comfortable middle ground.)

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#62

Post by Ankintol »

kumarvvr wrote: post #46

Some part of me wishes that programming and stuff ought to be of enough complexity so that only serious programmers lead the tech stuff. Too much of programming education / online stuff is muddled with millions of media items that cater to absolute beginners. I rarely come across deep, insightful articles that discuss at-least one level beyond the standard stuff. Any search for any programming related question leads…

As someone who's produced a large volume of educational content in my career, this idea ends up producing content that even most serious practitioners cannot consume.

The problem is that even amongst "serious" programmers people often have a patchwork of knowledge with small, unpredictable gaps in understanding; many of which will surprise you. You will find these gaps even if you've taken the time to handpick vetted experts. Once you account for this patchwork of knowledge gaps in verified experts you'll often notice that you're really close to a tutorial for relative beginners, which most people are, and just go the full distance.

The problem generalizes to a variety of subjects but is particularly pernicious in programming where small details are often of much greater significance.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#63

Post by shard »

vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Not knowing AWS, this sub-thread reads like a real-life version of the Microservices sketch: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#64

Post by dsiegel2275 »

I have been building my own SRS flashcard web app, targeted specifically for language learning. Your implementation, UX-wise, is similar to mine (e.g. I have nearly identical "flip" transition"). Your use of icons is nicer, and the color scheme you chose is excellent.

I like the trade that you made of not having persistent accounts. I wrestled with that idea for a portion of my site that features "pre canned" decks. Without looking at the implementation I suspect it could then be a completely client-side solution served as static files.

Nice work.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#65

Post by baobabKoodaa »

dsiegel2275 wrote: post #64

I have been building my own SRS flashcard web app, targeted specifically for language learning. Your implementation, UX-wise, is similar to mine (e.g. I have nearly identical "flip" transition"). Your use of icons is nicer, and the color scheme you chose is excellent. I like the trade that you made of not having persistent accounts. I wrestled with that idea for a portion of my site that features "pre canned" decks.…

Thanks! By the way, you can use client-side user accounts for custom decks as well. Just save user cards to local storage and allow the user to import/export their cards to a file by clicking a button. (In my opinion, local storage alone provides sufficient persistence for most user data, like which cards should be on which piles, but if the user goes through the trouble of creating a custom deck, we want to offer import/export as a backup feature, and also to be able to move decks across devices.)

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#66

Post by dsiegel2275 »

osmaelo wrote: post #40
ben174 wrote: post #31

Flashcards are my favorite way to learn - specifically to pass a test or gain some certification. I've standardized on a simple format of a google sheet with column A being the front side of the card, and column B being the back - and found a few decent iOS flash card apps that allow me to link to a google doc. So, do you have the whole list of questions in a consumable format I could get into a sheet?

What iOS flash card apps would you recommend? Thanks!

Anki seems to be the gold standard. It has desktop, web and native mobile versions and it synchronizes across devices. The interface isn't anything fancy... but it doesn't really need to be for the app to be effective.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#67

Post by bigyikes »

jrockway wrote: post #61
vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Sometimes I wonder if the old world where you had to buy computers and drive to the datacenter at 3 in the morning to replace dead hard drives was really so bad. I guess it was really so bad. Everything you have to build for yourself in the cloud is something you probably needed in your self-hosted stack -- a directory of users, permissions (and escalation), firewall rules, SSH key material, etc. I feel like no matte…

Haven’t used it in years, but Heroku was really great in this respect. It was very easy to just focus on making a good app instead of trying to configure everything myself.

I guess there’s probably not much demand for this kind of thing at large scales.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#68

Post by crazygringo »

qorrect wrote: post #22

Amazon has turned developers into consumers. I like the site, I hate how un-hobbyist-friendly the dev world has become.

??? The dev world is probably more hobbyist-friendly than any other world I can think of.

But AWS isn't meant for hobbyists any more than SalesForce is meant as a personal contacts list.

If you want to build a hobby project, use something meant for that, like a $5/mo droplet at Digital Ocean.

It's fine and good for the dev world to have an enterprise-focused part too.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#69

Post by crazygringo »

bobowzki wrote: post #34

If you need flashcards for something that should be simple and logical... it's not.

You don't need flashcards to build stuff. You can learn it as you go.

You need flashcards to pass exams and interviews, when you need to learn stuff a lot quicker than you could by learning as you go. And sometimes speed is important in life.

Flashcards are orthogonal to whether something is simple and logical.

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