Dan Vega

What I'm thankful for, AWS, Course Graphics & YouTube

After taking a week off due to Thanksgiving I'm back with another edition of the newsletter. I had some time to think about what I am thankful for over the holiday and I figured I would start by sharing that with you.

Thankful for

It's been a crazy couple of years on this planet. I have been so focused this year on things in my life that I would like to change that I lost sight of so many things I am grateful for. This isn't the entire list, but it is the important ones.

You

I am thankful for each and every one of you. Thank you for signing up for this newsletter, reading my articles, watching my videos, and supporting the content that I put out there. Some of you pay for my content and honestly I'm humbled that you choose to learn from me. I love to learn and I love to teach the things that I find interesting back to you.

I love hearing from you so please reach out to me by replying to this email or like Chol did by tweeting at me. Thank you for the kind words Chol and I am glad to hear that my monolothic solution worked for you.

https://twitter.com/actualsudo/status/1467470501400354818

My Family

My family is the reason I get out of bed every single day. They are my rock and they push me to be a better Husband, Father, and person. I want them to be proud of me and I think about that often. I would be lying if I said that raising 2 babies through a pandemic has been easy but I think we are all stronger and closer because of it. It's been a dream come true watching them learn and grow and I am thankful for that ❤️

Health

In the time of a global pandemic, I don't know how you don't think about your health. My family has remained healthy through these tough times and I am so thankful for that.

Personally, it's been a rough year for me. For those who don't know, I have Type 2 diabetes. Outside of my family and very close friends I don't think I have ever told anyone that. It probably has something to do with me being ashamed or embarrassed but if you can't tell 4,000+ of your closest friends on a newsletter, who can you tell 🤷‍♂️

I don't want to get into the specifics on how I got here but I will share with you what has been going on lately. This year between stress, not sleeping (baby), lack of exercise (see previous 2), not testing every day and bad nutritional choices on my part my A1C reached an 11.1. For those of you that don't know, that is very bad.

This was a huge wake-up call for me and a reminder that nothing I do is more important than my health. Your health is everything and if you don't get that right it will affect everything else in your life. I have always loved working out, it is my escape and something I get to do for myself. There was a huge lack of that this year and that has been affecting me mentally and physically. Over the last month or so I have gotten back to running and It's amazing what it can do for your mind and body!

I'm sharing this with you as a reminder that nothing is more important than your health.

My Career

I get to do what I love each and every day and I don't know that everyone gets to say that. When I put some headphones on and sit down to write code or create content I can't tell you how happy I am. Life is too short friends, If you're not happy it's up to fix that.

I'm not telling you to go quit your job because at the end of the day most of us need to work but you need to find something that gets you out of bed in the morning and that inspires you.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I have some experience with AWS but mostly building tutorials and demos. I signed up for a free account about 5 years, know my way around the console and at high level can tell you what a lot of the common services are used for.

I put together a nice demo for my Spring Boot 2 course on how to deploy a Spring Boot Application on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk. AWS is something I have wanted to level up on and there is no time like the present.

With all of the Black Friday sales going on I decided to invest in myself. A Cloud Guru was running a 40% off promotion (it's still valid) so I decided to pickup a yearly subscription. I had a subscription to them a couple of years ago so I already knew about the amazing content they produce. My main goal with this subscription is to start preparing for certifications. These are the certs I have my eye on but I honestly have no long this will take me.

  • Cloud Practitioner
  • Developer Associate
  • Solutions Architect Associate
  • Solutions Architect Professional

If anyone has all four of these certs I would love to know how long it took you to prepare and take the exam for all of them. I am hoping to finish these quickly but I'm not sure what a realistic goal should be.

The second part to this puzzle is architecting, building and deploying solutions on AWS. I have a couple of ideas for projects and the first one would make a great fit on AWS. To accomplish this you really need to understand the different technologies used to build out these solutions.

As you know I'm also a huge fan of Java & Spring Boot so to learn how to go from zero to production with Spring Boot and AWS I picked up this book Stratospheric which does a great job of covering that. I know 2 of the authors on this book Tom & Phillip and I love everything the put out there so I am really excited to dive into this one.

If you have any resources for AWS or tips & tricks please reach out to me. I got really jealous of all the tweets from re:invent this week and I hope to be there next year!

Course Graphics

I have a bunch of courses that I have created over at danvega.dev/courses. Each of the course graphics are something that I put together and they are mostly just stock graphics I found over the years. I want to get some custom graphics designed for each of the courses and I also wanted them to follow some type of theme.

With that I went over to Upwork and put up a job description of what I was looking for. In there I said that these were 3 examples of course graphics that I really love.

I wanted something unique and I excited to share with you one of the results. The following graphic was created for my Groovy Course. What do you think?

Groovy Course Cover

YouTube

Back in April of this year I created a video on how to Create Your First Spring App. The idea here was to create a spring application from scratch without Spring Boot. I think this is a really great way to understand what Spring Boot is doing for you behind the scenes. A new subscriber, John left this comment and it made my day.

This is really helpful because as a beginner I now have done a lot of research until I finally had created my little big picture (LOL) in the world of Spring and what all to learn. I truly must say that without understanding whats going on under the hood of spring boot you have a much longer way to understand what this framework is about. Dependency Injection (Bean Factory vs. ApplicationContext), Annotations, Beans, (also Generics, Reflections etc.) and my conclusion is you should learn Spring before diving into Spring Boot. There are a lot of fancy courses and videos out there but without understanding the internals ... well, it's more difficult. I would like to see a video were you build a bigger Spring app with Spring MVC, JDBC, REST etc.. Thanks for the content, this helped me so much, this is exactly the maximum level of complexity I need. Hope to see more about Spring internals from you in the future. Subscribed!

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record here but I love hearing you from you guys. This comment made my day and helps validate that the content I am creating is helping people. Thanks John 👏🏻👨‍🏫

Around the Web

📝 Articles

🎬 Videos

💻 Projects

📚 Books

✍️ Quote of the week

👨🏼‍💻 Courses

✍️ Quote of the week

“Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.” – Joseph Pilates.

Until Next Week

Thanks for sitting down and sharing a cup of coffee with me my friend. I hope you enjoyed this installment of Coffee & Code and I will see you next Monday morning. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding
Dan Vega
danvega@gmail.com
https://www.danvega.dev