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Choosing an AWS region is the first decision you have to make when you set up your AWS components. You can’t do anything in the AWS Management Console, SDK or CLI without choosing a region. Most AWS customers choose one based on proximity to themselves or to their end users, which sounds like a sensible thing to do. Price calculations using AWS Price List API (2021-05-26). By Ernesto Marquez.

However, proximity alone is not enough. There are a lot of other factors to consider when choosing a region. Cost varies by region - choose the wrong one and you could end up paying a lot more. Author uses the AWS Price List API a lot. He uses it to programmatically calculate the cost of every configuration he makes. For some regions, it’s not difficult to find a 30% or 70% price difference compared to the cheapest AWS region.

Source: https://www.concurrencylabs.com/blog/choose-your-aws-region-wisely/

It is also worth noting that:

• Reserved EC2 Instance Cost and Savings vary by region
• Regions have different latencies and data transfer speeds
• Consider the type of resource that is most important to you (i.e. compute, data transfer, latency, storage, etc.)
• Not all services are available in all regions (some take a VERY long time before they are)
• Not all regions have the same number of Availability Zones
• All data transfer between AWS regions costs the same, except for one region (Ohio)

You would pay $0.02 per GB of data transferred to any region in the world, except Ohio. For Ohio, you would pay $0.01 per GB.

As you can see, there are a lot of factors to consider when choosing the right AWS region. Not everything is about proximity to your end users. Choosing your AWS region wisely can save you the pain of overspending thousands of dollars and potentially hindering the growth of your applications. For detailed charts and breakdown of costs follow the link to the full article. Excellent!

According to a 2020 study, over half of the companies that use the public-cloud said that doing so had improved their ability to meet their business goals. By James Harvey, EMEA CTO at Cisco AppDynamics.

Another recent study found that shifting business applications to the cloud helped boost revenue by 16% and productivity by 19%. Little wonder, that 93% of enterprises today already have a multi-cloud strategy in place and 73% plan to optimise their existing use of the cloud in the future. The advent of sophisticated, scalable cloud architectures — native and hybrid — has enabled organisations to take full advantage of modern cloud infrastructures and microservices architecture to boost productivity and increase cost savings.

Despite these advantages, moving to the cloud still has its headaches for some organisations. Often, in highly complex - cross-platform and multi-site — deployments, it can be hard for IT managers and CIOs to demonstrate the gains from migrating to the cloud.

What’s needed, is a way to monitor, configure and optimise the organisation’s entire technology landscape, through a single lens:

• Scale, adapt and grow with the cloud
• The impact of the pandemic on cloud strategies
• The power of observability and monitoring

Observability is important here because it provides the raw, granular data necessary to gain an in-depth understanding of complex and highly distributed systems. Perhaps even more importantly, businesses are able to identify how well the infrastructure supports the applications, identifying any bottlenecks and load issues, in real-time. Insightful!

Reading a lot of great books improves our knowledge, judgment and mental models. But many people rarely engage with the content of their books. By Thomas Oppong.

When you aim to read hundreds of books a year with no regard for absorption, you probably won’t get all the knowledge you need from the books. To improve your retention rate, you have to slow down and think deeply about the new ideas.

Successful reading requires metacognition.

When you are metacognitive, you are aware of your own thought processes and think about your thinking. It’s a vital skill for learning and retaining new knowledge.

When you apply metacognition to reading:

• You make time to analyze the content and reflect on what you are reading.
• You ask critical, challenging, and analytical questions whilst reading.
• You make time to figure out what you already knew before reading and what you want to improve.
• You’ve thought about what to do to retain more of what you read
• You plan on applying some of the ideas in the book in your life. Successful readers use metacognition to understand what they want from books. They also use it to improve their reading experience.

Most great books require an investment of 5–10 hours to absorb the content thoroughly. When you plan of spending a lot of your time on good books, it’s essential to make sure you are getting the most knowledge out of them without wasting time.

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words. Deliberate reading means you take your books seriously. It’s one of the best ways to acquire and retain new knowledge. Good read!

Improving your workforce performance is probably one of the biggest priorities for all executives and business owners. When your team’s productivity is up, everything else is expected to be just as high in performance. By Thomas Jones.

One way to improve workforce performance is by using digital transformation as your primary means of driving this transition. Hence, here’s how you can use digital transformation to improve workforce performance:

• Define realistic and clear goals
• Align your strategy with your goals
• Create an environment of transparency
• Provide access to relevant information
• Give opportunities for decision-making
• Be flexible and adapt to employee needs

To sum up, using digital transformation to improve your team’s workforce performance is probably one of the best things you can do for the short-term and long-term success of your business. Good read!

Because of strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to make all employees return to the office and allowed many to work remotely. By Gleb Tsipursky.

Apple’s plan to force its staff back to the office has caused many to leave the company and led to substantial internal opposition.

All of the surveys revealed strong preferences for working from home post-pandemic at least half the time for over three-quarters of all respondents. A quarter to a third of all respondents desired full-time remote work permanently. Between 40% and 55% of respondents said they’d quit without permanent remote options for at least half the workweek; of these, many would leave if not permitted fully remote work. Minority employees expressed an especially strong preference for remote work to escape in-office discrimination.

Leaders frequently proclaim that people are their most important resource. Yet the leaders resistant to permitting telework are not living by that principle. Instead, they’re doing what they feel comfortable with, even if it devastates employee morale, engagement, and productivity; seriously undercuts retention and recruitment; and harms diversity and inclusion. In the end, their behavior is a major threat to the bottom line.

Many people feel a desire to go back to the world before the pandemic. They fall for status quo bias, a desire to maintain or get back to what they see as the appropriate situation and way of doing things. Read the rest of this interesting article to understand cognitive biases and taking research-based steps to address them, so you can make the best decisions. Nice one!

From collecting data to sending results, ADF constructs the right MLOps Lifecycle on one screen. By Rahulraj Singh.

Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/implementing-an-end-to-end-machine-learning-workflow-with-azure-data-factory-f16cbeeffd94/

Author will walk through an entire Machine Learning Operation Cycle and show how to establish every step of the way using Azure Data Factory (ADF). Yes, it is possible, easy, and extremely reliable. As a bonus, it also automatically sets you up to receive alerts for any sort of data anomalies occurring throughout the process, so you do not have to worry about monitoring the workflow manually.

The article content is split into:

• How would you define an End-to-End (E2E) ML Workflow?
• What is Azure Machine Learning?
• Walking through the workflow step-by-step
• Azure Function to create a trigger for the pipeline
• Azure Databricks for data preprocessing and storing to Data Lakes
• Build and train models from the stored data using Azure Machine Learning
• Push the final output into Azure Blob Storage
• Access the blob storage from Power BI to build reporting dashboards

… and more. And we liked: “Storytelling is the most important part of any analytics process”. You will also find links to further reading on the topic in the article. Good job!

Regular Expressions are powerful, PHP but they are not known to be readable, and more often than not, maintaining a regular expression is not a straight-forward task. By Ayesh Karunaratne.

Further, using these improvements also means the regular expressions might be less portable to other languages. For example, named captures are supported even in older PHP versions, but in JavaScript, named captures feature was only added in ECMAScript 2018.

The choice of the delimiter is important because all occurrences of the delimiter character within the expression must be escaped. The fewer escaped characters inside a regular expression, the more readable it will be. Not choosing meta characters (such as ^, $, braces, and other characters that carry special meaning in regular expressions) can reduce the number of characters escaped.

The article brings information on the following:

• Choice of delimiter
• Reducing escape characters
• Non-capture groups
• Named captures
• Using comments
• Named character classes

Regular expressions support character classes, and they can help take the scrutiny off a regular expression while making them more readable at the same time. Good read!

Automation testing and Continuous Integration (CI) are integral parts of the development and test activity. Selenium test automation is one such approach that helps in the end-to-end testing of the web product. By Himanshu Sheth.

The article deals with:

• Introduction to Docker
• How to install and setup the Docker on Windows
• Why use Selenium with Docker for web application testing
• Creating Selenium test in Docker
• Debugging Docker Container with RealVNC Viewer
• Running Selenium tests on LambdaTest with Docker

Container in Docker is a stand unit of software that packages the code and all the required dependencies so that the application can run more quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.

In this tutorial on how to run Selenium tests in Docker, we have seen how Docker lets you run tests in containers and isolate the tests in development and deployment. Docker with Selenium provides a light-weight solution to run UI tests, that too in an isolated environment. Good read!

CSS-in-JS has taken a solid place in front-end tooling, and it seems this trend will continue in the near future. Especially in the React world. By Tomas Pustelnik.

For example, out of 11492 people who participate in State of CSS survey in 2020 only 14.3% didn’t hear of Styled Components (a dominant CSS-in-JS library). And more than 40% of participants have used the library.

Author wanted to see an in-depth performance comparison of CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled Components and a good old CSS for a long time. Sadly he was unable to found a comparison on a real-world project and not some simple test scenario, so he did it himself.

Don’t use runtime CSS-in-JS if you care about the load performance of your site. Simply less JS = Faster Site. There isn’t much we can do about it. But if you want to see some numbers, continue reading.

The article content:

• What I measured and how
• Network comparison
• Coverage
• Lighthouse performance audit
• Performance profiling
• Comparing user interaction

Runtime CSS-in-JS can have a noticeable impact on your webpage. Mainly for low-end devices and regions with a slower internet connection or more expensive data. Good read!

Preparing for important conversations in your UX career. Notes from mentoring session in which author was discussing how to approach UX career conversations and specifically how to ask for a raise or promotion. By H Locke.

There are a number of routes into UX. There is also a massive skill set that could be considered part of our remit so it’s really easy, over time, to find yourself taking on more roles and greater responsibility day-to-day.

The article focuses on:

• Things to think about before having that career conversation
• Have you earned it?
• Do you know how your company manages career development?
• Are you prepared?
• Prepare … your (rational) argument
• Prepare … for the awkwardness
• Prepare … for the human stress response
• Now ask for the meeting
• How to manage the conversation

We liked: Make sure it’s at least 30 mins so that you have their full attention. If your manager is a flake who always arrives 20 minutes late, book them for an hour. If the person asks what its about in advance, say you’re looking for some career guidance. Nice one!