[HN Gopher] Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills
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Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills
Author : baobabKoodaa
Score : 264 points
Date : 2021-05-24 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloudbite.attejuvonen.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloudbite.attejuvonen.fi)
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| This would be fantastic to add to a DevOps wiki/forum that I've
| been wanting to make for ages. I just never get started because I
| want it to be perfect and can't decide even what to name the damn
| thing, much less how it should be organized
| ben174 wrote:
| 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?
| osmaelo wrote:
| What iOS flash card apps would you recommend? Thanks!
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| 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.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| You will find the questions here:
| https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/cloudbite/blob/master/conten...
|
| You need to write a small script to transform the questions
| into a format that's cooypasteable to Google Sheets, though.
| david_allison wrote:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XQ9Ejk2jePCmWU3vzt0w...
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Oh, nice! I'm happy to see people importing the content to
| other apps.
|
| (By the way, the README explains that the MIT license is for
| the code, not the content. Your excel gives the impression
| that the content is MIT licensed, and it is not. To clarify:
| I'm happy to see people copying the content to different
| places, I just don't want MIT license attached to the
| content, because I don't want people to make money by selling
| my content. Distributing the content for free is fine by me.)
| david_allison wrote:
| Oh, I'm so sorry! Picked the license from the sidebar of
| the GitHub. Updated.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| No worries! Thanks for contributing!
| cozos wrote:
| Ive been using AWS for a couple years at work now.. never ran
| into difficulties where flashcards/spaced repetition woulda
| helped. For example, I don't think you need to memorize IAM
| privileges or stuff like that. Maybe I'm just working on not so
| complex things?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| This flashcard set is mainly intended to pass certificate
| exams. Spaced repetition with flashcards is an efficient method
| to memorize and retain information. When you're actually
| working on stuff, you don't need to memorize information,
| because you can google stuff and learn as you go. When you're
| doing an exam, you can't google, so you need to memorize
| information.
| mcelearr wrote:
| I'm a developer with some experience of AWS, about to start
| studying for AWS Certs, and looking for good materials. These
| look amazing - thanks so much!
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I would reorder the buttons like:
|
| - Repeat soon - Repeat later - Never repeat
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Hmmh, you're right, it would be more logical. I don't want to
| reorder the buttons now that people have already begun using
| it, though.
| js4ever wrote:
| Well done! Thanks for those who needs to pass AWS Certs.
|
| But on another side after checking few flashcards it seems you
| will turn into an AWS Marketing Parrot, more than really learning
| skills (Eg: question about AWS Shield)
| bredren wrote:
| In conversations recently around technical hiring I've found a
| heavy emphasis on "AWS" knowledge rather than infrastructure
| know-how or proven experience building on top of any stack.
|
| Sometimes, people don't even know what AWS is except that it is
| needed by their product. They need someone "strong in AWS."
| They don't know what AWS products they use or what they do.
|
| Separately, I have had a very senior developer convey a sense
| of respect for candidates that know AWS things that this
| developer does not know. I was surprised that the developer
| would give a pass on any subject so easily.
|
| There seems to be some sort of an implied belief in ability
| simply because the person can recite Amazon's branded solution
| names and have configured these things before. In part, because
| the interviewer doesn't know the buzzwords, they can't probe
| for the actual depth of experience.
|
| It feels almost like a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"
| situation. And on the candidate side a "can't beat em, join em"
| by being able to recite AWS jargon, regardless of how well you
| can build and choose solutions to fit business needs.
| vngzs wrote:
| I don't want to hear people tell me only how to solve
| problems with AWS's legos. Sure, we use them - and sure,
| knowing them will help you, but those tools are a crutch that
| is going to prevent you from solving tough problems if it's
| the only thing you know. You don't want to be stuck on a
| problem just because it's not in Amazon's toolbox yet.
| mellavora wrote:
| Very nice. My team is prepping for AWS certs at the moment, and
| this is helpful.
|
| Passing the exam does mean acting like an AWS Marketing Parrot.
| That is an unavoidable aspect of it. The exam is AWS
| certification, not "general IT skills". So I would not call
| this a flaw of your card content. Your cards show an awareness
| of this. Your card about SOAP APIs points out that the correct
| exam answer is technically wrong.
|
| I would strongly suggest that you NOT take hliyan's suggestion
| of making a "how-to" version of the slides. "How-to" is very
| different than "pass exam", it would be very difficult to
| successfully address both needs.
|
| I respect Hhliyan's need (and share it myself often enough); I
| respect it enough to suggest that it gets addressed in a way
| which is likely to satisfy it. "Pass the exam" flashcards have
| another purpose.
| hliyan wrote:
| I have to agree. While the cards themselves are a useful
| format, I wish this had more "How do you..." rather than "What
| is..." questions. E.g. Q: "How do you provide temporary
| credentials to IAM users to access some AWS resource?" A: "STS"
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I'll take it into consideration when
| I create more cards (AWS deck is done, but I will create
| Azure deck next). I tried to strike a balance between
| different question types (e.g. "what", "how", "why",
| "compare", "which"). I thought that this variation in
| question format is nice when you're plowing through a lot of
| questions. Maybe I have too many "what" questions. Those are
| the easiest to think up and write down.
| hliyan wrote:
| That's great. That way it can cater to both those who are
| looking to get a certification and those who just want to
| apply the skills (like myself). Another thought: would you
| be open to converting the content from HTML-in-JSON to
| markdown (one file per card, perhaps?). I wanted to fork
| your repo and create cards for various different skills,
| but the format kind of put me off.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Try to fork the repo and run it locally. There's a button
| for creating cards (button appears only when running it
| locally). It's still HTML-in-JSON, but you get instant
| preview while editing, and I think it's a nice way to
| format cards. HTML offers more flexibility in formatting
| than Markdown does. That said, I totally understand you
| might prefer a different format, and if you want to work
| on it, I'm sure you will be able to replace the HTML-in-
| JSON format with Markdown.
| akbarnama wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Thanks for creating this.
|
| I have forked and I am running the app locally. But, I
| don't see any button for creating the cards.
|
| Edit: I had to manually change the visibility style in
| styles.css and then it worked.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I don't think passing a certification deprived people of
| analytic thought
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! You're definitely right that some of
| the questions are simply parroting AWS marketing points. I
| tried to optimize the question set for passing Associate level
| AWS cert exams, and unfortunately those exams require you to
| memorize certain AWS marketing crap.
| bobowzki wrote:
| If you need flashcards for something that should be simple and
| logical... it's not.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| Actually I see flashcards differently. I cannot agree with the
| "everything Flashcards" idea, it does not work for me, and I
| can't imagine learning from cards.
|
| With flashcards, I can create an interconnected map in my mind,
| it supercharges learning, provides structure, makes digesting
| new content much easier. That ready cache of information has
| proved immensely useful.
|
| Using just the tools of logic and reasoning is incredibly slow,
| error prone and exhausting. Especially in a time constrained
| and pressure setting e.g. a production issue, a discussion with
| people having differing opinions, a test or an interview.
|
| Flashcards take out a lot of friction from knowledge retention.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Hi, author here. I'm so happy to see this appear on HN front
| page! I almost didn't post this on HN as I wasn't sure if there
| would be interest towards a site like this. I spent so many hours
| tinkering with the UI and crafting questions that I'm happy to
| see that people are finding value in it :)
| 40four wrote:
| I'm curious, did you build the flash card UI yourself, or use a
| library? I'm not in the market for studying AWS skills, but I
| really like the flash card interface!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Thanks! I built the flashcard UI myself with vanilla JS.
| 40four wrote:
| Cool, good work! I see someone else posted the GitHub link,
| I'll check it out.
| pvg wrote:
| takes a bit of clicking but the repo for the site is at
| https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/cloudbite
| milansm wrote:
| This is exactly how I studied for hard (theory-heavy) exams at
| the university! If this would cover >90% of what can come up on
| the certification exam, I would be willing to pay! Please take
| my money!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Sorry, you're going to have to use it for free.
| Sjonny wrote:
| This is neat. What I'm missing though is a static link to a
| particular card which I can then share with others.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Good idea! I added this on my to-do list.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| 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 to articles that start from
| installing Node / Python.
|
| Stackoverflow is an exception though.
| Ankintol wrote:
| 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.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| There are far more beginners than people with enough knowledge
| to care about anything beyond that.
|
| And that problem only becomes worse the further you get into
| these topics.
|
| When you add to that the fact that anything specialized will
| become outdated very quickly, incentives are not aligned for
| there to be a lot of deep, insightful articles about anything.
|
| There just aren't enough people who would be interested in it
| to make it worth the time someone would take to create it.
|
| edit: And of course, StackOverflow is a great place to find
| these types of things because it serves as a watering hole for
| the types of questions and discussions it sounds like you would
| be interested in.
| dr-smooth wrote:
| Great UI work! If you want printable flashcards for offline
| study, you can get some here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/j8nhu5/f...
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Why not just use Anki? It's mature, and plenty of decks exist
| for language learning. I've been using it for ~4 years or so
| now and nothing else has really come close in terms of features
| or stability.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| 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.)
| agustif wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this and congrats on the product.
|
| BUT: I don't think any amount of flashcards can help me get my
| head around setting IAMRole's and such, I stay away of amazon's
| cloud as much as I am able to, when/if I have a choice in the
| matter.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > any amount of flashcards can help me get my head around
| setting IAMRole's and such
|
| Cloudtrail can now build these for you.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| You would be absolutely amazed how effective flash cards and
| spaced repetition are at cramming arbitrary information into
| your head. Once you have definitions and jargon in place, it's
| significantly easier to learn the concepts and how things go
| together.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Are you using a library for the flippable card, or is that all
| handwritten?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| All handwritten. Everything is vanilla JS.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| I really like this app. I only have one minor piece of feedback,
| and that's that the card wobbling while you're reading the
| question is very, very distracting.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The wobbling effect is supposed to
| resemble the feeling of holding a physical card in your hand.
| It's supposed to wobble only when you move your mouse from
| left-side-of-card to right-side-of-card, or when you move your
| mouse from outside-the-card to over-the-card. Let me know if
| it's wobbling in unexpected ways on your device.
|
| In any case, I'm willing to remove the wobbling effect entirely
| if this feedback is echoed by other people.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| It's acting "correctly", it just turns out that I tend to
| move my mouse around the center of the card while I'm reading
| it, which makes it super obnoxious.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Actually, I just played with it some more, and you know
| what it is? My brain knows the mouse is controlling it, so
| while reading, I'm unconsciously trying to find a middle
| spot to put the mouse in a vain attempt to make it sit
| flat, which has the effect of causing nonstop wobbling.
| It's like it's designed to irritate me. :D
| tomcam wrote:
| Quite a lovely UI.
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is terrific, thank you! Have you considered offering the
| cards as an Anki deck?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Content of the cards would probably be easy to convert to other
| formats, but the cards are formatted with (a little bit of)
| HTML, so it might take some work to get the cards to look nice
| in Anki.
| zaik wrote:
| Formatting in Anki is done via HTML. To the best of my
| knowledge, it is even possible to include CSS and JavaScript
| in the card type.
| david_allison wrote:
| > To the best of my knowledge, it is even possible to
| include CSS and JavaScript in the card type.
|
| Yep. A useful debugger if you want to get started:
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/31746032
| david_allison wrote:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XQ9Ejk2jePCmWU3vzt0w...
|
| Import allowing HTML tags.
|
| Will need a little formatting of the card template for the <ul>
| tags.
|
| PS: Hey Dotan! Been a while, hope you're well
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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 restrictions on
| top and couple that with terribly organized document it makes no
| fun at all.
|
| I get the need for all those layers of security but without well
| organized document everyone has to go through the ordeal. What we
| need now is plethora of how-tos for these common architectural
| patterns.
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.)
| jfoster wrote:
| I think the primary concerns with what App Engine started out
| as were flexibility and vendor lock-in.
|
| Feels like it is a very solvable problem, though. Only a
| matter of time.
| topkeks wrote:
| IMHO Cloud Run (Knative) is a pretty decent "next
| generation App Engine" without vendor lock-in.
| bigyikes wrote:
| 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.
| noir_lord wrote:
| This mirrors my experience working with Lambda's - I went the
| "deploy docker images as lambda's" route and that was mostly OK
| (I mean it's just node/sharp etc) but the actual setup up -
| good god, I swear some of that documentation if read aloud
| would summon Cthulu.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Lock-in 101, build a system just as complex but tell the end
| user it's easier.
| shard wrote:
| Not knowing AWS, this sub-thread reads like a real-life version
| of the Microservices sketch: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ
| fridif wrote:
| A good starting point is elastic beanstalk, at least, but yes
| it is a big tangled web and one wonders why one is trying to
| copy netflix for a simple web app most of the time
|
| if yoyr workload isnt simple though, then its time to pay the
| price until a better abstraction comes along ^.^
| dzonga wrote:
| I ran into the same problem. kicked out s3 and ended up using
| seaweedfs. couldn't be happier. coding instead of reading aws
| documentation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think avoiding the console, getting a solid understanding of
| IAM and cloudformation are a good basis to build on.
|
| AWS can definitely be poorly documented and buggy at times.
| sackerhews wrote:
| I felt your pain when I read that.
|
| If it's of any help, I can promise you that creating a
| Terraform configuration to set this up will improve your life,
| happiness and general well being in the future.
|
| Yes, Terraform has a learning curve, but it's also a black
| magic effery for the cloud.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| second this, terraform is a game changer if you are using aws
| (or any of the other clouds, it supports multiple backends)
| fakedang wrote:
| There really ought to be sandbox "default" settings or
| templates that Firebase has for noobs, instead of configuring
| everything change by change. I still dread configuring IAM and
| now just resort to using one big EC2 instead of multiple
| services.
| waffletower wrote:
| I found the flashcards wordy. However, I feel they need to be
| even more wordy. Acronyms should be resolved, at least once, per
| card (preferably on the explanation, to aid teaching the acronym)
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I know what you mean, I've been going back and forth with this.
| In some cases I've spelled out the entire acronym, like rarer
| acronyms, but with some common acronyms it's not worth it. For
| example, "S3" is "Simple Storage Service", and anybody who
| studies for AWS cert exams will learn that really fast, so it's
| not worth it to repeat it on every card. I think a nice
| solution would be hover tooltips to spell out acronyms, but it
| would take some work to get that done without breaking all the
| other functionality that's related to hovers.
| hit8run wrote:
| Just don't use AWS. There are other options out there that do not
| lock you in like this. Adding environment specific complexity
| that is tangled to AWS is to avoid by all means.
| qorrect wrote:
| Amazon has turned developers into consumers. I like the site, I
| hate how un-hobbyist-friendly the dev world has become.
| echelon wrote:
| It was the plan all along. Open source is free for big business
| to embrace and extend, and they used it to turn us into
| renters.
| b4ke wrote:
| It sounds like the machines plan to abstract human
| involvement over the long term.... first you change the way
| they think, then it's your space of thought to commandeer and
| command.
| crazygringo wrote:
| ??? 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.
| danjac wrote:
| You hear horror stories of students/hobbyists playing around
| with AWS Lambda or some other service and ending up with huge
| bills. Maybe they get resolved but I certainly don't want to
| deal with the panic of misconfiguring some setting and losing a
| chunk of my savings. I'll use this stuff at work if needed but
| it certainly cools me on playing around with it in my spare
| time, which is how I best learn new tech.
| mleonhard wrote:
| The dev world is friendly toward hobbyists (and small teams)
| when you use Heroku or DigitalOcean.
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