[Launch School] Community Update - April 21st, 2020

Hi everyone, It's me again! I'm bringing you yet another Community Update with news and tidbits from Launch School. I hope this update finds you coping well with the pandemic and its impact. Launch School News To help students in this urgent time, we recently announced the Launch School COVID-19 Hardship Scholarship. As a small business, allocating $25,000 was a huge investment for us, but we felt strongly that we had to do something. I'm happy to announce that we ended up giving over $30,000 in scholarships spread across nearly 20% of our student body. I was touched by so many comments from thoughtful students asking that someone else should be considered first and to only consider their request last. Read [more about why we turned our marketing budget into the Covid-19 Hardship Scholarship](. Podcast: Six Figure Remote Job I got a chance to speak with Nick Calibey, a Capstone graduate and software engineer at TimescaleDB. We talked about how he went from getting his Masters in Theological Studies to now working on Cloud Infrastructure, making 6 figures while working remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nick is one of the first remote people we took into Capstone, so the remote job hunt is a topic we focused on in this conversation. You can listen from your favorite podcast app by searching for "Launch School" or listen from the browser [on our podcast website](. Study Groups and Other Events The first Capstone cohort of 2020 is ready to present their projects this week. There's a lot to see! - On ** April 23**, Max, Mike, and Nathan will talk about [Bento](. Bento is a blazing-fast serverless video transcoder that converts high-definition videos to new formats and resolutions. This process typically takes hours. By leveraging the instant scale and concurrent execution of function-as-a-service architecture, Bento transcodes hundreds of small parts of a video file in parallel, slashing multi-hour transcoding jobs down to minutes. - Elsewhere, Derick and Kelvin will present their project, [Apex](, the following day (Apr 24). Apex is an API proxy that sits in the path of network traffic between microservices. It provides one place to monitor and control service-to-service traffic. It's designed for teams that have just started breaking up their monoliths into several microservices but are now having to spend a lot more time diagnosing network-related faults, and managing the corresponding fault-handling logic (e.g., retrying failed requests without overwhelming the responding service). With Apex, teams can query the logs for all requests and responses in one database table, and define and update all retry logic in the same configuration data store. - That same day (April 24), Holden, Ido, and Liela showcase [Backpack](, a portable backend for your web apps that provides the essential features of data persistence, user authentication, file storage, real-time communication, and frontend hosting without the complexities of managing & configuring servers to support each of those services. Grab a server (or a fleet of servers!), grab Docker, install Backpack, and host as many backends as your hardware can support. - Finally, on ** April 25**, David, Nancy, and Melissa introduce [Venice](. Venice is an open-source framework for rapidly deploying and easily managing event stream processing pipelines for event-driven applications. Venice allows developers to focus on their application logic instead of their infrastructure. With a default pipeline, an intuitive command-line interface, and a web UI, Venice simplifies deployment and management for developers new to stream processing. Check them all out! As usual, we also have a bunch of online study groups, including the new beginner study groups. - [JS100/JS101 Beginner Study Group (Apr 24)]( - [RB100/RB101 Beginner Study Group (April 24)]( - [JS109 Assessments Study Group (April 26)]( - [RB109 Assessments Study Group (April 23)]( - [RB109 Assessments Study Group (April 26)]( - RB129 Assessments Study Group (April 29) - announcement not yet available. Monitor the [Community Forum](. I'd also like to remind you that the Launch School Women's Group has a meeting scheduled for [April 25](. All events are free, though most have limited seating availability. Monitor the [Community Forum]( for news of future events. If you would like to host an informal group, please let me know -- together, we can make it happen! However, for the time being, we don't recommend face-to-face groups. As a result, the Toronto meeting that was scheduled for last week was postponed until the situation improves. Student Articles Our students have been busy writings articles! Here are two of the most recent on the [Launch School Medium publication](: - Callie Buruchara wrote a great article on [Passing Launch School's First Assessments: RB109](. She talks about her process for dealing with both the exam and the interview. While her experience is with the Ruby Track assessments, her discussion applies equally well to our JavaScript Track. If you're getting ready for one of these assessments, don't miss it! - Elsewhere, Drew Holbrook reflects on his early experiences in [A Beginner's Guide to Surviving Launch School 101](. Drew is well past the 101 level now. Still, he offers a lot of valuable hints and tips for getting through the initial stages of learning at Launch School. - William Baker has submitted our first article that directly addresses the JS109 assessment in his [Preparing for the JS109 Interview Assessment](. Since the article doesn't go into any JavaScript-specific details, it also a good choice for students in the Ruby Track. --------------------------------------------------------------- Archives are in the [Resources tab](. See you next time! Do you enjoy reading student contributions? Consider writing something yourself! We give Launch School cash credit for articles accepted in our [Medium publication](. We also offer a $200 credit for [Tech Talk]( presentations. --------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to stop receiving emails from us, you can use the one-click link below to unsubscribe. [Unsubscribe From All Email]( [Unsubscribe From Weekly Summaries](