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Office Hours Topics

Web & HTML Fundamentals​

  • How to write and format HTML
  • Dynamically generating HTML and templates
  • How HTTP works (in depth)

Automation & Scheduling​

  • Makefiles for automating building/pushing/running Docker images
  • How to check if your crontab works
  • How to decide the most efficient batch size for writing data
  • How to decide how often to batch write data to a database or data lake (e.g. every 3 hours)

AWS Services & Cloud Infrastructure​

  • How does EC2 work (in depth)
  • How does RDS work (in depth)
  • How does Redshift work (in depth)
  • How does Lambda work (in depth)
  • Boto3 Sessions and AWSWrangler
  • Debugging in the cloud - best practices (CloudTrail, CloudWatch, logging)
  • Advantages and disadvantages of AWS resources covered so far (use cases, trade-offs, cost vs performance)
  • When would EC2 be more cost-efficient compared to Fargate?
  • When to host on a virtual machine vs a container
  • Why does EventBridge scheduler need access to public subnets?
  • AWS console vs Terraform - when to use each in real projects
  • Other AWS services worth knowing (beyond course coverage)
  • How does ECS know to shut itself down when a task is completed (exit codes, visibility)

Databases & Data Architecture​

  • B-Trees - what they are and why they are fast
  • Different consistency models in databases
  • Data lake vs querying local data - when and why to connect
  • Why are databases (Postgres) row-based while data warehouses (Redshift) are column-based, but both look the same in DBeaver?