Here’s to New Beginnings (Scaleway Community Newsletter, May 2023)
Tags: news, community, learning
Published: 2023-06-19 12:38:48

_This is the web edition of Scaleway's new monthly community newsletter, where we share interesting stuff dedicated to various topics devs and devOps folks care about. If you want this in your inbox every month, [subscribe today](https://scaleway.typeform.com/newsletter)!_

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Hi there!

👋🏻 Welcome to our new newsletter (try saying _that_ 3x fast in a row) for the developer community. Everything is pretty new here, such as this newsletter itself, which you will get every month now and which will have a different theme each time. I’m also pretty new, at least here at Scaleway 😉 So I figured why not make the theme of this first newsletter “New Beginnings”?

Starting a new job always means being exposed to so many new things, and I have learned a lot in the past few weeks as I started working with our engineers to help them write articles for our blog: I learned about [Identity and Access Management (IAM)](https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/iam-identity-access-management/), for example. I also know more about containers now than I did a month ago. I really learned a whole lot about Kubernetes, first and foremost, the various ways to pronounce _kubectl_, a command line tool for controlling Kubernetes clusters. 😜 Some might argue that it’s pronounced “kube control” but my brain just unfailingly chooses to go with an almost Mayan-sounding pronunciation: “queue-bektl”. Don’t @ me, okay! 🤷

So, moving on from the truly riveting _kubectl_ debate, I’ve compiled a non-exhaustive list of recent new things that could get devs excited, from GitHub slash commands to running AI locally. 


## 📚 Learning something new

So, as I said above, I’ve learned a lot of new things in the last few weeks. One of the many things new to me was Load Balancing. I came across [this excellent explanation](https://samwho.dev/load-balancing/) of how Load Balancing works and found it extremely helpful.

It’s well structured; it doesn’t imply anything, explains everything, and is well written. Overall, something to make me, as a tech content specialist, extremely excited. And if you want to learn about Load Balancing as well, it’s a great resource to start with. Try not to get mesmerized by the visualizations! 😵‍💫


## 💻 Trying something new

If you’re a new developer, you intimately know the fear of making your first pull request. I myself have only made no-code contributions to open source so far, and I was still sweating buckets each time. And even if you’re an experienced dev, you can probably still remember that rising panic even if you no longer remember what your first PR actually was.

Bekah Hawrot-Weigel from OpenSauced wrote a blog post to help guide developers to make their first pull request: [Writing Your First Pull Request: Tips, Best Practices, and AI-Powered Tools for Success](https://dev.to/opensauced/writing-your-first-pull-request-tips-best-practices-and-ai-powered-tools-for-success-3bg9).


## 🤖 Getting excited about something new 

Did you hear you can now run Large Language Models (LLM) locally? Like, in your browser? Because you totally can! Check out [WebLLM, an LLM-based web chatbot that runs in your browser](https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm) without server support. WebLLM runs on Vicuna-7B and is made possible by the release of [WebGPU](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API), an API that enables developers to make use of the underlying system’s GPU.

Creating an in-browser sandbox environment for an AI chatbot brings potentially interesting opportunities for the future, such as maintaining privacy while still using AI to help you out with tasks.

The project is still in its infancy, but if you have a Mac with an Apple silicon chip, you can [run a small demo of WebLLM in Chrome Canary](https://mlc.ai/web-llm/) to see what it’s like. [Some folks have tried it](https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/16/web-llm/) already and seem quite delighted with it.


## 👀 ICYMI



* GitHub [added slash commands](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7054610656171356160/)! You can now use forward slash in issues, comments, and pull requests to quickly access markdown shortcuts in text boxes.
* Our DevRel team started to live stream recently. You can check out all previous [Scaleway Sessions](https://www.youtube.com/@Scaleway-cloud/streams) on YouTube, and if you subscribe on YouTube or [Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/scaleway), you’ll get notified of future live streams. Please, show our DevRel team some 💜
* 🇫🇷 For our Paris community: on May 23rd we’ll be hosting a session of [the Jam](https://www.scaleway.com/en/the-jam/), our community event focused on engineering excellence. We’ll be talking about the culture of mentoring and building confidence at the beginning of your leadership journey with experts from [Datadog](https://www.datadoghq.com/) and [Rudder](https://www.rudder.io/). [You can sign up here!](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-jam-formerly-cto-forum-tickets-517301040337?aff=NewsletterCommunity)
* The [GitHub + DEV Hackathon 2023](https://dev.to/devteam/announcing-the-github-dev-2023-hackathon-4ocn) was announced. Build something that benefits open source, utilizing GitHub Actions or GitHub Codespaces, by May 23, and you’ll be in the running to win some prizes. Just build it, submit it, and publish an official submission post on DEV! Good luck!
* If you’re new to command line stuff, you might like [CLI tricks every developer should know](https://github.blog/2023-04-26-cli-tricks-every-developer-should-know/), but I suspect even well-versed CLI users will find some helpful new tricks in this article,… which I _low-CLI_ love. See what I did there? Yeah, okay, I’ll see myself out now. 😆 Until next time! 👋🏻

And May the 4th be with you! ⭐ ⚔️

Cheers,
Kai from Scaleway