sidecar VS xml-string-streamer

A lot of my day job work is self directed because our managers expect a lot out of us but also leave us alone to do the work (amazing right?) but message received.

Let's take one not related to software at all! I turned a shed into an office over the course of many months: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1333866090573811723. I wanted to give up and burn it down at some points, but I powered through and ended up with the perfect shedquarters!

I also did a podcast many years ago that was hard for me to produce, but I powered through until I felt like it had reached its natural conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzr2Hd6Uscin....

I created a course teaching college students financial accounting that's made over 100k in the 5 or 6 years it's been live (http://acct229.com). That was a freakin grind that I thought about quitting a lot.

I also started doing tech YouTube videos recently and each one is a tiny exercise in finishing (and it feels great to ship!): https://www.youtube.com/@aarondfrancis/videos?view=0&sort=p&...

I wrote and released an open source package called Sidecar (https://github.com/hammerstonedev/sidecar) for managing Lambda functions from Laravel. That led to me speaking at Laracon Online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rq-yHAwYjQ) and also to being asked to produce a course for Laracasts (https://youtu.be/0Rq-yHAwYjQ?t=11759). Speaking at the first Laracon led to speaking at the second Laracon Online (https://youtu.be/f4QShF42c6E?t=21744). Both of these led to me being profiled by GitHub's ReadME project at https://github.com/readme/stories/aaron-francis. (The shedquarters is featured here!)

That interview led to another piece called "Publishing your work increases your luck" at https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work. I gave a talk on that article at GitHub Universe. That article led to... this article. And here we are!

Each of these things have 1) felt awesome to release and 2) directly increased my luck, my bank account, or led to the next thing.

Hope those examples hit home a little harder!

I wrote a library [1] for Laravel that lets you put a kind of "microservice" inside of your monolith.

It lets you develop, deploy, and execute AWS Lambda functions from your Laravel application.

The theory here is that sometimes you need some other language/infrastructure beyond what you're comfortable devops-ing yourself, and Lambda is actually quite good at providing you with an entire stack of stuff you don't have to own.

So if you need a single Node, Python, or Ruby function you can put just that part on Lambda and still call it from Laravel as if it were a native PHP function. No API gateway or anything to muck about with, either.

Is it a true microservice? Not really, although who knows what that actually means. It does allow you to take advantage of some parts of microservices without the pain though!

[1] https://github.com/hammerstonedev/sidecar

Have a look at Laravel Sidecar

You can try some streaming parse library like https://github.com/prewk/xml-string-streamer instead of running js code from laravel.