Announcing my Advanced CDK Course

It was a little over 4 years ago, I think around the beginning of 2019, Eric Johnson reached out to me. He wanted to show me a new product, a new way of writing Infrastructure as Code. He knew I had been using Terraform for a while and that I was an application developer at heart. So he dropped a little code on me. I think it was something like this:

class MyStack extends Stack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);

    new Topic(this, 'MyTopic');
  }
}

And I was immediately aghast!

Why would I want to write imperative Iac?!?! -- 2019 Matthew

But then, about 6 months later, I was working on a contract job and needed to maintain about 200+ RDS instances. And I immediately saw the value of the CDK. It's not about writing the simple IaC, it's about writing the complex IaC. If you know me, you know I've been hooked ever since.

At the beginning of this year, 4 years after that fateful day, I decided it was time to write a CDK course. The original goal was to make the most comprehensive course I could. This began by covering the basics and then proceeding all the way to the advanced tips and tricks. However, it felt like I was repeating a lot of what was already out there and well documented, so the focus changed to what the CDK Workshop and other basics weren't covering.

So, I'm happy to announce that my Advanced CDK Course is now available on Sidkik! Sidkik is a new platform for course creators to share their knowledge.

What's in the course?

I cover additional app creation, best practices for stacks, how to handle multi-stack environments and circular dependencies. I also cover constructs and best practices there, as well as how to build and publish your own constructs. Testing gets the most coverage as it's a wide and deep topic.

What's next?

But most importantly, I plan on expanding the course over time. I already have planned some additional sessions I'll be adding in the coming months. Because I feel like it's not quite complete yet, I'm offering the course at a discount for the next few weeks.

Use discount code EARLYACCESS for $15 off the course.

Please provide me feedback. I want to know what is working, and more importantly, what is not.

You can reach me on Twitter, LinkedIn, BlueSky, or the cdk.dev Slack server.

Happy coding!