Here's A Round-Up of 2018 Community Tutorials

2018 has been an exciting year for us on the DigitalOcean Community team as we surpassed over 2,000 tutorials in our repository in September!

We continue to work with community authors to publish tutorials that serve developers. In February of this year we launched our Write for DOnations program, which not only adds to our Community knowledge base, but also gives back through making a donation to tech-focused nonprofits. If you are thinking about sharing your knowledge with the developer community, consider applying to this program so you can begin working with Community Editors who will offer you mentorship as you write your tutorial.

This year, we also released new learning resources. DigitalOcean Blueprints offer automated multi-server infrastructure setups to support you as you scale. Our first Community white paper, Running Cloud Native Applications on DigitalOcean Kubernetes, provides guidance for you and your team as you get up and running with Kubernetes.

Additionally, we have begun to offer tutorials to help you with automating your server setups, and have worked to keep tutorials up-to-date through maintenance, with pushes for both the Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 9 updates.

We selected a few tutorials below that showcase some of the breadth and depth that we and our community wrote about this year: from building neural networks to architecting applications for Kubernetes.

• Modernizing Applications for Kubernetes
• In this conceptual guide by Hanif Jetha, learn about the high-level steps you need to follow for modernizing your applications so that you can ultimately run and manage them in a Kubernetes cluster.
• How To Build a Modern Web Application to Manage Customer Information with Django and React on Ubuntu 18.04
• Build a modern web application with a separate REST API backend and frontend using React, Django, and the Django REST Framework by going through this tutorial by Ahmed Bouchefra.
• How To Build a Neural Network to Recognize Handwritten Digits with TensorFlow
• Neural networks, used as a method of deep learning, attempt to simulate the way the human brain works. This tutorial by Ellie Birbeck will walk you through implementing a subsection of object recognition by using TensorFlow, an open-source Python library.
• How To Manage an SQL Database
• For anyone who has ever desired a quick reference to some of the most commonly-used SQL commands, Mark Drake delivers in this cheat sheet tutorial.
• Kubernetes Networking Under the Hood
• Brian Boucheron breaks down how Kubernetes networking works within a cluster, including how data moves inside a pod, between pods, and between nodes.
• How To Use Alertmanager And Blackbox Exporter To Monitor Your Web Server On Ubuntu 16.04
• Sending alerts when problems arise significantly speeds up identifying the root cause of an issue and helps you recover quickly. Marko Mudrinić’s tutorial covers Alertmanager and Blackbox Exporter to monitor the responsiveness of an Nginx web server, allowing you to send e-mail and Slack notifications if your server isn’t responding.
• DigitalOcean eBook: How To Code in Python
• Not quite a single tutorial, but our free eBook that collects together Lisa Tagliaferri’s more than 30 Python tutorials so you can learn how to code in Python or reference Python syntax while you’re on the go.
• How to Use Traefik as a Reverse Proxy for Docker Containers on Ubuntu 18.04
• When you are trying to run multiple applications on the same host, you’ll need to set up a reverse proxy. Traefik is a Docker-aware reverse proxy solution offering its own monitoring dashboard. Learn how to use Traefik to route requests to two different web application containers by following this tutorial by Keith Thompson.
• How to Automatically Deploy Laravel Applications with Deployer on Ubuntu 16.04
• Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework designed to make common web development tasks easier. András Magyar walks you through deploying a Laravel application automatically without any downtime.
• How To Build a Node.js Application with Docker
• Recreate and scale your Node.js application with Docker by following this tutorial by Kathleen Juell.
• How to Deploy a Symfony 4 Application to Production with LEMP on Ubuntu 18.04
• Deploy a Symfony 4 application to production with a LEMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04 to get started configuring the server and the structure of the framework. Oluyemi Olususi’s tutorial will take you through all the steps you need.
• Architecting Applications for Kubernetes
• Designing and running applications with scalability, portability, and robustness in mind can be challenging, especially as system complexity grows. In Justin Ellingwood’s guide, learn some of the principles and patterns you can adopt to help you scale and manage your workloads on Kubernetes.