How I Set Up my Email Newsletter

I had always wondered how one sets up a custom email address but never knew where to start to learn the information I needed to understand what went on behind the scenes. This remained one of those things I wanted to do but never really got started on, until recently. I became more fascinated with computer networking, and that led me to taking a Udemy course on computer networking by Rick Crisci, which sparked more interest as the last time I read anything about networking was a while back when I did my undergraduate in Mathematics and Computer Science. After building more confidence with the computer networking fundamentals, I started looking for something to build on top of to get some practice. I did a couple of network subnetting exercises on paper as that was the natural next step for me to practice more.

I extended this learning to Google Cloud Platform where I found my new learnings very useful. This began with creating my first VPC, a Compute Engine instance, load balancing across managed and unmanaged instance groups, enabling firewall rules across specific subnets used internally by Google Cloud Platform and working with Google Kubernetes Engine, just to mention a few technologies I found fascinating in my first interactions. This was done through the Google Cloud Skills Boost platform which had labs that were beginner-focused and that slowly progressed in difficulty to keep the learning challenging but still manageable to walk through. I picked the Cloud Engineer learning path that I worked through and registered for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification which I achieved after my practice time. I'm looking forward to expanding my skills in the cloud and gearing more towards site reliability engineering which has been growingly becoming fascinating to me, thanks to the learnings and amazing stories from the Google SRE Podcast.

Now I'll get to the newsletter. Borrowing from how I found the labs from Cloud Skills Boost effective for my learning, I was thinking of a way to master the fundamentals around cloud technologies that was agnostic to the cloud providers and that one would easily build on top of to any platform they wanted, be it AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean or any other cloud provider, and that involved some sort of labs that would be easy to set up. That's when I thought it would be great to start a newsletter just around that. This would allow me to work on the labs to improve my learning whilst sharing that with the broader community. This can allow people on the same journey as I am to benefit from this while also challenging my approaches and helping build on the learning. From this point, I had to stop wondering and do the reading. I already had a custom domain (johnapella.com), and building from first principles, I thought, "How would I get labs@johnapella.com to send my newsletter from?".

That led me to AWS Simple Email Service and AWS Workmail. I went through their setup instructions, created an identity around my domain and verified that on my DNS provider. This involved a lot of verifications and setups to improve email deliverability, a new realm where I was quickly learning the basics. I then proceeded to create the labs user in Workmail to finally get the email I wanted. Then I had to have a place from which I could manage my email list. I did some research and settled with Email Octopus Connect due to its interoperability with AWS Simple Email Service. Email Octopus, too, had its own learning curve that I needed to get familiar with. This leaves me with a lot to learn as I keep on building on the cloud and around cloud technologies and working to improve on the quality of the labs even as I look to send my first lab out to learners like me. This might have already happened depending on when you're reading this.

This piece was a short glimpse into my journey and the motivations behind starting my newsletter. My goal is to keep exploring my interests in site reliability engineering and share what I learn along the way. If this sounds interesting to you, I invite you to subscribe and join me on this journey.