#262 — April 15, 2020

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GitHub Shakes Up Pricing, Makes Most Core Features Free — One of the good consequences of Microsoft acquiring GitHub seems to be that they want to open it up to everyone without any barriers, so now you can use GitHub for private development with unlimited collaborators for free, and even the enterprise features are cheaper now.

Nat Friedman (GitHub)

Comparing HTTP/3 vs. HTTP/2 Performance — HTTP/3 is still in a draft status spec-wise, but it’s already being supported here and there, including on Cloudflare. This post covers where HTTP/3 is right now, why it matters, and some basic benchmarks.

Sreeni Tellakula (Cloudflare)

We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

Ask HN: How to Rediscover the Joy of Programming? — A popular Hacker News discussion from this week about how to make programming really click for you, rather than being merely a daily slog.

Hacker News

How Deploys Work at Slack — When you’re running a service that’s used at the heart of so many companies, like Slack, deploys require a careful balance of speed and reliability. This is a very high level look at what Slack does.

Slack Engineering

???? Jobs

Full-Stack Developer (Skien, Norway) — We are looking for a full-stack dev with a solid track record to help us adapt to tomorrow's security requirements.

OKAY

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Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

The Death of Hype: What's Next for Scala — Most languages go through a ‘hype cycle’ and Scala’s initial peak was quite a few years ago now but what’s the long term outlook like?

Haoyi

The Case for Human-Centric Observability

Lightstep sponsor

Clocking a 6502 to 15GHz — Via emulation, of course :-)

Chris Evans

The Malleable Systems Manifesto — An attempt to explore the idea of software being easy to change, reusable, sharable, and thoughtfully crafted.

Malleable Systems Collective

What Outranks Thread Priority? — When reawakening his laptop because to take longer and longer, Bruce set out to find the cause..

Bruce Dawson

Why NextDNS Is My New Favourite DNS Service — Note: This is about using a third party DNS service as a client rather than for serving records.

Stanislas Lange

???? Tutorials

How to Monitor Your Web Page's Total Memory Usage with performance.measureMemory() — Learn how to measure memory usage of your web page in production to detect regressions. (Chrome only, for now.)

Ulan Degenbaev

How Anti-Cheat Systems Detect System Emulation — Not an area I’m involved in but this is fascinating. These folks really know their stuff.

Daax, iPower, ajkhoury, and Drew

▶  Easy And Correct High Availability Postgres with Kubernetes — A 50 minute talk from PostgresOpen 2019 that goes all the way ‘from containers up’ until actually doing stuff with Postgres.

Steven Pousty

Some GitHub Pro-Tips Direct from GitHub — Lee Reilly is a developer and marketer at GitHub and has a whole bunch of genuinely useful GitHub power user tips here.

Lee Reilly (GitHub)

Untangling Microservices, or Balancing Complexity in Distributed Systems — “The microservices honeymoon period is over.” Vladik looks at why, as well as at common design issues that turn microservices into ‘distributed big balls of mud’.

Vladik Khononov

▶  Explore Your Microservices Architecture with Graph Theory and Network Science — Can we improve microservice architectures using graph theory? Apparently yes.

Nicki Watt

Continuous Deployments for WordPress Using GitHub Actions — Shipping code to a production server often requires paid services. With GitHub Actions, Continuous Deployment is free for everyone. Read how to set that up.

Steffen Bewersdorff

The DevSecOps Security Checklist — The checklist brings security, operations & engineering together to up-level security without impacting velocity.

Sqreen sponsor

A Beginners Guide to Basic Indexing in Postgres

James Bannister

???? Code and Tools

The Desmos Graphing Calculator — One of those long-standing tools I lean on every now and then that I think everyone should know about. Ideal for graphing functions, doing approximations, etc.. and you don’t have to sign in or anything ????

Desmos

All 200+ Google Cloud Products Described in 4 Words or Less — This is a neat poster. We need AWS and Azure versions of this as well.

Greg Wilson

IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1 Released — Now supports Java 14 and its new features.

JetBrains

Portray: A Python3 Documentation Generation Tool — I’m only a Pythonista on rare occasion, but this looks really neat.

Timothy Crosley

mv.sh: Rename Files with mv Without Typing The Name Twice

Přemek Vyhnal

regex2fat: Turn Your Favorite Regex into FAT32 — This is an absolutely terrible idea (but in a fun, entertaining way ????)

8051Enthusiast

The Simpsons in CSS — Just a bit of fun, but neat to see what you can whip up with (a lot of) CSS.

Chris Pattle

#264 — April 29, 2020

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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) Released — Lots of goodies in the latest Ubuntu release which will surely form the basis for many a server over the next several years (its standard support will end in April 2025). Some related info:

• It uses Linux kernel 5.4 which introduces WireGuard VPN support and kernel lockdown.
• Phoronix have run tons of Ubuntu 18.04 vs 20.04 benchmarks on a 48 core Xeon server and found significant performance improvements for server use cases.
• There's also Lubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu MATE 20.04 and Xubuntu 20.04 if you prefer alternative desktop environments.
• People are still frustrated by snaps, but you can disable them.

Canonical

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases — A Google engineer shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

Audit Every SQL Query — JackDB is a modern database client with comprehensive audit logging and role-based access controls. Learn more about auditing database operations with JackDB.

JackDB, Inc. sponsor

How The Final Python 2 Release Marks the End of an Era — Last week we casually slipped in a note about 2.7.18 being Python 2’s final release but.. maybe it deserved a bigger story than that. Luckily Stack Overflow’s Ryan Donovan is here with one.

Ryan Donovan

AMP Introduces 'User-Friendly' Content Encryption Support — AMP aims to be all about providing speed to mobile consumers of content but paywalls just, well, get in the way. So Google and the AMP folks have come up with a way where protected content can be served and unlocked client-side for more performance. Cynically, of course, you could consider this yet another form of DRM for Web content..

The AMP Blog

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

???? Stories and Opinions

Two Months with PowerShell on a UNIX — You can’t use it as a login shell yet, but otherwise Microsoft’s PowerShell (which is more commonly associated with Windows) isn’t too bad.

Joe Wright

'Teleforking' a Process Onto a Different Computer — Imagine if instead of calling fork you could call telefork and have a process forked onto other machines within a cluster.. this developer rigged up a fun prototype.

Tristan Hume

▶  Discussing Serverless Use Cases with Gareth McCumskey — A chat with Gareth McCumskey (of Serverless Inc) about different production-level serverless use cases including RESTful APIs, GraphQL, WebSockets, and capturing clickstream data.

The Serverless Chats Podcast podcast

How Twitter Engineers Hunted Down a Linux Kernel Bug — When two Twitter engineers reset a Linux server’s firewall config, they expected things to work.. but it didn’t, and they unearthed (and fixed!) a kernel bug along the way.

Cong Wang and Dan Luu (Twitter)

To Microservices and Back Again: Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith — When Segment moved to a microservices architecture, they gained environmental isolation, but at a cost of higher operational overhead. Three years later, the costs were too high, and the team migrated back to a monolith..

Thomas Betts and Alexandra Noonan

How Mozilla Engineers Code Quality in the Firefox Browser — An insider’s look at Firefox’s code quality toolchain that’s been designed to manage the ongoing development and releases of the popular desktop browser.

Mozilla Hacks

???? Tutorials

The Tool That Really Runs Your Containers: Deep Dive Into runc and OCI Specifications — runc is a container runtime that was extracted from Docker over the years and is now maintained separately but which still does the work of spawning and running containers.

Kirill Shirinkin

Decoupling Larger Applications with Amazon EventBridge — How to use an event-based architecture to decouple services and functional areas of applications. (EventBridge is AWS’s serverless app-to-app event bus.)

James Beswick (AWS)

The Complete Guide to Distributed Tracing

Lightstep sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

A Variety of C Obfuscation Tricks — C is, like many languages, well suited to trickery and here’s a look at some of it.

Colin Ian King

???? Code and Tools

Will It CORS? — A handy online tool/wizard for establishing how your (potential) use case will (or won’t!) operate alongside CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

HTTP Toolkit

sls-dev-tools v1.0: Think DevTools But for Serverless — “Think Chrome Dev Tools but for Serverless” say the team behind sls-dev-tools. They work with AWS Lambda and alongside tools like Serverless Framework or SAM.

Theodo

IPFS 0.5.0 Released: A Major Leap Forward for Peer to Peer Kind — IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is perhaps the best known peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol and it has been seeing some high profile adoption as shown here.

Molly Mackinlay

The Super Simple AWS Storage Calculator — A quick way to compare how much it costs to store certain amounts of data on various AWS services at differing levels of robustness.

The Duckbill Group

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Windows Terminal Preview v0.11 Release — A lot of updates here for Microsoft’s official terminal app prior to an even bigger 1.0 release.

Microsoft

MsQuic: Microsoft Open Sources Its QUIC Library — A cross-platform, general-purpose library that implements the QUIC transport protocol. GitHub repo.

Daniel Havey (Microsoft)

Editly: Slick, Declarative Command Line Video Editing — I’ve long wondered why there isn’t a good way to “code” video editing at the command line other than wrangling with arcane ffmpeg options. Well.. this uses ffmpeg, but it handles a lot of the wrangling for you.

Mikael Finstad

Pomerium: An Identity-Aware Secure Access Proxy — An identity aware access-proxy modeled after Google’s BeyondCorp. Think VPN access benefits but without the VPN. Built in Go, naturally.

Pomerium

98.css: CSS for Building Faithful Recreations of Windows 98 — If for any reason you need your Web site’s interface to look like Windows 98…

Jordan Scales

pxy: A Go Livestream Proxy from WebSocket to External RTMP Endpoints

Chua Bing Quan

#303 — May 8, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Introducing Scylla Open Source 4.0 — Scylla (a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL data store aiming to be the “world’s fastest column-store database”) now provides production-ready lightweight Transactions (LWT), a DynamoDB-compatible API (Alternator), and operator for Kubernetes, and more.

Dor Laor

The Best Medium-Hard Data Analyst SQL Interview Questions — This article begins with a quote: “The first 70% of SQL is pretty straightforward but the remaining 30% can be pretty tricky.” True! This article focuses on the tricky ‘medium-hard’ area that few tutorials venture into.

Zachary Thomas

????Live Coding: Guide to Grafana 101 - Getting Started with Alerts — Join us on May 20th to see how to use Grafana’s alerting functionality to get notified about anomalies in your data, dig into root causes, and respond to critical issues. Step-by-step demos + tips = cheaper, more flexible monitoring ✅.

Timescale sponsor

TileDB 2.0 and the Future of Data Science — TileDB is an embeddable storage engine focused on working with dense and sparse multi-dimensional arrays. It’s a C++ library with official Python, R, Java and Go integrations, but it can integrate with other database systems too. 2.0 introduces dataframe support, a new API for R, and support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

Stavros Papadopoulos

Time-Series Compression Algorithms, Explained — Delta-delta encoding, Simple-8b, XOR-based compression, and more - these algorithms aren’t magic, but combined they can save over 90% of storage costs and speed up queries. Here’s how they work.

Joshua Lockerman and Ajay Kulkarni

CockroachDB Creators Raise $87 Million of New Investment — Quite a raise and quite a valuation in these times for the creators of CockroachDB, a popular distributed SQL database.

Cockroach Labs

The Big Cloud Data Boom Gets Even Bigger, Thanks to COVID-19? — It’s not like the cloud was doing badly beforehand, but the pandemic is apparently encouraging companies to virtualize as much of their operations as possible.

Datanami

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days. — Using MongoDB Atlas? Studio 3T is the professional GUI and IDE that unlocks the power you need.

Studio 3T sponsor

Speeding Up count(*): Why Not Use max(id) - min(id)? — A warning tale in case you decide to take this shortcut. While you might be able to estimate or fudge a number that’s close, you can’t guarantee sequences will give you an exact, correct answer here.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Using AWS API Gateway to Run Database Queries — API Gateway is commonly used to hook up HTTP endpoints to AWS Lambda functions but did you know it can directly connect to DynamoDB? (Or any AWS service that lets you query over the AWS API, so not RDS.)

Renato Byrro

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility (particularly early on in the development cycle when your eventual access patterns aren’t always known) – there are some mitigations, however.

Rob Cronin

Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Tooling

pgModeler: A Postgres Database Modeler — An easy way to create and edit database models in a visual way. It’s packaged up as a paid product but is also open source so you can build your own.

Raphael Araújo e Silva

AvionDB: A Decentralised Database with MongoDB-like Developer Interface — An admittedloy ‘alpha stage’ database system built on top of OrbitDB, a serverless, peer-to-peer database that uses IFPS for storage and implements the core decentralized database logic/protocol.

Dappkit

mssql-cli, a CLI Tool to Manage SQL Server, Now on macOS and Linux — mssql-cli is a tool for working with SQL Server from the command line, complete with Intellisense, syntax highlighting, and paging.

Alan Yu (Microsoft)

#497 — April 16, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Bye Bye Ruby 2.4, Support Has Ended — From the end of April 2019 till now, Ruby 2.4 has been in its ‘security maintenance’ phase but now you won’t even get that, Ruby 2.4.10 should be the final 2.4 release. 2.5 will follow in 2.4’s footsteps next year, so upgrading to 2.6 or 2.7 should now be a priority for those older apps.

Ruby Core Team

Testing Ruby Decorators with super_method — Have you ever wondered how you can properly test the behavior of a method overridden by Module#prepend? Enter super_method which returns a Method object of which superclass method would be called when super is used or nil if none exists.

Simone Bravo

You Hacked the Gibson? Yeah, They Built Their Own Login — Don't let Crash Override pwn your app. FusionAuth adds secure login, registration and user management to your app in minutes not months. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Heya: A Sequence Mailer for Rails — “Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences.” Note: It’s open source but not free for commercial use beyond a certain point.

Honeybadger Industries LLC

A Final Report on Ruby Concurrency Developments — A report on work funded by a 2019 Ruby Association Grant that puts forth a proposal of using non-blocking fibers to improve Ruby’s concurrency story.

Samuel Williams

Mocking in Ruby with Minitest — Minitest has basic mocking functionality baked in, but be judicious in your use of it.

Heidar Bernhardsson

???? Jobs

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

▶️ Get ready for your next role: Pluralsight is free for the entire month of April. Stay Home. Skill Up. #FreeApril — SPONSORED

???? Articles & Tutorials

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression in Ruby — Linear regression is a mathematical approach to modelling a relationship between multiple variables and is demonstrated here by exploring whether the tempo of a song predicts its popularity on Spotify.

Julie Kent

Feature Flags: A Simple Way to 'De-Stress' Production Releases — Feature flags bridge a gap between the abstract concept of continuous delivery and tactical release of features.

Matt Swanson

A Guide to Deprecation Warnings in Rails — If you’ve upgraded Rails and you start seeing warnings screaming at you, you can either get Googling or.. read this ????

Luciano Becerra

What's the Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Understanding webpacker.yml — Have you ever really gone through the Webpack config?

Ross Kaffenberger

Using Optimizer Hints in Rails — Rails 6 removes the need to write raw SQL to use optimizer hints, so that’s cool.

Prateek Choudhary

Dissecting Rails Migrations — You should pick up something new about migrations by reading this article as it covers all of the essentials and a little more.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

The Basics of Custom Exception Handling — Never hurts to revise the basics of effective exceptions.

Mark Michon

How to Improve Code Readability with Closures

Andrey Koleshko

???? Code and Tools

ruby-prolog: A Pure Ruby Prolog-like DSL for Logical Programming — Solve complex logic problems on the fly using a dynamic, Prolog-like DSL inline with your normal code.

Preston Lee

Anyway Config: Keep Your Ruby Configuration Sensible — Get your Ruby project out of ‘ENV Hell’ with anyway_config, a framework for managing configuration.

Vladimir Dementyev

The End of Heroku Alerts — Rails Autoscale keeps your app healthy. Simple and effective autoscaling for Web, Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Que.

Rails Autoscale sponsor

Tomo 1.0: A Friendly CLI for Deploying Rails Apps — There’s a short tutorial for deploying Rails, and the documentation is thorough.

Matt Brictson

ActiveLdap 6.0: An Object Oriented Interface to LDAP — A very long standing project (16 years!) that has just had an update. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and while I don’t hear about it much anymore, it has plenty of established use cases.

Sutou Kouhei

Elasticsearch Integrations for ActiveModel/Record and Rails

Elastic

RubyMine 2020.1 Released

Natalie Kudanova

#499 — April 30, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Occasionally we run interviews in Ruby Weekly and we're back with another one.. with long time Rubyist and Kiba maintainer, Thibaut Barrère. Be sure to check out the bottom of this issue to read it, especially if you ever run ETL jobs with Ruby! ????

Ruby Weekly

▶  Let's Build a Twitter Clone in 10 Minutes with Rails, CableReady, and StimulusReflex — You know that cloning Twitter in 10 minutes is impossible, but what about the core mechanism of the idea? After a slow first minute, this video does a pretty good job of showing off some techniques you might not have used before.

Nate Hopkins

discuss.rubyonrails: The Rails Project Discussion Forum — Basically a Web version of the Rails mailing lists and a worthwhile place to head if you want to suggest features, ask questions, etc.

Ruby on Rails Discussions

Easy Rails Deployments — Deploy your Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, and Rack application to any cloud or server. Cloud 66 offers a scalable Heroku alternative that doesn't lock you in. Try it free and get extra $66 free credits with the code: 'Ruby-Weekly'.

Cloud 66 sponsor

sequel-activerecord-adapter: Allows Sequel to Reuse an ActiveRecord Connection — If you want to use more Sequel or migrate in that direction, this makes it easy.

Janko Marohnić

Ruby Adds Experimental Support for 'End-Less' Method Definitions — We’ve touched on this in a previous issue, but if you fancy a proper blog post with examples, this is more accessible than digging through feature tracker discussions. I’m not a fan of this syntax myself yet, but Prateek does a good job of selling it.

Prateek Choudhary

CableReady: Trigger Client-Side DOM Changes from Server-Side Ruby — If you skipped the video above because it’s a video (and I know many of you do ????) CableReady is still worth checking out. It aims to “complete the ActionCable story” by providing a way to directly interact with clients over ActionCable WebSockets. The docs will help you get the idea.

Hopsoft

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

???? Articles & Tutorials

A Practical Use for PStore — PStore is one of the older parts of Ruby’s stdlib and lets you persist (and restore) a Ruby hash to disk. I haven’t seen it in Ruby code for years but Arkency have found a neat, modern use case.

Paweł Pacana

▶  Drag and Drop Sortable Lists with Rails and Stimulus JS — How to wire up drag and drop lists with a Rails app using Sortable, Stimulus and acts_as_list.

Go Rails

Setting Up Multi-Factor Authentication for RubyGems.org — If you’re a registered user of the official Ruby Gems repository, you should have had an email this week about securing your account using 2FA. This is just my own reminder that this is a good idea especially if you publicly publish widely used gems! :-)

Rubygems.org

Let’s Explore Big-O Notation With Ruby ???? — Learn to use Big-O to look at an algorithm and easily discern its efficiency, without having to run a profiling tool.

Honeybadger sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

Rails System Tests in Docker — We’re seeing an uptick in articles about system tests in Rails. Here’s how to integrate them into your development Docker setup.

Hint.io

The Difference Between System Specs and Feature Specs — If you’ve felt the difference between RSpec’s “feature specs” and “system specs” is quite subtle, this explanation will help.

Jason Swett

Why Rubyists Should Consider Learning Go — If you want compilation and a type system, Crystal is probably a better fit for Rubyists, but Go is undoubtedly a neat language and ecosystem (and if you do end up in the Go world, check out our Go weekly! ????)

Ayooluwa Isaiah

Building a Ruby CLI with Thor

Daniel Gómez

???? Code and Tools

git curate: Peruse and Delete git Branches Ergonomically — Got a repo cluttered with branches here and there? git curate aims to cure the pains of getting those branches back under control.

Matt Harvey

MessageBus: A Reliable and Robust Messaging Bus for Ruby and Rack

Sam Saffron

Are You Spending Too Much on Heroku?

Rails Autoscale sponsor

bootstrap_form: A Rails Form Builder for Bootstrap v4-Style Forms

Bootstrap Ruby

ActiveModelAttributes: The Active Record Attributes API, but for Active Model — Brings some of the goodies of the Rails 5 Active Record attributes API to ActiveModel too. 1.6.0 just dropped.

Karol Galanciak

#500 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Welcome to issue 500! A bit of an arbitrary milestone but thanks to you all :-)

Ruby Weekly

Ruby Next: Make All Rubies Quack Alike — Ruby Next is a Ruby-to-Ruby transpiler that allows you to use the latest features of Ruby in previous versions without monkey patching or refinements. Could this be how experimental features are released going forward?

Vladimir Dementyev

Ruby 3 'Guilds' Proposal Now Called Ractor — This documentation is in Japanese (though the source code examples are easy to follow) but the news is that the new, proposed concurrency mechanism for Ruby 3 called Guilds (explained here) has been renamed to Ractor (as in ‘Ruby actors’, Ruby’s take on the actor model).

Koichi Sasada

Don’t Do Auth From Scratch. Focus On Your App — Spend less time on authentication and authorization and more time developing your awesome app. Auth built for <devs>. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Take the 2020 Ruby on Rails Survey — This is the sixth outing for Planet Argon’s survey which began in 2009. We try and support it each time as the results always make for interesting reading (see 2018’s results). Participate and become data ????

Planet Argon Team

Alt::BrightonRuby: A Slightly Odd, Quasi-Conference for Strange Times — Alt::BrightonRuby is not happening in-person this year. Instead, you can buy the recorded talks, get a _why book, and get some podcasts with the speakers.

Alt::BrightonRuby

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

???? Articles & Tutorials

▶  How To Begin Contributing to a Gem — If you’ve been using a library for a while and you want to contribute back, how do you get started? A 12 minute introduction here.

Drifting Ruby

How to Set Up Factory Bot on a Fresh Rails Project — Factory Bot is a library for setting up Ruby objects as test data – an alternative to fixtures, essentially.

Jason Swett

Using Postgres's DISTINCT ON to Avoid an N+1 Query — “Recently I fixed a tricky N+1 query and thought I should write it up..”

John Nunemaker

Need to Upgrade Rails? Don’t Know How Long It Will Take? — Get an action plan for your Rails upgrade and an in-depth report about your technical debt and outdated dependencies ????.

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrade Services sponsor

5 Uses for 'Splats' — 5 different ways to leverage Ruby’s splat (*) operator.

Jason Dinsmore

Running Multiple Instances of Webpacker — If you’re working on multiple Rails apps at once, changing where Rails gets served up is easy by configuring the port, but what about Webpacker? That requires another tweak.

Scott Watermasysk

Performing Asynchronous HTTP requests in Rails — How to update parts an app’s pages with asynchronous HTTP requests. A step-by-step how-to with JavaScript’s fetch() function, and Rails native server-side partial rendering.

Remi Mercier

How to Use AWS SimpleDB from Ruby — If you haven’t heard of AWS SimpleDB, you wouldn’t be alone as it’s not very popular, but it’s a pretty simple and cheap way to store simple documents in the cloud.

Peter Cooper

What's The Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Ways to Reduce Your Heroku App's Slug Size — You might be surprised Heroku didn’t already do some of this for you.

Rohit Kumar

A Chat with Thibaut Barrère — If you missed our interview with Thibaut Barrere (Rubyist, and creator of the Kiba ETL framework) in last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

Glenn Goodrich

???? Code and Tools

Rodauth 2.0: Ruby's 'Most Advanced' Authentication Framework — A authentication framework that can work in any Rack-based webapp. Built using Roda and Sequel, Rodauth can be used with other frameworks and database libraries if you wish. Why’s it so advanced? More info on that here.

Jeremy Evans

RubyGems 3.1.3 Released — Lots of little bug fixes and tweaks.

RubyGems Blog

Business: Business Day Calculations for Ruby — Define your working days and holidays and then you can do ‘business day arithmetic’ (for example, what’s in 5 working days after now taking holidays and weekends into account?)

GoCardless

Lockbox: Modern Encryption for Rails

Andrew Kane

split: The Rack Based A/B 'Split' Testing Framework — A mature framework with robust configuration and multiple options for determining the winning option.

Split

P.S. In last week's issue, one of the links to our sponsors was incorrect and some readers emailed us to say they really wanted to read the promised article, Let’s Explore Big-O Notation with Ruby, so here it is. Apologies for any inconvenience.

#337 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

✍️ With a few of the links today, this is a good time to note we sometimes link to things we disagree with or that are controversial if they are newsworthy or of relevance to our community. Inclusion is not always endorsement but you can read any summaries we write alongside items to get our take on things ????

Node Weekly

Node v14.2.0 (Current) Released — The latest version of Node gains a new experimental way — assert.CallTracker — to track and verify function calls and the amount of times they occur. Also, require('console').Console now supports different group indentations

Node.js

Deno 1.0: What You Need to Know — Two years ago Ryan Dahl, the original creator of Node, gave a popular talk called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js where he revealed Deno, his prototype of how he'd build a better V8-based JavaScript runtime. With 1.0 due next week, Deno is poised to be a particularly exciting release and this article does a good job of cruising through the reasons why.

David Else

Enhance Node.js Performance with Datadog APM — Debug errors and bottlenecks in your code by tracing requests across web servers and services in your environment. Then correlate between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues without switching tools or contexts. Try Datadog APM free.

Datadog APM sponsor

Deno Weekly: Our Newest Newsletter — We really like what we see from Deno (above) so far, so we're launching a new newsletter all about it! ???? Rather than keep mentioning Deno in Node Weekly, we'll be giving it its own space. Even if you're not planning to use Deno, feel free to subscribe for a while, see what happens, then unsubscribe if it doesn't suit you — the next issue will drop on 1.0's release (due next Wednesday).

Cooperpress

Controlling GUIs Automatically with Nut.js — Write Node code that clicks on things, opens apps, types, clicks buttons, etc. Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Hit the GitHub repo to learn more or check out some examples.

Simon Hofmann

A Practical Guide to Node Buffers — You’ll often encounter Buffer objects for holding binary data in the form of a sequence of bytes during interactions with the operating system, working with files, network transfers, etc.

DigitalOcean

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Opinions

How to Build a REST Service with Fastify — How to build a basic RESTful service using Fastify, a popular Node Web framework focused on performance/low overheads.

Wisdom Ekpot

▶  How to Use Node.js for Load Testing — A straightforward tour of an approach for hitting a Web site over and over from multiple child processes.

Tom Baranowicz

How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code — A quick fire tip.

David Walsh

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Node: Best Practices for Performance — Covers very similar ground to another memory leak article we linked recently.

Deepu K Sasidharan

'Some thoughts on the npm acquisition..' — The creator of Hapi and an investor in npm Inc. shared his thoughts on GitHub’s acquisition of npm. I disagree with his conclusion (and his views have also caused concern on Twitter) but it’s nonetheless interesting to get views from behind the curtain.

Eran Hammer

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

npm 6.14.5 Released — Just a couple of minor bug fixes.

The npm Blog

actions-cli: Monitor Your GitHub Actions in Real Time from the Command Line

Tommaso De Rossi

SQL Template Tag: Tagged Template Strings for Preparing SQL Statements — For use with pg and mysql, for example.

Blake Embrey

webpack-blocks: Configure webpack using Functional Feature Blocks

Andy Wermke

JavaScript Error Tracking with AppSignal v1.3.0 is Here

AppSignal sponsor

FarmHash 3.1: A Node Implementation of Google's High Performance Hash Functions — FarmHash is a family of non-cryptographic hash functions built by Google mostly for quickly hashing strings.

Lovell Fuller

do-wrapper 4.0: A Node Wrapper for the DigitalOcean v2 API

Matthew Major

#309 — April 24, 2020

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Golang Weekly

Go Developer Survey 2019 Results — The annual survey results are here but calculated differently than in previous years. See how the community feels, what tools we use, and what we’re really using Go for.

The Go Blog

Fiber: An Express.js Inspired Web Framework for Go — If you know Express (from the Node world) than Fiber will look very familiar. It supports middleware, WebSockets, and various template engines, all while boasting a low memory footprint. Built on top of FastHTTP.

Fiber

We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

A Comparison of Three Programming Languages for Bioinformatics — This is quite an academic piece but basically Go, Java and C++ were put head to head in an intensive bioinformatics task. The good news? Go won on memory usage and beat the C++17 approach (which was admittedly less than ideal) in performance. The team in question chose Go going forward.

BMC Bioinformatics

Go for Cloud — A Few Reflections for FaaS with AWS Lambda — A response to a this article about Go’s pros and cons in the cloud. You should read both.

Filip Lubniewski

???? Jobs

Enjoy Building Scalable Infrastructure in Go? Stream Is Hiring — Like coding in Go? We do too. Stream is hiring in Amsterdam. Apply now.

Stream

Golang Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

An Introduction to Debugging with Delve — If you’re in the “I don’t really use a debugger..” camp, Paschalis’s story and brief tutorial might help you dip a toe into the water.

Paschalis Tsilias

Object Ordering in Go — This is all about object comparison and the types of comparisons that are allowed in Go. Reading this post > Not reading this post.

Eyal Posener

How to Manage Database Timeouts and Cancellations in Go — How to cancel database queries from your app and what quirks and edge cases you need to be aware of.

Alex Edwards

The Go Security Checklist — From code to infrastructure, learn how to improve the security of your Go applications with the Go security checklist.

Sqreen sponsor

Data Logging with Go: How to Store Customer Details Securely — Specifically, this looks at using custom protobuf FieldOptions to mark fields as OK to log and reflection to check those options.

Vadzim Zapolski-Dounar

How to Install Go in FreeBSD in 5 Minutes — You can use a package manager, but this way has advantages and it’s easy.

Jeremy Morgan

???? Code & Tools

Fynedesk: A Fyne-Powered Full Desktop Environment for Linux/Unix — Previously we’ve linked to Fyne, a Go-based cross-platform GUI framework, but now it’s been used to create an entire Linux desktop environment!

Fyne.io

Lockgate: A Cross-Platform Locking Library — Has support for distributed locks using Kubernetes and OS file locks support.

Flant

Pomerium: An Identity-Aware Secure Access Proxy — An identity aware access-proxy modeled after Google’s BeyondCorp. Think VPN access benefits but without the VPN. Built in Go, naturally.

Pomerium

Beta Launch: Code Performance Profiling - Find & Fix Bottlenecks

Blackfire sponsor

Apex Log: A Structured Logging Package for Go — Inspired by Logrus.

Apex

mediary: Add Interceptors to the Go HTTP Client — This opens up a few options: tracing, request dumping, statistics collection, etc.

Here Mobility SDK

iso9660: A Go Library for Reading and Creating ISO9660 Images — The use cases for this will be a bit niche. The author created it to dynamically generate ISOs to be mounted in vSphere VMs.

Kamil Domański

pxy: A Go Livestream Proxy from WebSockets to External RTMP Endpoints

Chua Bing Quan

#311 — May 8, 2020

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Golang Weekly

Caddy 2: The Go-Powered Web Server with Automatic TLS — After over a year of redesign, Caddy 2 has a new architecture to v1. If you want a new HTTPS server that ‘just works’, Caddy is well worth a look IMO. Its lead creator, Matt Holt, answered lots of questions on this Hacker News thread about the release.

Caddy Web Server

Rek: An Easy HTTP Client for Go — The inspiration here is from Python’s very well known and highly esteemed Requests library.. so the Pythonistas among you might like this!

Luc Perkins

Modern Redis Features with RedisGreen — Online upgrades to the latest Redis 6.0 features, memory mapping, key size tracking, and more.

RedisGreen sponsor

Life Without Line Numbers — There’s a lot of buzz around reducing the size of Go binaries (1.15 does so by ~6%) and here’s another tactic: reduce the precision of the position information. The gain is 2-6%, depending on how far you take it.

Josh Bleecher Snyder

▶  Discussing Black Hat Go — “Are you excited to learn about hacking and that?” Got an hour? Roberto Clapis, a security engineer at Google, and Tom Steele, a co-author of Black Hat Go, join the Go Time team to discuss security, penetration testing, and more.

Go Time Podcast

???? Jobs

Enjoy Building Scalable Infrastructure in Go? Stream Is Hiring — Like coding in Go? We do too. Stream is hiring in Amsterdam. Apply now.

Stream

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

Mid-Stack Inlining in Go — Inlining a function can lead to serious performance gains, so why not do it for everything? Well, there are always trade-offs.

Dave Cheney

Asynchronous Preemption in Go 1.14 — How the new preemption implementation works, including the use of a lesser-known signal (SIGURG).

Vincent Blanchon

Why Are My Go Executable Files Larger Than My Source Code? — We built a data visualization tool to find out. Here’s how we built it, and what we learned.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

Accelerating Aggregate MD5 Hashing Up to 800% with AVX512 — The culmination of this work is md5-simd, a Go library that performs such rapid MD5 hashing (when running concurrently). The use cases here are quite restricted but you may appreciate seeing how such things are implemented for any high end SIMD wrangling you need to do one day.

MinIO Blog

▶  A Beginner's Guide to gRPC in Go — There’s a written version of the tutorial if you dislike videos.

TutorialEdge

Four Steps to Daemonize Your Go Programs — Daemons are programs that run as non-interactive background processes (e.g. background job processors, Web servers, database systems).

Ilija Eftimov

Go as a Scripting Language? — There’s plenty of folks that use Go as a scripting language, but there are challenges around REPLs and shebang support. Some of these challenges are being addressed today.

Segio De Simone

???? Code & Tools

UUID 3.3: A Pure Go Implementation of UUIDs — A pure Go implementation of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) as defined in RFC-4122 covering versions 1 through 5.

The Go Commune

Reed-Solomon: A Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding Library — A Go port of a Java library built by Backblaze that does Reed Solomon erasure coding (a way to send or store data in a larger form that’s resilient to data loss). Boasts operation of over 1GB/sec per core.

Klaus Post

ko 0.5: Build and Deploy Go Apps on Kubernetes — ko’s objective is to “to make containers invisible infrastructure.” It’s been rapidly maturing in the past few months too.

Google

Monitor the Health and Performance of Your Golang Apps with Datadog APM. Free Trial

Datadog APM sponsor

Tengo 2.2: A Fast Embeddable Script Language for Go — Quite a mature project now and worth a look if you need to add some dynamic scripting to your code.

Daniel Kang

UniPDF 3.7: A Library for Creating and Processing PDF Files — Pure Go, which is neat, but note it’s dual licensed: AGPL for open source, commercial for closed source projects.

UniDoc

Mockery: A Mock Code Generator for Go Interfaces

Vektra

Dynamo: An Expressive DynamoDB Library

Greg Greg

???? Two Fun Side Projects

gasm: An Experimental WASM Virtual Machine for Gophers — “I did this just for fun and for learning WASM specification.” Nonetheless, it works with basic examples.

Takeshi Yoneda

thdwb: A Homebrew Web Browser and Rendering Engine — Another experimental, fun learning project. You won’t be using it for your day to day browsing any time soon but projects like this keep the imagination fueled up.

Danilo Fragoso

It'd be quite cool to link to more fun Go experiments and side projects actually, so let us know if you work on any. Bonus points for games, musical, or Web experiences ????