#263 — April 22, 2020

Read on the Web

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — This is not a technical article but is an important one nonetheless. Lee Holloway essentially programmed Cloudflare into being. But then he became distant and unpredictable, and what happened to him is something that could affect any of us ????

Sandra Upson (WIRED)

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview.

Glauber Costa

Slow CI Build? Get a 41:1 ROI by Switching to Semaphore — For every $1 invested in Semaphore, engineers gain $41 in reclaimed productivity. Who said money can’t buy you time?

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

▶  Mob Programming and the Power of Flow — I enjoyed this insightful walk through the idea of bringing people together and attempting to develop things in an efficient way with numerous people around the same machine (a.k.a. ‘mob’ programming). It’s not for everyone, but it’s neat to see how it can work.

Woody Zuill

Cloudflare Workers Now Supports.. COBOL — COBOL is one of the earliest things you could really call a programming language (it first appeared in 1959!) and is often a source of amusement because it’s seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, it’s still in use (particularly in legacy systems) and you can use with Cloudflare Workers too!

John Graham-Cumming

???? Jobs

DevOps Engineer 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

???? Stories and Opinions

How 'Memories', a 256 Byte Demo, Was Coded — You can watch the demo here or enjoy learning just how these unusual developers cram so much into so little space.

HellMood/DESiRE

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories — For pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression.

Quanta Magazine

▶  Discussing NGINX and Service Meshes with Alan Murphy — I enjoyed this SE Daily episode last week and learnt a fair bit.

Software Engineering Daily podcast

End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments — Optimize service costs and reduce MTTR with full data correlation, payload visibility and automated tracing. Try free.

Epsagon sponsor

▶  Performance Profiling for Web Applications — An overview of how to use Chrome DevTools to understand a Web application’s performance bottlenecks.

Sam Saccone

Are Object Stores Starting to Look Like Databases? — A bit, yes.

Alex Woodie (Datanami)

The Case Against CS Master’s Degrees

Oz Onay

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tutorials

Ask HN: I'm A Software Engineer Going Blind, How Should I Prepare? — This is something I hope none of you have to go through, but we’ve linked to other stories about being a blind coder in the past, and some form of sight loss will affect many of us over the years.

Hacker News

Writing an 'Emulator' in JavaScript (and Interfacing with Multiple UIs) — Tania built a Chip-8 interpreter in JavaScript and has gone into quite a bit of detail about what was involved here. Lots of neat bits and pieces to pick up from this.

Tania Rascia

What It Took to Build a Serverless App That Texts Positive COVID-19 News — Code, a screencast tour, and an article looking at what it took to build a simple serverless app using C#, Azure Functions, and Twilio to text news alerts (but only ones with positive sentiments!)

Gwyneth Pena S.

If You Use grep On Text Files, Use the -a (--text) Option — I could explain why but then you wouldn’t need to read this. Makes a good point.

Chris Siebenmann

Event-Reduce: An Algorithm to Optimize Frequently Running Queries? — In brief, the idea is that rather than having to re-run queries when data changes on a table, you can basically merge in changes to previous query results. Be sure to check the FAQs.

Daniel Meyer

Embedding Binary Objects in C

Ted Unangst

???? Code and Tools

Desed: A Debugger for sed — Demystify and debug your sed (the text processor that comes with nearly every Unix) scripts, from the comfort of your terminal. Step through line by line, place breakpoints, etc.

SoptikHa2

Falcon: An Open-Source, Cross Platform SQL Client — Built around Electron and React, this basic client can quickly do chart visualizations of query results and can connect to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite and more.

Plotly

The SaaS CTO Security Checklist

Sqreen sponsor

Termible: Offer Terminal Apps in the Browser Without Installation — This is a commercial service but I find the idea intriguing. You provide a Dockerfile, embed some code on your site, and let people play with your product/service “live”. HTTPie seems to use it for its live examples.

Termible

X410: An X Server for Windows 10 — If you’re using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to run Linux behind the scenes of a Windows 10 install, X410 takes things to another graphical level.

Choung Networks

60 Linux Networking Commands and Scripts — “I decided to create a network tools go-to-list for myself. Then, I thought, why not turn the list into a blog post?”

Hayden James

Brök: A Tool to Find Broken Links in Text Documents — Built in Haskell.

Mark Wales

xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust. — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data.

Andrew Gallant

#265 — May 6, 2020

Read on the Web

Caddy 2: The Go-Powered Web Server with Automatic, Default 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

Redis 6.0 Released — The next major release of the popular data structure server is here. Redis is at the heart of so many data systems nowadays that any major release is big news but 6.0 packs in a lot of new bits and pieces that make it more robust and capable of modern workloads, including:

• Access Control Lists (ACL) for limiting what certain clients can do.
• Diskless replication on replicas.
• Threaded I/O (but Redis itself remains primarily single threaded).
• SSL/TLS support.
• A new client-server protocol, RESP3.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

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

An 'Extra Dumbed Down' Explanation of BGP — The BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is a fundamental part of how the Internet works by defining and exchanging routing information between systems. This post explains what BGP is but, importantly, what its flaws are and how it needs to be made better.

RevK

How PHP is Beginning to Show Its Maturity — “If you still think PHP lacks an appropriate object model, you might be pleasantly surprised taking a look again.” Add proper FFI, dependency management, and security to the mix and PHP looks better than ever as of version 7.4.

John Coggeshall (LWN)

What Netlify’s Infrastructure Team Learned As It Increased Deploy Speed by Up to 2x — How the infrastructure team at Netlify took a 4 year old codebase, isolated an issue, tested a few different solutions, and eventually improved observability while rolling it out to production.

Epure, Neal and Drasner

???? 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

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

Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

How a Few Lines of Code Broke Lots of JavaScript Packages — A week ago JavaScript developers were reporting breakage in numerous key packages. The culprit? A tiny change in a tiny dependency. A fix was quickly deployed and the creator of the affected project reflects on what happened here.

Forbes Lindesay

systemd, 10 Years Later: A Historical and Technical Retrospective

V.R.

Initial Impressions of WSL 2 — WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a compatibility layer for running Linux executables natively within Windows 10 and ”..it feels like a new era for web development on Windows.”

Dave Rupert

What Port Numbers Do Developers Use Locally? — A look at what port numbers developers are using locally in development.

Roland Crosby

▶  A Language Head to Head: Kotlin 4 vs. Scala 3

Garth Gilmour and Eamonn Boyle

▶  Does Agile Make Us Less Secure? — Weighing up the balance between older ways of making things ‘just so’ before deploying versus pushing to production numerous times a day.

Michael Brunton-Spall

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility. See how the costs can be mitigated to remain Agile.

Rob Cronin

???? Tutorials

Using AWS CodeBuild to Execute Administrative Tasks — A look at using AWS CodeBuild to run scheduled or adhoc jobs. It’s not the first tool most would jump to (as it’s marketed as a build service) but the flexibility provided is pretty neat and might help you package together code in a way that better suits your use case (it’s well suited for batch jobs that take a while to run, rather than 500ms functions, say!)

Gojko Adzic

Git Branch Naming Conventions — A primer on naming branches for modern git workflows to help organize your or your team’s work.

Sanket Saurav

Implementing Conway's Game of Life in 32 Bytes — Not exactly a tutorial but if you can read x86 you’ll learn something. Here’s a video of it in action.

SizeCoding

TLDR: Writing a Slack bot to Summarize Articles — Using state-of-the-art NLP to read more news, faster? I always find automated summaries to be kinda useless, but the way it’s put together is neat nonetheless.

Chris Ismael

OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practices

IETF

Using PostgreSQL for JSON Storage — With JSON and JSONB types and associated advanced ways to query such columns, using Postgres as a store for JSON data is pretty simple. This is the briefest of overviews but leads into an interactive online tutorial.

Steve Pousty

???? Code and Tools

Never IPv4: A Quick Way to Test Your IPv6 Support — If this site doesn't load for you, you're in the majority! It's a test site that only has AAAA records and so will only work on a fully working IPv6 stack. NeverIPv6.com provides the opposite.

As207960 Cyfyngedig

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

Tommaso De Rossi

Pixie Is Alive. Monitor & Trace K8s Apps On-Prem Without Changing Code — At-scale streaming, gaming, e-comm & SaaS SRE teams run eBPF based edge monitoring Pixie scripts to debug in minutes.

Pixie sponsor

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs — Backblaze B2 has been a compelling alternative to S3 for a while on price alone but now it shares an API too.

Gleb Budman

awesome-kubernetes: A Curated List for Awesome Kubernetes Sources — A lot of k8s resources here from installers and useful articles to platforms, projects, books, and Twitter accounts.

Ramit Surana

Rich: A Python Library for Rich Text and Beautiful Formatting in the Terminal — This does look really nice.

Will McGugan