#262 — April 15, 2020

Read on the Web

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

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

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

#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