#352 — April 22, 2020

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???? We've got a neat bonus for you this week at the bottom of the issue ????

Postgres Weekly

Postgres Explain Visualizer 2: A Vue.js Component to Show Execution Plans — Less a standalone tool and something you’d use when building your own Postgres tooling. There is, however, a demo here. The output is really nifty.

Dalibo

Insert-Only Tables To Be Autovacuumed in Postgres 13 (But Why?) — Autovacuuming clears up dead tuples that are often left when updating or deleting data from tables, so why is autovacuuming for append-only tables a big deal in Postgres 13? Laurenz explains.

Laurenz Albe

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

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

An Easy Postgres 12 and pgAdmin 4 Setup with Docker — Docker provides an easy and loosely coupled way to get things set up in a development environment.

Jonathan S. Katz

Is There a Limit on Number of Partitions Handled by Postgres? — Sort of, but you’d really have to be going at it to stretch Postgres 12’s capabilities in this area.

Denish Patel

Where Do My Postgres Settings Come From? — A nice visual look at how parameters and settings cascade or override each other.

My DBA Notebook

Identify Slow-Running PostgreSQL Queries Quickly in Datadog — Improve PostgreSQL performance by visualizing and identifying errors fast using granular, out-of-the-box dashboards in Datadog.

Datadog sponsor

Replicate Multiple Postgres Servers to a Single MongoDB Server using Logical Decoding Output Plugin

David Zhang

An Overview of the JOIN Methods in Postgres

Kumar Rajeev Rastogi

If you enjoyed this interview, Luca actually gave some more detailed answers in the full interview which you can read here.

#353 — April 29, 2020

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Postgres Weekly

7 Things That Could Be Improved in Postgres — As 1990s dance pop group D:Ream sang in 1994, Things Can Only Get Better.. including Postgres ???? Luckily these are all ‘nice to have’s but I dare say we’ll see some of them (such as automatic tuning and auto-vacuuming improvements) appear over time.

Kaarel Moppel

How The Citus Distributed Query Executor Adapts to a Postgres Workload — Citus is the popular extension for horizontally scaling Postgres and its query executor has seen some huge updates lately.

Citus Data (Microsoft)

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this pganalyze eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Swarm64 DA 4.0: A Database Acceleration Extension for Postgres — Swarm64 started life as a FPGA-driven way to accelerate Postgres performance, but can now work without FPGAs too. This is not a free product but if you want to give it a run, there’s a trial or it can be spun up from the AWS Marketplace.

Yana Krasteva

Postgres Performance Goalposts — An interesting heuristic from Bruce here on what to do if you expect your connections, queries, or write queries to be above/below certain levels.

Bruce Momjian

A Tale of Password Authentication Methods in Postgres — “Let’s say you want to implement a password authentication method in a client/server protocol..” Here’s the story of how Postgres came up with its approaches.

Peter Eisentraut

How to Set application_name When Using psql — As Craig says: “Setting your application name in Postgres is SO USEFUL. It will help a lot for debugging when you’ve got multiple different apps/services connecting to the same database.”

Denish Patel

How to Upgrade Postgres from v11 to v12 on Ubuntu 20.04 — Now that Ubuntu 20.04 is out, this might be on your mind!

Paolo Melchiorre

Working with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL: What Happened to the Stats? — Apparently there’s a bug with numerous versions of Aurora PostgreSQL that causes certain stats to be lost on restart.

Michael Vitale

Postgres Vision 2020 - Free Online Conference (June 23-24) — Learn how today’s IT leaders are using Postgres. Join from anywhere in the world and listen from 30+ Postgres experts.

EnterpriseDB sponsor

A Deep Dive into PostGIS Nearest Neighbor Search — Take a deep dive into the Postgres and PostGIS internals to find out how K-nearest neighbor accelerates local search.

Martin Davis

My Favorite Postgres Extensions: Part One — A basic high level look at pg_partman and postgres_fdw.

Nawaz Ahmed

Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres

Kristian Dupont

Postgres.app: The Easiest Way to Get Started with Postgres on the Mac — I’ve used this for years, it’s super popular, but if there’s just a handful of developers out there who’d benefit from it and don’t know about it, this reminder will be worth it :-) It continues to get very frequent updates.

Jakob Egger, Chris Pastl, and Mattt Thompson

#354 — May 6, 2020

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Postgres Weekly

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

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

Monitor Custom Postgres Metrics in Real-Time with Datadog — Monitor and visualize Postgres performance in context end-to-end alongside the rest of your stack. Create custom, drag-and-drop dashboards to quickly view analytics on any Postgres metric. Try Datadog free.

Datadog sponsor

My Favorite PostgreSQL Extensions: Part Two — The second part of a series we linked to last week. This time, Nawaz takes a look at pgAudit, pg_repack, and HypoPG.

Nawaz Ahmed

Backup Manifests and pg_verifybackup in Postgres 13 — Postgres 13 will introduce two features to enhance the automated validation of physical backups: backup manifests and a new tool called pg_verifybackup.

Gabriele Bartolini

arm64 Packages Now on apt.postgresql.org — If you’re running ARM64 hardware and Debian or Ubuntu, you can now install Postgres via apt.

Christoph Berg

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 Postgres 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

How to Migrate From Inheritance-Based Partitioning to Declarative Partitioning — Partitioning was introduced in Postgres 10 and Postgres 11 improved the declarative partitioning support. This article demonstrates a move from inheritance based partitioning to declarative partitioning using the native features found in Postgres 11+.

Caterina Magini

Free eBook: How to Get a 3x Performance Improvement on Your Postgres Database — Learn our best practices for optimizing Postgres query performance for customers like Atlassian and how to reduce data loaded from disk by 500x.

pganalyze sponsor

How to Backup Multiple Tablespaces with pg_basebackup

Ahsan Hadi

▶  Security and Compliance with Postgres — A recorded webinar that 2ndQuadrant ran recently.

Boriss Mejías

Oracle to PostgreSQL: ANSI Outer Join Syntax in Postgres — The latest in a series of blog posts about migrating to Postgres from Oracle which looks at what Postgres offers in place of Oracle’s join operators.

Kirk Roybal

An Interview with 2ndQuadrant's Jimmy Angelakos — The latest ‘PostgreSQL Person of the Week’ to face questions about his experiences with Postgres.

Andreas Scherbaum

dadbod.vim: A Modern Database Interface for Vim — A Vim plugin for interacting with numerous databases, including Postgres.

Tim Pope

#497 — April 16, 2020

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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

#498 — April 23, 2020

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Ruby Weekly

Mining for Malicious Ruby Gems: 700+ Gems Affected — Breathe easy as this was all resolved a month ago (and was too obscure to pay off for the hackers anyway) but a security research team recently found over 700 malicious Ruby gems that were subtle typos/adjustments of more popular gems (e.g. atlas-client vs atlas_client – could you tell which one is real?)

Tomislav Maljic

You Can Now Sponsor Matz on GitHub — I appreciate these are challenging times, but if you’ve ever wanted to give a big thank you to Matz, the creator of Ruby, here’s one way to do it. We’re sponsoring Matz now as without him, this newsletter wouldn’t exist! ???? Alternatively, if you have little to spare, maybe send him a thanks on Twitter?

GitHub Sponsors

Ruby Performance Tips — Here’s a collection of practical tips for improving Ruby performance for better user experiences, brought to you by Raygun. Read the tips here.

Raygun sponsor

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

▶  Introduction to Stimulus Reflex — Stimiulus Reflex makes SPA-type interactions very simple by using ActionCable to render pages and then diffing them on the client.

GoRails

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice? — Before you say “always”, understand that caching is not free and, if done incorrectly, can even make things worse.

Jonathan Miles

???? 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

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

???? Articles & Tutorials

How to Customize Webpack in Rails Apps — How to go about configuring webpack when tweaking webpacker.yml just isn’t enough.

Ross Kaffenberger

RSpec Given/When/Then with Symbols — An interesting, alternative way to structure a BDD feature in RSpec. I think I prefer the underscores but YMMV.

Caius Durling

Looking Inside a Ruby Gem — Piotr decomposes a .gem file which turns out to just be a collection of gzipped and tarred files, only some of which are the code.

Piotr Murach

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, you will learn about the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Passing Rails Controller Params to Sidekiq — ActionController::Parameters can give Sidekiq issues.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Catchup Subscriptions with Rails Event Store

Miroslaw Praglowski

Logic-less Ruby Templates with Mustache

David Santangelo

▶  Discussing Ruby for Good with Sean Marcia — Sean talks about founding Ruby For Good (an event about philanthropic Ruby development) and some of the projects it has been responsible for creating.

Ruby Rogues podcast

???? Code and Tools

Impressionist 2.0: A Plugin to Log Impressions in Rails Apps — Impressionist tracks page views and impressions. v2.0 has just dropped but they’re also are looking for new maintainers, so contact them if you want to get involved.

Charlotte Ruby Group

acli 0.3: A Command Line Client for Action Cable — Interesting on two fronts.. first, because it’s an mruby app, and we don’t see many of those, and second, because it lets you play with Action Cable channels in any easier way.

Vladimir Dementyev

Undercover: A Tool to Stop You Shipping Untested Code — It’s like RuboCop but for code coverage rather than code style.

Jan Grodowski

How to Monitor Your Host Metrics Automatically

AppSignal sponsor

Bridgetown: A Modern Ruby (JAMstack) Web Framework — Bridgetown is a new Ruby-based static-site generator based on a fork of Jekyll. It supports plugins and Webpack, so you can use your front-end framework of choice.

Bridgetown

net-ssh 6.0: A Pure Ruby Implementation of the SSH2 Client Protocol — Yes, you can write programs that invoke and interact with processes on remote servers, via SSH2, all in Ruby.

Buck, Fazekas, et al.

#500 — May 7, 2020

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???? 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.

#334 — April 16, 2020

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Node Weekly

npm Has Now (Actually) Joined GitHub — We announced GitHub’s acquisition of npm a month ago but now the process is complete. Not much real news here but the plan is to now focus on community engagement and improving registry infrastructure.

Jeremy Epling (GitHub)

Node v13.13.0 (Current) Released — fs.readv is a new function to sequentially read from an array of ArrayBufferViews, util.inspect now lets you specify a maximum length for printed strings, the default maximum HTTP header size has been increased to 16KB, there are three new collaborators, and more.

Michaël Zasso

Get Better Insight into Redis with RedisGreen — Modern hosting and monitoring services include memory usage maps, seamless scaling, key size tracking, and more.

RedisGreen sponsor

▶  Watch the Live Coding of a New Feature for Node.js — This is not something for novices, but if the idea of watching ‘over the shoulder’ of a Node.js collaborator implementing a new feature directly into Node itself interests you.. this could be a valuable hour spent.

Vladimir de Turckheim

node-libcurl 2.1: libcurl Bindings for Node — libcurl is a very powerful and well established way to fetch data from URLs across numerous protocols. node-libcurl 2.1.0 brings support for the latest version of libcurl (7.69.1) to us in the Node world.

Jonathan Cardoso Machado

npm's CTO: 'So Long, and Thanks for All The Packages!' — Ahmad Nassri was npm’s CTO but has now left. Here, he reflects on the past ten years of npm, the repo, the company, and the achievements of both.

Ahmad Nassri

???? 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

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

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

???? Tutorials

Working With AWS Route 53 from Node — Route 53 is Amazon Web Services’ suite of DNS-related services. Like every AWS service, you can control it via an API, and here’s how to manipulate hosted zones from Node.

Valeri Karpov

Best Practices Learnt Running Express.js in Production for 4 Years — There’s a lot of stuff packed in here focused around middleware, testing, logging, and general concerns around scaling and keeping apps running in production.

Adnan Rahić

The Node.js Security Handbook — Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js security handbook made for developers.

Sqreen sponsor

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project with PostgreSQL — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

Porting to TypeScript Solved Our API Woes — From the guy behind the (in)famous Wat video comes a tale of porting a backend from Ruby to TypeScript.

Gary Bernhardt

How to Mass Rename Files in Node

Flavio Copes

▶  Let's Build a Digital Circuit Simulator In JavaScript — A special episode of the Low Level JavaScript series takes us on a brief journey into the world of digital logic.

Low Level JavaScript

The Story of How I Created a Way to Port Windows Apps to Linux — We mentioned ElectronCGI recently as a way to let .NET and Node.js code depend upon each other, but here its creator explains more about the how and why.

Rui Figueiredo

How to Create an Alexa Skill with Node — Implementing a custom ‘skill’ for Amazon Alexa by using Node and AWS Lambda.

Xavier Portilla Edo

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

Node v10.20.1 (LTS) Released — If you’re still using Node 10, don’t use v10.20.0, use this, due to a bug in the .0 release.

Bethany Nicolle Griggs

emoji-regex: A Regular Expression to Match All Emoji-Only Symbols

Mathias Bynens

ip-num: A Library to Work with ASN, IPv4, and IPv6 Numbers — Happy in both Node and the browser.

dadepo

Optimize Node.js Performance with Distributed Tracing in Datadog

Datadog APM sponsor

verify-json: Verify JSON Using a Lightweight Schema — A lighter weight alternative to something like JSON Schema.

Yusuf Bhabhrawala

middle-manager: A Lightweight 'No BS' Presentation Tool — A bit of humor, really. It turns Markdown into basic presentations but then the magic is it detects your ‘BS’ business language so you can remove it ????

Anders

#335 — April 23, 2020

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Node Weekly

Node.js 14 Released — Woo-hoo another major release of Node.js is here. v14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October.. so production apps would, ideally, remain on v12 for now. So what’s new..?

• Diagnostic reports are now a stable feature.
• It's based on V8 8.1.
• An experimental Async Local Storage API
• Improvements to streams.
• An experimental WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) to support future WebAssembly use cases.
• Bye bye to the ESM module ‘experimental’ warning (though it still is experimental).

Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs

Learn Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript — Join Brian Lonsdorf and learn how to apply such concepts as pure functions, currying, composition, functors, monads and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Puppeteer 3.0: Say Hello to Firefox — Best known as a way to headlessly control Chrome from Node, Puppeteer has recently seen some competition in the form of the cross-browser Playwright recently. But competition can be good and Puppeteer now supports Firefox too.

Mathias Bynens

ZEIT Is Now Vercel — You probably best know ZEIT as the creators and maintainers of the popular Next.js React framework and their ‘Now’ deployment and hosting platform.

Vercel

New OpenSSL Security Release To Require Node Updates? Maybe Not.. — A key security update to OpenSSL raised the possibility of widespread Node releases to incorporate the fixes, but initial suggestions are that Node isn’t affected. Fingers crossed!

Sam Roberts

???? Jobs

Node.js 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

OneTesselAway: Building a Real-Time Public Transit Status Device — A developer wanted to know when the next bus would arrive.. while using lots of cool tech, including Node, the OneBusAway API, and the Tessel 2 IoT platform.

Robert McGuire

What is the toJSON() Function? — If an object has a toJSON function, JSON.stringify() calls toJSON() and serializes the return value from toJSON() instead.

Valeri Karpov

Top GitHub Best Practices for Developers - Expanded Guide — Implementing these best practices could save you time, improve code maintainability, and prevent security risks.

Datree.io sponsor

Refactor Your Node and Express APIs to Serverless with Azure Functions — John Papa points out a Microsoft tutorial that walks through the process of taking a Node API serverless with Azure’s Functions service.

John Papa

Querying SQL Server from Node with async/await

Rob Tomlin

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

lazynpm: A Terminal UI for npm — One of those sort of things you don’t realize you need until you give it a go. There’s a four-minute screencast if you want to see how it works without downloading.

Jesse Duffield

node-sqlite3 4.2: Async, Non-blocking SQLite3 Bindings for Node — 4.2.0 just came out.

Mapbox

ts-gphoto2-driver: A Node Wrapper for libgphoto2 — libgphoto2 provides a way to control a variety of digital cameras/DSLRs.

Lenzotti Romain

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

Rosetta: A General Purpose Internationalization Library in 292 Bytes — Less than 300 bytes, but does have a few dependencies. Aims to be very simple and is targeted at basic string use cases.

Luke Edwards

nodejs-dns 2.0: The Google Cloud DNS Client for Node

Google

node-osc 5.0: Open Sound Control Protocol Library — OSC is a protocol used to communicate between media devices.

Myles Borins

ts-node: TypeScript Execution and REPL for Node

TypeStrong

???? And One for Fun..

npm trends: Compare NPM Package Downloads — A site to compare package download counts over time. For example, what about koa vs restify vs fastify?

John Potter

#336 — April 30, 2020

Read on the Web

Be sure to check out the Tools and Libraries section today as there have been quite a lot of (minor) releases.. from MIDI parsing and JPEG decoding to generating TypeScript types from a Postgres database.. maybe there's something for you ????

Node Weekly

Middy 1.0: A Node Middleware Framework for AWS Lambda — Middy’s aim is to make writing serverless functions (hosted on AWS Lambda) easier by providing a familiar middleware abstraction to Node developers. The example in this post shows off the main benefit.

Luciano Mammino

Rust and Node.js: A Match Made in Heaven? — This is technical stuff but using other languages, such as Rust, for building add-ons for Node is an interesting area.

Anshul Goyal

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

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

Node v14.1.0 (Current) Released — Last week we featured the release of Node 14.0 and 14.1 is already with us. Principally bug fixes, plus an update to the OpenSSL dependency.

Bethany Nicolle Griggs

???? Jobs

Backend 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

???? Articles & Tutorials

Four Tools for Web Scraping in Node — A walk through of a few different libraries (for scraping and parsing data directly from websites) to see how they work and how they compare to each other.

Sam Agnew

Six Platforms for Hosting a Node App in 2020 — Of course, you can run a Node app pretty much anywhere there’s a server, but some platforms make it easier than others. These all have free tiers too. Glitch, Now.sh (now Vercel) and Heroku are particular favorites of ours at Cooperpress.

Amit Bendor

Getting Started with NuxtJS — Learn how to create Vue.js-powered server-side rendered apps with NuxtJS including configuring an app and deploying it on Heroku.

Timi Omoyeni

The Node.js Security Handbook — Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js security handbook made for developers.

Sqreen sponsor

A Collection of Challenging TypeScript Exercises — “The goal: Let everyone play with many different TypeScript features and get an overview of TypeScript capabilities and principles.”

Marat Dulin

Exploring Node.js Internals — It’s reasonably elementary but Aleem Isiaka explains how the internals of Node.js interact with one another on a simple task such as creating a file.

Smashing Magazine

Creating CommonJS-Based npm Packages via TypeScript

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Turning Vue Components Into Reusable npm Packages — Outlines how you can reuse Vue components across your projects by automating your process to bundle, test, document, and publish your components.

Sjoerd de voorhoede

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

Node v12.16.3 (LTS) Released — OpenSSL gets an update, and warnings are no longer printed for modules that use conditional exports or package name self resolution.

Node.js

pm2 4.4 Released: The Node Production Process Manager — A very mature and widely used process manager that includes a load balancer for keeping Node apps alive forever and to reload them without downtime. v4.4 improves the Node 14 compatibility.

Alexandre Strzelewicz

jpeg-js: A Pure JavaScript JPEG Encoder and Decoder — It admits it’s far slower than native alternatives but if you need a pure JavaScript JPEG encoder/decoder, this is where to go.

Eugene Ware

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

node-stream-zip: For Fast Reading of ZIP Archives — Reads chunk by chunk rather than all in one go so it’s memory friendly.

Dimitri Witkowski

JZZ: A MIDI Library for Node and Web Browsers — Send, receive and play MIDI messages from both Node and the browser on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Sema

Vegemite: A Pub/Sub State Manager — Inspired by Immer and Redux, full TypeScript support, and sized at only 623 bytes, which includes one dependency.

Luke Edwards

Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres

Kristian Dupont

web-worker: Consistent Web Workers for the Browser and Node — In Node it works as a web-compatible Worker implementation atop worker_threads. In the browser it’s an alias for Worker.

Jason Miller

node-csv-parse: A CSV Parser Implementing the stream.Transform API

Adaltas

#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

#308 — April 17, 2020

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Golang Weekly

Broccoli: Using Brotli Compression to Embed Static Files in Go — There’s been talk about making static file embedding a standard part of Go, but for now you might find this project interesting. It uses the Brotli compression system to embed a virtual file system of static files in your Go executables as tightly as possible.

Aletheia

How Thanos Would Program in Go — An introduction to the Thanos Go Style Guide built for Thanos, the distributed metrics system project, not the Marvel super-villain, BTW ????

Bartek Płotka

Introducing GoLand 2020.1 — A variety of upgrades for Go Modules support, code-editing features that require little to no interaction from the user, an expanded code completion family, and more! Try free for 30 days.

GoLand sponsor

Understanding Bytes in Go by Building a TCP Protocol — There is a lot more in this long-ish tutorial than just learning about bytes. This is great if, let’s say, you are stuck at home and need a challenge. (Note: If you’ve got deja-vu, we linked this in last week’s brief non-issue.)

Ilija Eftimov

Ebiten 1.11.0 Released: The Go 2D Gamedev Library — Ebiten is one of those genuine gems of a project. Maybe use it to take part in this weekend’s Ludum Dare game jam? More Go entries would be neat..

Ebiten

Generics in Go: How They Work and How to Play With Them — Generics are a lot closer than you might think. So much so that you can try them today in a browser or compile locally.

Chris Brown

???? Jobs

Senior Software Engineer (Go) – 100% Remote (UK/EU Only) — Form3 is building the most exciting banking technology on the planet and are looking for Talented Engineers to join the team.

Form3

Golang 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

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Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

Statically Compiling Go Programs — If you thought all/most Go binaries were static, you might be surprised to find out that some core packages use cgo code and result in dynamically linked libraries.

Martin Tournoij

How To Create Testable Go Code — Structure your code and tests to be mockable, testable, and maintainable, even if it calls external services.

Dave Wales

The Go Security Checklist — Ensure the infrastructure and the code of your Go applications are secure with the latest actionable best practices.

Sqreen sponsor

Build Your Own Neural Network in Go — A beginner’s guide to building the simplest parts of a neural network completely from scratch.

Dasaradh S K

'How I Built a Cloud Gaming System with WebRTC and Go'

Thanh Nguyen

???? Code & Tools

podcast-cli: A Podcast Player with a Terminal-Based Interface

Goulin

Godocgen: A Go Documentation Generator — Godocgen can output to multiple formats/destinations, making it easy to host as a static site. More background here.

Holloway Chew Kean Ho

3mux: An i3-inspired Terminal Multiplexer — Imagine something like tmux but easier to learn and with sensible defaults. Plus, it’s written in Go so you can tweak it as much as you like :-)

Aaron Janse

Micro 2.5: A Go Micro Services Development Framework

Micro

Beta Launch: Code Performance Profiling - Find & Fix Bottlenecks

Blackfire sponsor

Goph: A Native Go SSH Client — Supports connections using passwords, private keys, keys with passphrases, doing file uploads and downloads, etc.

Mohamed El Bahja

GeoDB: A Persistent Geospatial Database with Geofencing and Google Maps Support — Built using Badger gRPC and the Google Maps API. Track the geolocation of objects across boundaries or in relation to other objects.

Coleman Word

oneinfra: A 'Kubernetes as a Service' Platform — Provide or consume Kubernetes clusters at scale, on any platform or service provider.

oneinfra

Gocorona: Track COVID-19 Statistics From Your Terminal — A short and sweet demonstration of what you can throw together quickly using termui, a customizable Go-powered terminal dashboard and widget library.

Ayooluwa Isaiah

#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

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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 ????