#231 — August 28, 2019

Read on the Web

Lessons GitLab Learnt When Debugging A Scaling Problem— GitLab, a popular alternative to GitHub, deals with over 300 Git-over-SSH connections per second so debugging a handful of broken ones is a serious undertaking. It makes for a great story though and you’ll definitely take something away from this one.

Craig Miskell

An Interactive Map of AWS's Global Infrastructure— A really neat interactive visualization of how Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure is located around the world, how it connects together, and explanations of how various bits of it work.

Amazon Web Services

Learn to Harness Chaos to Build Resilient Systems— Systems in production fail. At this year’s ChaosConf, attendees will learn the how-to and benefits of failing parts of their infrastructure to see how their systems hold up, and to see where the weaknesses lie.

Gremlin sponsor

What Happens When You Launch A Browser for The First Time?— A collection of interesting and quite revealing Twitter threads digging into what browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc) do upon install/first launch (including phoning home and downloading default extensions).

Jonathan Sampson on Twitter

Google Cloud Run Button: 'Click-to-Deploy' for your Git Repos— Cloud Run is a Google Cloud service for running stateless containers and Cloud Run Button, unveiled this week, provides a way to let users of your code quickly deploy your app to GCP from the repo. Hopefully it doesn't get shut down in 12 months and will last as long as Heroku’s long standing ‘Deploy to Heroku’ button.

Google Cloud Blog

💻 Jobs

Lead Security Engineer— Make an impact as our first Security Engineer, focusing on driving innovation & best practices around our cloud security efforts.

Cockroach Labs

WebOps developers are in demand on Vettery— Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

Picking Rust for Building Webapps— A developer tried to convince himself not to use Rust for building a basic webapp, but ultimately decided he was “ready to have a different set of problems” to using more established languages.

Abe Winter

▶  The Infrastructure Effect— The latest episode of the fantastic Command Line Heroes podcast covers both Go and COBOL in the context of programming languages being used to build and maintain digital infrastructure.

Command Line Heroes podcast

Is DNS on Blockchain The Next Step After DNS over HTTPS?— Everything ends up on a blockchain eventually, right? 😏

Peter Lai

Please Add RSS Support To Your Site

Kev Quirk

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare Workers for Free Image Hosting— Create your own Imgur-esque static image hosting solution using B2 (basically Backblaze’s answer to S3) and Cloudflare Workers to rewrite the URLs to something more friendly.

James Ross

Everything You Need To Know About Socket.IO— Socket.io used to be the ‘go to’ JavaScript library for enabling live communications between a server and browser before WebSocket support was universal, but it still has utility.

Ably

How Agile is Your Web Team? Get Your Score and Customized Roadmap

Pantheon sponsor

curl Exercises— Less a tutorial and more a guide to practicing how to use curl, the popular command line HTTP client.

Julia Evans

How to Set Up A Perfect Python Project

Brendan Maginnis

Troubleshooting Red Hat OpenShift Applications with Throwaway Containers

Fernando Lozano

🛠 Code and Tools

GoAccess: A Visual, Real-Time Web Log Analyzer— We’ve linked this a few times over the years but it continues to get better and ever more relevant as we’re less happy to give over our data to third parties. GoAccess is a fast, terminal based log analyzer written in C that supports nearly all log formats.

Gerardo O.

Future-Proof Your Platform with a Video Stack That Scales— Keep up with new devices and new formats without extra work. Mux handles scaling so you don't have to.

Mux sponsor

Monolith: Save Web Pages into a Single, Bundled HTML File— Unlike a browser’s “Save as” feature, Monolith embeds a page’s HTML, CSS, image and JavaScript assets into a single HTML file for easy storage.

Y2Z

VMware vSphere Goes Kubernetes Native— A re-architecture of vSphere with a Kubernetes control plane, Project Pacific ‘looks like’ Kubernetes to developers and vSphere to admins.

Matt Asay (InfoWorld)

Mini_django.py: An Entire Django Python App in One File— Can we have a Ruby on Rails app in a single file next? :-)

Tim Watts

#232 — September 4, 2019

Read on the Web

Go 1.13 Released— The latest release of the popular Google-driven language is out, enabling TLS 1.3 support by default, improved modules support, and support for downloading and authenticating modules via an official mirror, index and checksum database.

Andrew Bonventre

Building Interactive SSH Applications— Writing interactive SSH-accessible applications isn’t hard, but requires a little specialized knowledge and good Unix literacy.

Drew DeVault

A Manager’s Guide to Kubernetes Adoption— It’s fair to say Kubernetes as a buzzword is somewhat overrepresented on social media, but if you’re not yet using it, this article will help you make sense of Kubernetes’ position in the world of ops.

Shuveb Hussain

Git Best Practices for SOC 2 Compliance Quick Wins— A practical list of Git best practices for SOC 2 compliance, written from a developer's perspective. Learn how implementing them can help you satisfy SOC 2 requirements, while improving developer productivity.

Datree.io sponsor

Bid Adieu to Python 2 and Get Ready for Python 3— For years, many Python developers were on the fence over migrating to Python 3 but with Python 2 being retired in 3 months, it’s time to adopt Python 3 fully.

Bart Copeland

mitmproxy: An Open Source, Interactive HTTPS Proxy— A ‘swiss-army knife’ for debugging, testing, or even performing penetration testing. iItercept, inspect, modify and replay web traffic such as HTTP 1.x, HTTP/2, WebSockets, etc.

Cortesi, Hils, et al.

▶  A 2.5 Hour Interview with John Carmack— Whatever you think of Joe Rogan, being able to hear John Carmack, the main developer behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, talk about his work is always a joy.

Joe Rogan Experience

💻 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

Get Hired Based on Your Skills Not Your CV— Our AI makes it easier and quicker to match with top webops jobs, with no recruiters and an average salary of £70k.

hackajob

💬 Stories and Opinions

How JavaScript Grew Up and Became a 'Real' Language— I remember the first time I saw Google Maps in 2005, then Microsoft’s documentation for XMLHttpRequest.. and a Pandora’s box was rapidly opened as developers finally saw potential in making Web pages interactive in a truly two-way fashion.

Matthew MacDonald

The Full Agenda for Chaos Conf Was Just Released— Speakers include Google's Director of SRE, Dave Rensin, and reliability leaders from Mailchimp, Condé Nast, and more.

Gremlin sponsor

What Happened to Hadoop— Hadoop was often called ‘the next big thing’ in enterprise IT, until it wasn’t. A former write for Gigaom takes a high level look at the trends that pushed Hadoop out of the spotlight.

Derrick Harris

Learning to Read Code Is More Important Than Learning to Write It— I agree! I learnt C about 30 years ago and while my C is very rusty and outdated, it has helped me be able to continue to read a lot of open source code.

Dan Moore

Main JavaScript Package Repo Moves to Ban Ads on the Terminal— After a mixed reaction to a recent experiment in open source funding by showing text ads upon the installation of npm packages, the stewards of the JavaScript world's main package repository is taking a hard line..

Catalin Cimpanu

One Team’s Troubles with Hand-Written Automated UI Tests— “After spending 6 months trying to write automated UI tests, we gave up.”

Steven Lemon

Ask HN: How Do You Handle Logging?

Hacker News

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Curl Cookbook: Some Simple HTTP Recipes with curl— Did you know you can make curlrun slower, pretend to be referred from another URL, or even generate C code?

Peter Krumins

An Introduction to Event-Driven Architectures with RabbitMQ

Nicolas Judalet

Make Your Images & Videos Load Fast & Look Beautiful with Cloudinary

Cloudinary sponsor

▶  Constructing Logic Gates, Circuits, and Adders in Civilization 3 Using Barbarians— This is your fun but geeky item of the week. Someone has really created a logic system within Civilization, a popular but addictive strategy game.

Lucien Maloney

Top Redis Use Cases by Core Data Structure Types— Redis, the popular in-memory data structure server, has several main data types, each suited to different use cases.

Kristi Anderson

An Introductory Guide to OAuth2

Milap Neupane

🛠 Code and Tools

Iosevka: A Condensed, 'Slender' Typeface for Code— As well as being useful for code, it’s easily customizable via code and defined via code itself (example code).

Belleve Invis

Firefox 69 Released— The biggest development is the default enabling of Enhanced Tracking Protection, a mechanism for blocking certain types of tracking cookies, cryptominers, and other nasties.

Mozilla

Dqlite 1.0: High-Availability SQLite with Raft Consensus— From the company behind Ubuntu is an ‘enterprise grade’ version of SQLite aimed at edge and IoT applications.

Canonical Ltd.

CUE (Configure, Unify, Execute): A Data Constraint Language from Google— A superset of JSON for validating and defining validation schemas for data.

Google

Ackee: Node.js-Based Self-Hosted Website Analytics— A self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for “those who care about privacy.”

Tobias Reich

eBay's TSV Utilities: Command Line Tools for Large, Tabular Data Files— Covers operations like filtering, statistics, sampling, joins and more. Intriguingly they’re written in D but binaries are available.

eBay

Announcing etcd 3.4

Gyuho Lee and Jingyi Hu

#230 — August 21, 2019

Read on the Web

How AWS Powered Amazon's Prime Day 2019— Amazon drove a ‘record breaking’ amount of traffic and sales on this year’s Prime Day, all powered by AWS services like CloudFront, DynamoDB (which peaked at serving 45.4 million requests per second), and Aurora.

Jeff Barr

Microsoft Introduces Beta of Its Chrome-Based Edge Browser— Available for Windows and macOS, the beta release of Edge is the third and final preview release of Microsoft’s new Chromium-based browser, although Microsoft is declaring it ‘ready for everyday use’ with this release. It also includes the ‘Internet Explorer mode’ for back compatibility with IE 11.

Joe Belfiore (Microsoft)

How to Develop a Successful DevOps Testing Strategy— Everything you need to know about building a DevOps strategy starts here. Get expert tips and tools that will streamline and automate your entire software delivery lifecycle.

Zephyr sponsor

Cloudflare Plans to Go Public, Here's Its S-1— When a company wishes to offer its shares for public sale in the US, it has to file a document with the authorities to disclose info about their business, how it’s performing, etc. Here’s Cloudflare’s.

SEC

IETF Publishes JMAP Spec, An Attempt to Modernize Email— We’ve briefly mentioned this before, but the specifications for the ‘JMAP’ email protocol have now been reviewed and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It remains to be seen if providers other than Fastmail and Topicbox adopt it, however.

Fastmail

Highlights from Git 2.23: Alternatives for git checkout— Yes, there’s a new version of git. The biggest tweak comes via two new commands, git switch and git restore which aim to break down the git checkout experience into something more controllable.

The GitHub Blog

💻 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

WebOps developers are in demand on Vettery— Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

The Architecture of a Static, Wiki-Like Site from 1996— I saw this on Hacker News and thought it was interesting, particularly through the lens of the renaissance of static site generation. It involves forms, email, and turning emails into site edits.

Colin Wright

How 21st Century Datacenter Locations Can Be Driven by 19th Century Politics

George Moore

The (Not So) Hidden Cost of Sharing Code Between iOS And Android— Dropbox used to share C++ code between their iOS and Android apps but the overhead of doing so turned out to be more costly than just writing two versions..

Eyal Guthmann (Dropbox)

📕 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams— Actionable insights to help you debug your development process with data. Get your copy.

GitPrime sponsor

Why Software Architects Must Be Involved in the Earliest Systems Engineering Activities

Sarah Sheard

What I've Learnt in a Year of Working Remotely— Working remotely as a software developer is increasingly common, and despite the obvious advantages, there are a lot of complicated tradeoffs too.

Mike Davidson

Behind The Scenes of Pinterest’s Next-Gen Content Moderation Platform, Pinqueue3.0

James Man (Pinterest Engineering)

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Some Distributed Systems Vocabulary— Brief, high level explanations of CAP, ACID, Harvest and Yield, BASE, CALM, consistency levels, and more. All things worth knowing (or knowing how to look up!)

Will Larson

How to Start Your Own ISP— A practical guide to starting your own (wireless) Internet Service Provider.

Graham Castleton

Do You Need Go or Kubernetes Training?

Ardan Labs sponsor

Using Callback URLs for Approval Emails with AWS Step Functions— A clever use for a Step Functions state machine – sending out an email and then awaiting for a user to click an approve/reject link within the mail.

Ben Kehoe

Bringing Serverless to a Page Near You with Hugo and Kubernetes— Discover how to migrate a Hugo-powered static site over to OpenFaaS complete with custom domains, TLS, and CI/CD.

OpenFaaS

You Can Now Trigger Kernel Panics on Your EC2 Instances— Initially it sounds like one of those “but why?” features but it’s basically to help you diagnose problems with unresponsive instances.

Sébastien Stormacq

🛠 Code and Tools

Ruby on Rails 6.0 Released— The latest big release of the popular rapid webapp development framework for Ruby is out.

Official Rails Blog

MongoDB 4.2 Released— The popular document-oriented database takes a step forward with support for distributed ACID transactions, on-demand materialized views, and retryable reads and writes (for handling transient cluster failures). Client-side field-level encryption is also in beta.

Eliot Horowitz (MongoDB)

Going 'Serverless' on Google Cloud Platform— A roundup of what GCP offers when it comes to no-ops services from the Firebase backend to Cloud Functions, App Engine, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine.

Tyler Treat

A New Way to Run .NET 'Apps' Directly From a GitHub Gist— A look at an interesting open source project that now brings an embeddable JavaScript-inspired scripting language, #Script, to .NET Core and .NET apps.

Scott Hanselman

#231 — August 28, 2019

Read on the Web

Lessons GitLab Learnt When Debugging A Scaling Problem— GitLab, a popular alternative to GitHub, deals with over 300 Git-over-SSH connections per second so debugging a handful of broken ones is a serious undertaking. It makes for a great story though and you’ll definitely take something away from this one.

Craig Miskell

An Interactive Map of AWS's Global Infrastructure— A really neat interactive visualization of how Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure is located around the world, how it connects together, and explanations of how various bits of it work.

Amazon Web Services

Learn to Harness Chaos to Build Resilient Systems— Systems in production fail. At this year’s ChaosConf, attendees will learn the how-to and benefits of failing parts of their infrastructure to see how their systems hold up, and to see where the weaknesses lie.

Gremlin sponsor

What Happens When You Launch A Browser for The First Time?— A collection of interesting and quite revealing Twitter threads digging into what browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc) do upon install/first launch (including phoning home and downloading default extensions).

Jonathan Sampson on Twitter

Google Cloud Run Button: 'Click-to-Deploy' for your Git Repos— Cloud Run is a Google Cloud service for running stateless containers and Cloud Run Button, unveiled this week, provides a way to let users of your code quickly deploy your app to GCP from the repo. Hopefully it doesn't get shut down in 12 months and will last as long as Heroku’s long standing ‘Deploy to Heroku’ button.

Google Cloud Blog

💻 Jobs

Lead Security Engineer— Make an impact as our first Security Engineer, focusing on driving innovation & best practices around our cloud security efforts.

Cockroach Labs

WebOps developers are in demand on Vettery— Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

Picking Rust for Building Webapps— A developer tried to convince himself not to use Rust for building a basic webapp, but ultimately decided he was “ready to have a different set of problems” to using more established languages.

Abe Winter

▶  The Infrastructure Effect— The latest episode of the fantastic Command Line Heroes podcast covers both Go and COBOL in the context of programming languages being used to build and maintain digital infrastructure.

Command Line Heroes podcast

Is DNS on Blockchain The Next Step After DNS over HTTPS?— Everything ends up on a blockchain eventually, right? 😏

Peter Lai

Please Add RSS Support To Your Site

Kev Quirk

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare Workers for Free Image Hosting— Create your own Imgur-esque static image hosting solution using B2 (basically Backblaze’s answer to S3) and Cloudflare Workers to rewrite the URLs to something more friendly.

James Ross

Everything You Need To Know About Socket.IO— Socket.io used to be the ‘go to’ JavaScript library for enabling live communications between a server and browser before WebSocket support was universal, but it still has utility.

Ably

How Agile is Your Web Team? Get Your Score and Customized Roadmap

Pantheon sponsor

curl Exercises— Less a tutorial and more a guide to practicing how to use curl, the popular command line HTTP client.

Julia Evans

How to Set Up A Perfect Python Project

Brendan Maginnis

Troubleshooting Red Hat OpenShift Applications with Throwaway Containers

Fernando Lozano

🛠 Code and Tools

GoAccess: A Visual, Real-Time Web Log Analyzer— We’ve linked this a few times over the years but it continues to get better and ever more relevant as we’re less happy to give over our data to third parties. GoAccess is a fast, terminal based log analyzer written in C that supports nearly all log formats.

Gerardo O.

Future-Proof Your Platform with a Video Stack That Scales— Keep up with new devices and new formats without extra work. Mux handles scaling so you don't have to.

Mux sponsor

Monolith: Save Web Pages into a Single, Bundled HTML File— Unlike a browser’s “Save as” feature, Monolith embeds a page’s HTML, CSS, image and JavaScript assets into a single HTML file for easy storage.

Y2Z

VMware vSphere Goes Kubernetes Native— A re-architecture of vSphere with a Kubernetes control plane, Project Pacific ‘looks like’ Kubernetes to developers and vSphere to admins.

Matt Asay (InfoWorld)

Mini_django.py: An Entire Django Python App in One File— Can we have a Ruby on Rails app in a single file next? :-)

Tim Watts

#232 — September 4, 2019

Read on the Web

Go 1.13 Released— The latest release of the popular Google-driven language is out, enabling TLS 1.3 support by default, improved modules support, and support for downloading and authenticating modules via an official mirror, index and checksum database.

Andrew Bonventre

Building Interactive SSH Applications— Writing interactive SSH-accessible applications isn’t hard, but requires a little specialized knowledge and good Unix literacy.

Drew DeVault

A Manager’s Guide to Kubernetes Adoption— It’s fair to say Kubernetes as a buzzword is somewhat overrepresented on social media, but if you’re not yet using it, this article will help you make sense of Kubernetes’ position in the world of ops.

Shuveb Hussain

Git Best Practices for SOC 2 Compliance Quick Wins— A practical list of Git best practices for SOC 2 compliance, written from a developer's perspective. Learn how implementing them can help you satisfy SOC 2 requirements, while improving developer productivity.

Datree.io sponsor

Bid Adieu to Python 2 and Get Ready for Python 3— For years, many Python developers were on the fence over migrating to Python 3 but with Python 2 being retired in 3 months, it’s time to adopt Python 3 fully.

Bart Copeland

mitmproxy: An Open Source, Interactive HTTPS Proxy— A ‘swiss-army knife’ for debugging, testing, or even performing penetration testing. iItercept, inspect, modify and replay web traffic such as HTTP 1.x, HTTP/2, WebSockets, etc.

Cortesi, Hils, et al.

▶  A 2.5 Hour Interview with John Carmack— Whatever you think of Joe Rogan, being able to hear John Carmack, the main developer behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, talk about his work is always a joy.

Joe Rogan Experience

💻 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

Get Hired Based on Your Skills Not Your CV— Our AI makes it easier and quicker to match with top webops jobs, with no recruiters and an average salary of £70k.

hackajob

💬 Stories and Opinions

How JavaScript Grew Up and Became a 'Real' Language— I remember the first time I saw Google Maps in 2005, then Microsoft’s documentation for XMLHttpRequest.. and a Pandora’s box was rapidly opened as developers finally saw potential in making Web pages interactive in a truly two-way fashion.

Matthew MacDonald

The Full Agenda for Chaos Conf Was Just Released— Speakers include Google's Director of SRE, Dave Rensin, and reliability leaders from Mailchimp, Condé Nast, and more.

Gremlin sponsor

What Happened to Hadoop— Hadoop was often called ‘the next big thing’ in enterprise IT, until it wasn’t. A former write for Gigaom takes a high level look at the trends that pushed Hadoop out of the spotlight.

Derrick Harris

Learning to Read Code Is More Important Than Learning to Write It— I agree! I learnt C about 30 years ago and while my C is very rusty and outdated, it has helped me be able to continue to read a lot of open source code.

Dan Moore

Main JavaScript Package Repo Moves to Ban Ads on the Terminal— After a mixed reaction to a recent experiment in open source funding by showing text ads upon the installation of npm packages, the stewards of the JavaScript world's main package repository is taking a hard line..

Catalin Cimpanu

One Team’s Troubles with Hand-Written Automated UI Tests— “After spending 6 months trying to write automated UI tests, we gave up.”

Steven Lemon

Ask HN: How Do You Handle Logging?

Hacker News

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Curl Cookbook: Some Simple HTTP Recipes with curl— Did you know you can make curlrun slower, pretend to be referred from another URL, or even generate C code?

Peter Krumins

An Introduction to Event-Driven Architectures with RabbitMQ

Nicolas Judalet

Make Your Images & Videos Load Fast & Look Beautiful with Cloudinary

Cloudinary sponsor

▶  Constructing Logic Gates, Circuits, and Adders in Civilization 3 Using Barbarians— This is your fun but geeky item of the week. Someone has really created a logic system within Civilization, a popular but addictive strategy game.

Lucien Maloney

Top Redis Use Cases by Core Data Structure Types— Redis, the popular in-memory data structure server, has several main data types, each suited to different use cases.

Kristi Anderson

An Introductory Guide to OAuth2

Milap Neupane

🛠 Code and Tools

Iosevka: A Condensed, 'Slender' Typeface for Code— As well as being useful for code, it’s easily customizable via code and defined via code itself (example code).

Belleve Invis

Firefox 69 Released— The biggest development is the default enabling of Enhanced Tracking Protection, a mechanism for blocking certain types of tracking cookies, cryptominers, and other nasties.

Mozilla

Dqlite 1.0: High-Availability SQLite with Raft Consensus— From the company behind Ubuntu is an ‘enterprise grade’ version of SQLite aimed at edge and IoT applications.

Canonical Ltd.

CUE (Configure, Unify, Execute): A Data Constraint Language from Google— A superset of JSON for validating and defining validation schemas for data.

Google

Ackee: Node.js-Based Self-Hosted Website Analytics— A self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for “those who care about privacy.”

Tobias Reich

eBay's TSV Utilities: Command Line Tools for Large, Tabular Data Files— Covers operations like filtering, statistics, sampling, joins and more. Intriguingly they’re written in D but binaries are available.

eBay

Announcing etcd 3.4

Gyuho Lee and Jingyi Hu

#233 — September 11, 2019

Read on the Web

A Full Breakdown of ConvertKit's $64,944 AWS Bill— If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I love breakdowns like this. Here’s the full breakdown of how an email marketing tool with 25k customers uses AWS.

Kris Hamoud (ConvertKit)

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) Now Available— Now in production form across five AWS regions, QLDB is a ‘ledger’ style database for tracking all committed changes to a dataset in a guaranteed and verifiably accurate way.

Jeff Barr

Chaos Conf Is Back— Systems in production fail. Now in its second year, Chaos Conf offers the opportunity for you to learn the "why"s and "how"s of intentionally breaking parts of your infrastructure to see how your systems hold up, and to see where the weaknesses lie.

Gremlin sponsor

Google Is Evolving “nofollow” with New Ways to Identify The Nature of Links— Google introduced rel=’nofollow’ in 2005 as a way for site owners to mark untrusted links that shouldn’t receive any PageRank-related credit in Google’s algorithms. It took off, but now Google is introducing two new rel values for specific types of content.

Google

🎂 Happy 60th Birthday to COBOL— In the beginning, there was machine languages and assembler. Neither was easy to use, but then along came COBOL, and everything changed. And, believe it or not, COBOL is still very much in active use.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

ƛ  AWS Lambda Cold Start Language Comparisons, 2019 Edition— Analysis of the ‘cold start’ times of AWS Lambda running with different runtimes (which now also includes Ruby). It seems things have improved significantly in recent times. Node.js is the big winner with Ruby in second place(!)

Nathan Malishev

💻 Jobs

Operations Engineer at DNSimple (Remote)— Chef expert? Join us to grow our automated infrastructure and help others on the team deliver infrastructure as code.

DNSimple

Job Searching Without The Searching? Try hackajob 🔎— Let your skills do the talking. Our AI matches you to roles based on your favourite webops tools so you can do what you love.

hackajob

💬 Stories and Opinions

Finished! Porting a 75,000 Line Native iOS App to Flutter— Experiences found when porting a large native app to Flutter allowing support cross-platform apps with one codebase.

Gary Hunter

Running GitHub on Rails 6.0— The story of how GitHub stayed up to date with using Rails 6.0 during its development, resulting in an upgrade process that is an example to follow.

Eileen M. Uchitelle (GitHub)

Dropbox's Journey to Type Checking 4 Million Lines of Python— Python is Dropbox’s most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app.

Dropbox Tech Blog

Advanced CDN Strategy for Improved Video Performance— When you use Mux for video, you'll get dynamic multi-CDN selection to deliver the best viewing experience for your audience.

Mux sponsor

An Inside Look at Software Testing at GitLab— Director of quality engineering Mek Stittri talks test technology and the future of automation at GitLab.

GitLab

Analyzing the Wikipedia DDoS Attack— Last week, Wikipedia was hit by a DDoS attack. Here’s what happened.

Alex Henthorn-Iwane

Hugo and IPFS: How This Blog Works (and Scales to Serve 5,000% Spikes Instantly)— Learnings from real-world experience with IPFS, and the curious stack that powers this developer’s blog.

Alessando Segala

Everything I Googled in a Week as a Professional Software Engineer— I think most of us will identify with things in this post.

Sophie Koonin

Why Your Docker Build Needs a Smoke Test

Itamar Turner-Trauring

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

📘 PDF: The Philosophy of Computer Science— Please note that this is a 28 megabyte PDF so only click through if you want to save what is a quite remarkable looking 900 page book covering the breadth of computer science and its relationship to philosophy, ethics, and more.

William J. Rapaport

Watch Now: “The Secret to Agile Transformation” On-Demand Webinar

Pantheon sponsor

Refactoring a Relational Database to Amazon DynamoDB— A walk through the process of reading, transforming, and writing SQL Server data from an Amazon EC2 instance to Amazon DynamoDB using AWS Glue.

Amazon Web Services

Google's Practices on 'How to Do a Code Review'

Google

Why Ada Is The Language You Want To Be Programming Your Systems With— Well, I’m not convinced, but it’s interesting to see people stand up for older languages. Ada was born in the 1970s for robust, military-grade development work.

Maya Posch

🛠 Code and Tools

Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log— Initially designed to be a ledger of transactions on the WePay system but now generalized for broader use cases of distributed systems that require serializable consistency.

wepay

xip.io: Wildcard DNS for Everyone— A long standing service that lets you get wildcard DNS support for any IP address (by embedding the IP as part of the hostname).

Sam Stephenson

Fancy Zones: A New Tiling Window Manager for Windows 10 from Microsoft— They’ve released it as part of their new range of power user-oriented “PowerToys” for Windows 10 (inspired by a similar project from the Windows 95 era).

Microsoft

Amazon EFS Offers Reduced Pricing for 'Infrequent Access'— EFS (Elastic File System) is a managed, cloud-native NFS file system that can be used with various AWS services. A new ‘infrequent access’ profile offers price optimization for situations where files are not accessed regularly.

Amazon Web Services

Introducing 'Can I Email'— An idea heavily inspired by Can I Use, a popular index of Web features and their cross-browser support. Can I Email takes the same idea to what different email clients support.

Can I Email

An Index of Sites with 'Dumb Password Rules'— At attempt at ‘shaming’ sites that have weird or just plain stupid password rules.

Dumb Password Rules

#234 — September 18, 2019

Read on the Web

IEEE Spectrum's Top Programming Languages of 2019— Python, Java, and C sit at the top of the table, but R, Matlab, and Go are all doing very well too.

IEEE Spectrum

Traefik 2.0: The Cloud Native Edge Router— Traefik is a popular HTTP and TCP-based reverse proxy and load balancer. It now supports routing TCP and HTTP over the same port, complete with TLS support using SNI. Support for middleware has also been introduced.

Gérald Croës

Do You Need Go or Kubernetes Training?— We offer on-site corporate training for engineers that want to learn Go (Golang) or Kubernetes. Having trained over 4,000 engineers since 2013, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

GitLab Raises $268 Million, Now Valued at $2.75 Billion— The aim is to improve their devops side of things (monitoring, security, CI, etc.) to be ‘best in class.’ A planned IPO in 2020 is also on their mind.

GitLab

Unveiling Dark, a New Language and Environment for Backends— Dark is an attempt at making it a lot easier to build backends and is holistic in the sense that the things you build get hosted directly on Dark’s own infrastructure. Yes, they are using the term “deployless”😄

Ellen Chisa

Java 13 Has Arrived— Since Java 9 in 2017, new Java releases have come every 6 months and here’s the latest. Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Sharat Chander (Oracle)

Is Serverless The End of Ops? (No..)— With a serverless architecture carrying all of the ops load, what does that mean for sysadmins? Ultimately.. just more complexity as serverless is just one paradigm amongst many.

Chrissie Buchanan (GitLab)

💻 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

Get Hired Based on Your Skills Not Your CV— We’ll introduce you to over 1,500+ companies who’ll compete to hire you. You’re always hidden from your current employer and we’re trusted by over 100k developers.

hackajob

💬 Stories and Opinions

PDF 📄 The Hidden Story of China Telecom's BGP Hijacking— “[H]ow China Telecom seems to employ its distributed points of presence (PoPs) (..) to selectively redirect internet traffic through China.” A pretty damning, but interesting, report.

Demchak and Shavitt

How I Revoked $1M Worth of EV Certificates— CAs are issuing all sorts of invalid certificates.

Scott Helme

Why Go and Not Rust?— If you are wondering how Rust and Go differ, check it out. I think my favorite takeaway is “Go is a better Java / C#…Rust is a better C++”

Loris Cro

A Kubernetes + GKE Mistake That Cost Me Thousands— A Kubernetes cluster built around 96 single-core instances is not the same as one running on a single 96-core VM.

Gajus Kuizinas

📕 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams

GitPrime sponsor

▶  Automating Operations of a Global CDN— Over the years, Netflix has moved from using commercial CDN providers to it own in-house CDN called Open Connect. Here’s a talk focused on how it operates. (Audio is poor early on but gets better.)

Robert Fernandes (Netflix)

▶  How Spotify Accidentally Deleted All its Kube Clusters with No User Impact— It happened in 2017 when Spotify was migrating to Google Kubernetes Engine. Spoiler? Spotify have rock solid ops policies around migrations.

David Xia

How Do Developers Promote Open Source Projects?— This academic paper isn’t a ‘how to’ but more an analysis of what people are already doing. Newsletters are one of the options 👋

Borges and Valente

Will AWS CDK Replace Terraform and the 'Serverless Framework'?

Kevin van Ingen

Ask HN: Are Available Domain Names Still Important When Naming A Company?— In short, yes.

Hacker News

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

How ConvertKit Could Lower Its $64K Monthly AWS Bill— Last week, we featured a company’s $64K AWS bill and now AWS billing guru Corey Quinn is here with his analysis.

Corey Quinn

Proxying npm Packages with GitHub Package Registry— GitHub has introduced the ability to proxy packages from the main npm registry through its GitHub Package Registry service (which is still in beta).

Alex Mullans (GitHub)

Continuously Testing React Applications with Jest and Enzyme

CircleCI sponsor

Moving Your JavaScript Development to the Terminal on Windows— If you’ve recently taken a look at Windows after becoming comfortable with macOS or Linux, this is for you. A detailed look at creating a powerful terminal-based development experience on Windows 10 using WSL and more.

Burke Holland

Using SO_PEERCRED in Go— A practical look at a slightly obscure Unix domain socket option that, intriguingly, provides the server process with user, group, and process IDs of any connected client.

James Bowen

12 New Features of AWS Amplify— An overview of the most popular new features of AWS Amplify, a sort of ‘sub-platform’ within AWS that provisions and manages backends for both mobile and Web applications.

Nader Dabit

A Technical Introduction to MemSQL— A brief technical introduction to the MemSQL database, a distributed, in-memory, SQL DBMS.

John Sherwood (MemSQL)

AWS Fargate Deep Dive: What, When, and Comparisons— As long as your app’s in a container, Fargate will get it running on AWS for you. How does it compare to other options?

Abhishek Ray

🛠 Code and Tools

Git Quick Statistics: A Quick Way to See Stats on Your Git Repos— Written in bash, this script helps you look at contributor stars, changelogs, commits per author/date/month/etc.

Lukáš Mešťan

Introducing NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB— AWS has released a Windows and macOS app for working with DynamoDB. Beware, however, as there are numerous reports of it breaking ~/.aws/credentials files (so be sure to back yours up!)

Amazon Web Services

curl 7.66.0: The Parallel HTTP/3 Future Is Here— curl has been undergoing a lot of work lately, primarily due to the HTTP/3 support being baked in.

Daniel Stenberg

Scylla Alternator: An Open Source DynamoDB-Compatible API for Scylla— Alternator is an open source project that brings DynamoDB compatibility to Scylla, a Cassandra-inspired distributed NoSQL store.

ScyllaDB

Cadence: A Distributed Orchestration Engine Built in Go— This system, built by Uber, simplifies the development of complex stateful distributed applications. This is the server but there are also Java and Go client libraries.

Uber Open Source

#235 — September 25, 2019

Read on the Web

A bit of a weird issue this week, so little actually happened.. but we've made the best of it as we can :-) Let's cross our fingers for next week! 😂

HTTP Mock: Intercept, Debug and Mock HTTP Requests— A big addition to the popular suite of open source HTTP Toolkit tools. This one lets you intercept and proxy HTTP and HTTPS traffic, examine requests and responses, and even mock servers or endpoints for prototyping.

HTTP Toolkit

Working with GitHub Actions— GitHub Actions are still in beta (though all applications are now being accepted immediately) and are changing quickly. But if you are looking to get started the possibilities are endless.

Jeff Rafter

📕 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams— GitPrime's new book draws together some of the most common software team dynamics, observed in working with hundreds of enterprise engineering organizations. Actionable insights to help you debug your development process with data. Get your copy.

GitPrime sponsor

Red Hat's New Linux Distro Brings CentOS Closer to RHEL— CentOS is a popular Red Hat ‘flavored’ Linux distribution and officially joined Red Hat in 2014 but has continued to lag behind RHEL somewhat. No more, as CentOS is set to become a parallel, ‘developer-forward’ upstream distribution that will include things from the RHEL codebase more quickly.

Jack Wallen

AWS Step Functions Adds Support for Dynamic Parallelism— Step Functions is a managed service for coordinating tasks around workflows built up of, surprise, multiple steps. What’s been added is support for dynamic parallelism within a workflow.

Amazon Web Services

💻 Jobs

Operations Engineer at DNSimple (Remote)— Chef expert? Join us to grow our automated infrastructure and help others on the team deliver infrastructure as code.

DNSimple

Let Your Skills Do the Talking— Our AI makes it easier and quicker to match with companies such as Apple, Skyscanner, KPMG, all based on your skills, no recruiters.

hackajob

💬 Stories and Opinions

When TCP Sockets Refuse to Die— A debugging story from Cloudflare.

Marek Majkowski

An HTML Attribute Potentially Worth $4.4M to Chipotle— During Chipotle’s checkout process the author discovered an autofill bug that could be costing the food company “$4.4 million annually”.

Jason Grigsby

How to Create Chaos Engineering Dashboards with Datadog and Gremlin

Gremlin sponsor

The Technical Challenges of Building Cloudflare WARP— WARP is a new VPN-style service for securing traffic on mobile devices by sending it through Cloudflare’s network. Here’s a pretty in-depth look at how they went about building the service.

Cloudflare

How a Blind Software Developer Works— An interesting explanation of something that most of us will not have experienced: what it’s like to develop software while being unable to see.

Tuukka Ojala

🛠 Code and Tools

Cascadia Code: Microsoft's Newest Monospace Font— Always good to see a new terminal font.

Microsoft

httpbin: An HTTP Request and Response Service— A mock server that lets you test various types of HTTP request. Look through the examples. You can spin up your own copy quickly via Docker, too. GitHub repo.

Kenneth Reitz

Talos: A Linux-Based OS Specifically for Running Kubernetes— Here’s an explanation of why you’d want to use this.

Talos Systems, Inc.

Set Up a CI/CD Server in Minutes— Demo GoCD’s full capabilities quickly, and see how its value stream map and pipelines as code functionalities get your code to prod more reliably.

ThoughtWorks - GoCD sponsor

Yugabyte DB 2.0 GA: A 'Jepsen Tested', High-Performance Distributed SQL DBMS— A Google Spanner-inspired, cloud-native, distributed, open source SQL database that aims to be Postgres compatible.

Kannan Muthukkaruppan

memcached Adds Support for Restoring Its Cache Between Restarts— Version 1.5.18 of anything doesn’t sound too exciting, but this is a big step for memcached and will make both upgrades and recovery a lot easier if you are able to provide the right type of filesystem for it (it uses DAX). More discussion here.

memcached community

git-blame-someone-else: Blame Someone Else for Your Bad Code— A humorous, tongue-in-cheek tool. “Please don’t run this against your production repo.”

Jay Phelps

A Gentle Introduction to Kubernetes (With More Than Just The Basics)— A lengthy guide and set of materials to help you learn Kubernetes.

Aymen EL Amri

Kubernetes 1.16 Released

Kubernetes Release Team

#236 — October 2, 2019

Read on the Web

HTTP/3: The Past, The Present, and The Future— Cloudflare has announced support for QUIC and HTTP/3 on their popular edge network. It’s still pretty cutting edge though (you’ll need to use Chrome Canary or curl to test it) but this is a really neat overview of the history of HTTP/3, what it is, and how it will speed up the Web.

Alessandro Ghedini and Rustam Lalkaka

Processing 40 TB of Code From 10 Million Projects with Go— There are two parts to this interesting study. First, the why and how of grabbing code from 10 million repositories, and secondly the results of his analysis over the downloaded code. There’s basically something for everyone in here, even if it’s just the most popular curse words in public repos(!)

Ben E. C. Boyter

New Public Go, Docker & Kubernetes Training are Available For You— Per your request we're offering public training sessions in the US & Europe. Click on the link to learn more. We have trained over 4,000 engineers and more than 200 companies from Fortune 500's to startups. Let us help you achieve your goals. Let's Talk.

Ardan Labs sponsor

TensorFlow 2.0: The Machine Learning Platform— A major release for an increasingly important developer platform. It remains Python-oriented, of course, but hopefully we’ll see the enhancements pushing out to other ports and versions such as TensorFlow.js over time.

TensorFlow

Running Transient Servers with Serverless— An interesting idea, this. Using AWS Lambda essentially as a scheduler for temporary EC2 instances in order to run background jobs.. Interesting to see, though I think there are better solutions.

Martin Raag

AWS IQ: AWS Help on Demand from Certified Third Party Experts— Amazon Web Services is now so vast an ecosystem that they’ve had to build a service where you can pay for help. A good move though.

Jeff Barr

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineers - CI/CD,Ruby,Jenkins (Edinburgh, Remote in UK)— Popular, award-winning Ruby/Rails SaaS product. Many production deploys/day. Join us as we grow and look to scale rapidly.

FreeAgent

Front-End Developer— Love building web apps? Join us at DNSimple and help us deliver domain management automation to the world.

DNSimple

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 Sqreen Handles 50,000 Req/Min Minute in a Write-Heavy Environment— Sqreen is an application security management service and here’s how they handle the load. MongoDB, DynamoDB, memcached, and Redis all play a role.

Benoit Larroque

Petabytes on a Budget: 10 Years and Counting— It’s always fun to see what Backblaze (a cloud backup service, and a huge buyer of storage) is up to. They’re now storing 950 petabytes of data, and are looking to the future, aiming to stick to an upfront cost of 3 cents per gigabyte for storage.

Andy Klein (Backblaze)

Which Companies Are Using Erlang, and Why?

Francesco Cesarini

Saving Money by Switching from PHP to D— Not your typical language swap, but interesting nonetheless.

Andrea Fontana

🎓 Tutorials and Knowledge

Text Rendering Hates You— A collection of different problems you’ll encounter when rendering text for yourself.

Alexis Beingessner

Conventional Commits: A Convention for Making Commit Messages More Readable— Some interesting ideas in here for defining some structure around commit messages.

Conventional Commits

▶  What Is An AWS Step Function? (and Why You Should Love Them)— A 13 minute presentation on AWS Step Functions, the visual workflow system for AWS services.

AWS Simplified

Leading a Remote Dev Team? Read Range’s Guide to Remote Work

Range sponsor

How Does JSON:API Compare To REST and GraphQL?— A high level comparison of two popular API standards and one, well, less popular one :-)

Kristopher Sandoval

How Much Faster is Redis at Storing a Blob of JSON Compared to Postgres?— If you’re familiar with Redis, the in-memory data structure store, it won’t surprise you that’s it’s fast(!) but the use cases and pros and cons between Redis and Postgres are hugely different too.

Peter Bengtsson

Making A Public IP Address API with Two Lines of Nginx Config— OK, that’s a cute trick.

Enzo Calamia

🛠 Code and Tools

Sloop: A Kubernetes History Visualization Tool— Monitors Kubernetes, recording histories of events and resource state changes and providing visualizations to aid in debugging past events.

Salesforce

Blazor: Build Client Web Apps with C#— Official supported and gets you ‘real .NET’ running in the browser by way of WebAssembly.

Microsoft

Deliver Your API-First Product to Millions of Developers

Manifold sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 3.7 Beta

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

dnscrypt-proxy: A Flexible DNS Proxy, with Support for Encrypted DNS Protocols

DNSCrypt

#237 — October 9, 2019

Read on the Web

BADSSL: A Site for Testing Clients Against Unusual SSL Configs— Want to see how your HTTP client, library, or tool of choice copes with an expired certificate, different types of hash algorithms, or invalid certificate authorities? This is very useful.

BadSSL

PostgreSQL 12 Released— Just a year on from Postgres 11 comes version 12 for the popular RDBMS. Key enhancements include SQL/JSON support, generated columns, and significant performance improvements (particularly with indexes and partitioned tables). This week’s Postgres Weekly has a good roundup.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Top CI Pipeline Best Practices— At the center of a good CI/CD setup is a well-designed CI pipeline. If your team is adopting CI, or your work involves building or improving CI pipeline, this best practices guide is for you.

Datree.io sponsor

n8n.io: Open Source Workflow Automation— It bills itself as an “open source alternative for Zapier”. Basically you can connect together various services and APIs in a visual way, perform intermediate steps, etc.

Jan Oberhauser

Supreme Court Allows Blind People to Sue Retailers If Their Sites Aren't Accessible— As long as it follows a period to comply, good! This follows a recent loss by Dominos over such a case.

David G Savage (LA Times)

How Facebook's Scribe Transports Petabytes of Logs Per Hour— The current version isn’t open source (yet) but Scribe is Facebook’s distributed, buffered queueing system and it moves “several petabytes” of Facebook’s logs every hour.. I still remember when the entire Google index was measured in the low petabytes! :-)

Facebook Engineering

💻 Jobs

Front-End Developer (Remote)— Love building web apps? Join us at DNSimple and help us deliver domain management automation to the world.

DNSimple

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

Vettery

🎓 Tutorials and Knowledge

How to Read a Web Page Test Waterfall Chart— If you look at waterfall charts and get a bit lost, you’ll find this to be a handy reference, explaining it all in very accessible way.

Matt Hobbs

Web Experience Not Meeting Your Visitor Expectations?— Let’s take a look under the hood together with a code audit.

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

Building Resilient Serverless Systems— A 40 minute talk from QCon London on using serverless technologies and an infrastructure-as-code approach to build, and operate resilient large-scale systems, including a walk through a demo where failure is simulated and recovered from.

John Chapin

All the Most Useful git Commands Showed Off in a Single Script— There’s a lot to digest here.

Dvir Volk

Building Kubernetes Apps with Scaling on Custom Metrics: A Gentle Introduction

Daniel Vaughan

What Is The GitHub Deployments API?— I must admit I hadn’t come across this “often forgotten” feature in the GitHub API either..

Deliverybot

💬 Stories and Opinions

Google: Polling Like It's The 90s?— A technical review of the ‘live score’ feature in Google search results, delivered with some surprisingly old-school tech from the 90s.

Matthew O'Riordan

How I Future-Proofed My Tech Stack— “Start simple, but don’t ever sacrifice your ability to scale,” says the author who’s using AWS Lambda, S3, Aurora MySQL, MongoDB Atlas, and more to build his managed GraphQL API service.

Albert Santalo

Scaling the Hotstar Platform for 50M Users— Hotstar is an Indian streaming platform.

Akash Saxena

▶  Seamless Kubernetes Adoption for Development Teams— A podcast chat with Jason L. van Brackel, director of community at Rancher Labs, about all things Kubernetes.

Darko Fabijan podcast

An Interview with a 'Adult Site' Developer— Now this won’t be for everyone, but regardless of your stance, this is an interesting look into the decisions behind the tech and how it works at one of the web’s largest 'NSFW' sites.

David Walsh

'Don’t Use Azure Functions as a Web Application'— An opinion piece that suggests that if you’re trying to build a full-scale webapp, maybe serverless isn’t where you should be turning first.

Maarten Balliauw

🛠 Code and Tools

Carbon: Create Beautiful Images of Your Source Code— We’re huge fans of seeing code snippets shared on social media and while images do have accessibility issues, they remain a rapid-fire way to get code into a tweet or Instagram image and Carbon excels at the task.

Carbon

Node-RED 1.0 Released— Node RED is a flow-based, visual programming tool (aimed primarily at hardware automation) that’s built on top of Node.js. Despite only reaching 1.0 now, it’s a mature project used in numerous real world IoT projects.

Nick O'Leary

Visualize Your Entire End-To-End CI/CD Workflow. Free and Open Source

ThoughtWorks GoCD sponsor

SQLite 3.30.0 Released— SQLite is such an unsung workhorse of the entire software ecosystem and continues to get better all the time. This latest release adds support for the FILTER clause on aggregate functions and more.

SQLite

s3st: Stream Multiple S3 Objects to Your Terminal— A command line utility to stream data from multiple S3 objects directly into your terminal. Ideal if you’re storing logs on S3 and want to grep them, perhaps.

Luciano Mammino

Clockwork: A Distributed, Scalable Job Scheduler— A general purpose distributed job scheduler that uses DynamoDB. It’s written in Java.

Kumar Uttpal

#238 — October 16, 2019

Read on the Web

free-for.dev: A Bumper List of Stuff That's 'Free' for Developers— An interesting and extensive list of hosted services or otherwise paid-for products that have free tiers or options for developers.

R.I.Pienaar

is-website-vulnerable: Find Known Vulnerabilities in a Site's Frontend Libraries— This is a neat tool, especially as npx lets you run it right now as simply as npx is-website-vulnerable http://.... (assuming you have npm installed). Give it a try on your own site.

Liran Tal

How Multiplexing Changes Your HTTP APIs— One of HTTP/2’s headline features and advantages over HTTP/1 is multiplexing, the ability to have multiple requests and responses in flight on one connection. This has big implications for APIs in general, says Mark Nottingham.

Mark Nottingham

New Public Go, Docker & Kubernetes Training are Available For You— Per your request we’re offering public training sessions in the US & Europe. Click on the link to learn more. We have trained over 4,000 engineers and more than 200 companies from Fortune 500's to startups. Let us help you achieve your goals. Let’s talk.

Ardan Labs sponsor

You Cannot cURL Under Pressure: A cURL Game— The latest work of genius from Ben Cox is an interactive, playable game testing your knowledge of the curl command. You can play the game here or, maybe even more interestingly, learn how it’s implemented using curl itself.

Ben Cox

Python 3.8 Released: What's New?— The first significant release of Python following the language’s creator stepping down as BDFL (‘benevolent dictator for life’) earlier this year.

PSF

How LinkedIn Customizes Apache Kafka for 7 Trillion Messages Per Day— Unsurprisingly, ‘messages’ here refers to internal messages rather than human generated ones, but LinkedIn still operates at an immense scale.

Jon Lee

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)— Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

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

Migration Complete: Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off Its Final Oracle Database— ..and the sense of how happy Amazon is about this is palpable! Migrating away from a legacy database is no easy task at the best of times, and especially not at Amazon’s scale.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

How Zalando manages 140+ Kubernetes Clusters— Zalando is a European fashion e-commerce site running a significant number of Kubernetes clusters on AWS.

Henning Jacobs

Learn How One Startup Kept Its Remote Team Engaged While Scaling

Range sponsor

And 'Lo!' - How The Internet Was Born— A high-level news item reflecting back on the technology that made up the Arpanet, which led to the Internet of today.

BBC News

Database Deep Dives: A Chat with FaunaDB's Creator— An interview with Fauna’s CEO, Evan Weaver, on why you might pick a global, serverless database like Fauna and the details of handling consensus.

Josh Mintz (IBM)

Reducing Docker Image Size and Cutting Google Cloud Costs

Matt Zeunert

Reversing a Supermarket's Private APIs for Automated Couponing— The sort of fun automation story I enjoy reading, at least.

JonLuca DeCaro

Watch Now: Elastic App Search Overview and Demo— App Search simplifies the process of building rich search experiences for software applications of every kind.

elastic.co sponsor

My Vision of D’s Future— D is an interesting language that has never quite got the same level of press as Rust or Go but it continues to make progress.

Atila Neves

Ask Hacker News: What Do You Self-Host?— I imagine readers of this newsletter are more likely than most to ‘self host’ their own services, so you might enjoy this discussion on Hacker News.

Hacker News

🛠 Code and Tools

Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector— The new WebSocket inspector, part of the existing Network panel UI in DevTools, will be released in Firefox 71, but is ready for use in Firefox Developer Edition now. Here’s a look at how it works.

Mozilla Hacks

AWS IAM Least Privilege Policy Generator— If you too have endured the headache that is making IAM policies for your AWS services, this could be the tonic you need.

Salesforce

WebAssembly.sh: An Online WebAssembly Terminal— An online WebAssembly Terminal to run WASI modules directly on your browser.

Aaron Turner

Assist: Instant Terminal Sharing From Anywhere— A screen-esque system (but which works across the Internet) for sharing a terminal with another person.

Assist

Bazel 1.0: A Popular, Software Building and Testing Tool

Google

#239 — October 23, 2019

Read on the Web

Dapr: Microsoft's New, Portable, Event-driven, Runtime for Distributed Apps— Dapr provides building blocks for microservices and is language-agnostic (though it’s built in Go which is kinda cool). It also provides bindings for common infrastructure items, such as pub/sub messaging. There’s more detail in the announcement blog post.

Microsoft

How AWS Built a Production Service using Serverless Technologies— The creatively named ‘Realworld Serverless Application’ is a project inspired by Amazon’s work on the development of the Serverless Application Repository which itself is built as a production-grade serverless system. Trek10’s Forrest Brazeal also provides some analysis of AWS’s approach.

Naseem, Gupta, and Paracha (AWS)

Managed PostgreSQL by DigitalOcean— Worry-free database hosting. Deploy a highly scalable PostgreSQL cluster with no admin overhead.

DigitalOcean sponsor

Firefox 70 Released— Includes a variety of CSS improvements, password generation for input type=’password’ fields, plus social tracking protection and ‘Lockwise’ password syncing. There’s also the usual Firefox 70 for developers list of key changes and updates.

Mozilla

DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH— Analysis of the threats surrounding modern attempts at securing DNS.

Jan Schaumann

Bazel 1.0: Google's Open Source Build System— Bazel is an open source build system designed to support a wide variety of programming languages and platforms.

Google Open Source

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)— Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Have You Tried Vettery?— Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

Automated Continuous Deployment at Heroku— Changes made to the popular PaaS platform by its developers are now rolled out globally within hours without any human intervention. Here’s the how and why.

Heroku

AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data— It’s no big secret that most cloud providers make much of their money on egress charges (i.e. bandwidth) but individual AWS customers have paid into the multi-millions moving their data out of the service.

The Information

AWS Cross-AZ Data Transfer Costs More Than AWS Says— Carrying on the AWS data charge thread.. hats off to Corey for running a real experiment in intra-AWS data transfer where he discovered you get charged for both sending and receiving.

Corey Quinn

How Was Life for a Regular Dev During The 'Dot Com Bust'?— I was in the industry in the early 2000s and it was no picnic, but it’s interesting to see what others experienced.

Hacker News

Set Up a Status Page in Minutes— Learn more about how StatusHub can help you communicate during downtime.

StatusHub sponsor

How DataDome Stores 200,000 Documents Per Second in Elasticsearch

DataDome

Will Automation Wipe Out the Role of the DBA?— Automation is eating up tasks traditionally held by the database administrator, but ultimately it frees them up to work on bigger things.

ThinkAutomation

The Decline of Stack Overflow— Been seeing this sort of sentiment a lot recently. Just part of the natural ebb and flow of services, perhaps.

John Slegers

Should We Rebrand 'JavaScript'?— I think most of us can agree there are problems with ‘JavaScript’ as a name, but is it worth rebranding it? “JS” is certainly one option.

Kieran Potts

🛠 Code and Tools

No Maintenance Intended: A Way to Mark Your Projects as Unmaintained— A badge and brief explaining page you can link to from your own projects if you want to make the point that you’re not actively maintaining them.

Potch

DNSApe: Simple, Fast Online DNS Tools— Quickly grab DNS records, check DNS traversal, DNS caches at 14 different servers, and a few other things.

srvAudit Skunkworks

via-ipv6: Enabling IPv4 Sites for IPv6 Only Networks— A project to enable access to certain IPv4 only sites on IPv6 only networks.

Nico Schottelius

The Internet Exchange Map— A map depicting over 300 active Internet exchanges and more than 500 buildings in which those exchanges reside.

TeleGeography

Speed Up Frontend Development with FaunaDB's Auth and Native GraphQL

FaunaDB sponsor

Lesser Known Coding Fonts— A topic that people rarely get bored of, it seems.

Vernon Foley

SHOUT.sh: Converts ALL_CAPS Commands to sudo-ed Commands— Not so much practical as an interesting joke.

Monsieur Cellophane

A Alpine Linux Docker Image with Bleeding Edge Nginx-Powered HTTP/3 Support— A Linux image with Nginx with HTTP/3 (QUIC), TLSv1.3, 0-RTT, and Brotli support. “All built on the bleeding edge for max performance.”

Ranadeep Polavarapu

A Repository of Email Marketing Legislation Around the World— A good start, though it’d be great to see it fleshed out even more.

EmailOctopus

#240 — October 30, 2019

Read on the Web

Fifty Years Ago When The First Packets Flowed..— This week we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first full system test and remote host-to-host login over the Arpanet, the key predecessor to today’s Internet. Steve (who invented RFCs) and Bill were both there and tell the story. FastCompany has a full feature story on the topic too, as well as Cloudflare’s write up about 50 Years of The Internet which goes into more depth about how the early Internet grew.

Steve Crocker and Bill Duvall

The Lines of Code That Changed Everything— A fantastic high level look at the bits of code that have ‘transformed our world’ from Spacewar and the JPEG algorithm to the Morris Worm and RSS.

Slate Magazine

Next Release Is DevOps for Your Release Notes— Next Release automates creating, sharing, and distributing release notes and changelogs based on your existing GitHub pull requests. With tons of configuration options.

Next Release sponsor

DNS Encryption Explained— Just as the web moved from unencrypted HTTP to encrypted HTTPS there are now upgrades to the DNS protocol that encrypt DNS itself and this post illustrates the key concepts well.

Peter Wu

▶  The Planet Performance Podcast— We wouldn’t normally link to a podcast with just one episode but Steve Souders has done so much for the Web performance community and industry is general, so definitely check this out.

Stoyan Stefanov podcast

💻 Jobs

DevOps / System Engineer - Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, BOSH— Are you interested in building and operating highly automated PaaS solutions? Join us.

anynines

Have You Tried Vettery?— Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials and Knowledge

Everything curl: An Extensive Guide to All Things curl— If curl isn’t a key part of your toolkit, now’s the best time to start, and this book will help.

Daniel Stenberg

The Anatomy of AWS Lambda— A detailed look at what makes AWS’s serverless platform tick from concurrency and cold starts to permissions and contexts.

Damian Sosnowski

The DevSecOps Security Checklist— Learn the latest best practices for WebOps and security engineers to prioritize and ramp up their security efforts.

Sqreen sponsor

Setting Up a CI/CD Pipeline by Integrating Jenkins with AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy— Trigger a CI/CD pipeline by pushing changes to GitHub with the end result being deployed via CodeDeploy.

Noha Ghazal

Migrate Your AWS Lambda Functions to Kubernetes with OpenFaaS— Burton explains the steps for migrating an existing AWS Lambda function to OpenFaaS and Kubernetes to gain portability and additional functionality.

Burton Rheutan

The Dynamic Composer: An AWS Serverless Pattern— Serverless expert Jeremy Daly shares a scenario where dynamically composing AWS Lambda functions gets similar results to Step Functions but with a simpler setup.

Jeremy Daly

💬 Stories and Opinions

The Story of How 22 Became the Port for SSH— Sitting between telnet on port 23 and FTP on port 21, it seemed a natural place.

Tatu Ylonen

JavaScript is C— “The exact same kinds of problems I had in C, I have in JavaScript or even TypeScript today.”

Chris Krycho

Why We Don’t See Many Public GraphQL APIs— GraphQL is both a great and not-so-great choice for a public API.

Marc-André Giroux

DevOps: Tools Can Lead The Culture Change

Rachel Stephens (RedMonk)

🛠 Code and Tools

Netflix Mantis: An Open Source Platform For Building Cost-Effective, Realtime, Operations-Focused Applications— Mantis is a platform to build an ecosystem of realtime stream processing applications.

Jeff Chao (Netflix)

Haxe 4.0 Released: The Cross-Platform Toolkit— Haxe is a long standing, cross-platform and multi-paradigm language and compiler perhaps known best for being a source and target for transpilation to/from other programming languages.

Haxe

Sell Your API-First Product to Millions of Developers

Manifold sponsor

Twilio SOCless: Automated, Serverless Security Runbooks— SOCless is an open source ‘security automation framework’ that Twilio initially built for their own use. It’s built in Python on top of AWS Lambda.

Twilio

Electron 7.0 Released: The Popular Cross-Platform Desktop App Platform— 7.0 brings Electron up to Chrome 78, V8 7.8, and Node 12.8.1 standards, and there’s a new nativeTheme API for working with changes to the OS’s theming/color scheme.

Electron Team

Beating wc with Less Portable, SIMD-Enhanced, C— This won’t interest most but I love this stuff.

expr-fi

Corkscrew: A Tool for Tunneling SSH Through HTTP Proxies

Bryan Chan

wstunnel: Tunneling Over The WebSocket Protocol

Romain Gerard

#241 — November 6, 2019

Read on the Web

Recursive Sans and Mono: A Free Variable Type Family— This is a new ‘highly-flexible’ type family that takes advantage of variable font tech to let you pick the right style along five different axes. It’s pretty clever, well demonstrated, and very suitable for presenting data, code, or to be used in documentation and UIs.

Arrow Type

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Online— It’s basically a collaborative version of VS Code that runs in the browser letting you develop from anywhere in a cloud-based environment. This isn’t a new idea but it’s great to see Microsoft’s might behind such an effort.

Visual Studio

Top CI Pipeline Best Practices— At the center of a good CI/CD setup is a well-designed CI pipeline. If your team is adopting CI, or your work involves building or improving CI pipeline, this best practices guide is for you.

Datree.io sponsor

You Can't Submit an Electron 6 (or 7) App to the Mac App Store?— Electron is a popular cross-platform app development toolkit maintained by GitHub. The bad news? It uses Chromium which uses several ‘private’ Apple APIs and Apple aren’t keen on accepting apps that use them for a variety of reasons.

David Costa

Dart 2.6: Now with Native Executable Compilation— Dart began life as a Google built, typed language that compiled to JavaScript but is now a somewhat broader project. The latest version includes a new dart2native tool for compiling Dart apps to self-contained, native executables for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Michael Thomsen

GitHub Sponsors Is Now Out of Beta in 30 Countries— GitHub launched its Sponsors program in beta several months ago as a way for open source developers to accept contributions for their work and projects more easily. It’s now generally available in 30 countries with hopefully more to follow.

Devon Zuegel (GitHub)

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)— Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

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

📕 Tutorials and Stories

How Monzo Built Network Isolation for 1,500 Services— 1,500 services power Monzo, a British bank, and they want to keep them all as separate as possible so that no single bad actor can bring down their platform. Here’s the tale of how they’ve been working towards that goal.

Monzo

A Comparison of Static Form Providers— A high level comparison of several providers who essentially provide the backend for your HTML forms.

Silvestar Bistrović

▶  An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect— A 16 minute video rich with illustrations and diagrams.

Okta

Intelligent CI/CD with CircleCI: Test Splitting— Did you know that CircleCI can intelligently split tests to get you your test results faster?

CircleCI sponsor

▶  Writing Maintainable Code Documentation with Automated Tools and Transclusion— A 37 minute podcast conversation between Robby Russell and Ana Nelson, the creator of Dexy, a documentation writing tool.

Maintainable Podcast podcast

▶  Git is Hard but Time Traveling in Git Isn't— A lightning talk from React Conf 2019 that flies through some interesting Git features in a mere 6 minutes.

Monica Powell

Highlights from Git 2.24— Take a look at some of the new features in the latest Git release including feature macros and a new way to ‘rewrite history’.

GitHub

Create a Bookmarking Application with FaunaDB, Netlify and 11ty— Brings together FaunaDB’s serverless cloud database, the Netlify platform (which uses Lambda under the hood), and 11ty (a static site generator) to create a bookmark management site.

Bryan Robinson

File Systems Unfit As Distributed Storage Backends: Lessons From Ten Years of Ceph Evolution— You can’t help but be won over by a comment like “Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages makes this paper extremely good value for your time.”

the morning paper

An SQL Injection Tutorial for Beginners— This is not a tutorial for you to follow but more a look at what hackers will attempt to do to your systems, if you let them. The techniques used are sneaky and interesting.

Marezzi

🛠 Code and Tools

Stripe CLI: A Command Line Development Environment for Stripe Users— Stripe has become somewhat ubiquitous in the payment processing space and their focus on developers is pretty neat, not least in this new tool for building and testing integrations.

Tomer Elmalem

Mark Text: A Simple, Free Markdown Editor— Works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Built in Node with Electron.

Luo Ran

Sell Your Managed Services and APIs to Millions of Developers

Manifold sponsor

Yumda: Yum Packages, but for AWS Lambda— Essentially a collection of AWS Lambda-ready binary packages that you can easily install. You can request new packages, build your own, or use the existing ones that include things like GraphicsMagick, OpenEXR, GCC, libpng, Ruby, TeX, and more.

LambCI

K-Rail: A Workload Policy Enforcement Tool for Kubernetes— A webhook-based policy enforcement tool built in Go that lets you define policies in Go code too.

Cruise

Gitql: A Git Query Language and Tool— Lets you query a git repository using a SQL-like syntax, e.g. select date, message from commits where date < '2014-04-10'

Claudson Oliveira

#242 — November 13, 2019

Read on the Web

The Maturing of QUIC— QUIC, a transport layer protocol that uses UDP, has gone from an experiment to a key Internet standard in just over six years, and HTTP/3 is being built on top of it. This post covers the protocol’s history and takes us on its journey up to now.

Jana Iyengar (Fastly)

The Bytecode Alliance: Building A Secure-by-Default, Composable Future for WebAssembly— The Bytecode Alliance is a new industry partnership (originally between Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat) designed to forge WebAssembly’s ‘outside-the-browser’ future. If you’re not yet in sync with why WebAssembly outside the browser makes sense, this announcement should give you a good idea.

Mozilla Hacks

Test Drive Blue Matador’s Alert Automation— Blue Matador is alert automation for cloud infrastructures. Our proactive alerts take the time and toil out of monitoring. Zero configuration and zero maintenance. Discover the unknowns in your infrastructure.

Blue Matador sponsor

Python Overtakes Java to Become Second-Most Popular Language on GitHub— The burgeoning data analytics space has helped Python leapfrog Java to take second place on GitHub behind JavaScript.

The Register

Using Postgres as a Pub/Sub and Job Server— If you’re building app that needs some sort of pub/sub mechanism, Postgres is up to the job and here’s how LayerCI uses it. Do take care, though, as using Postgres for pub/sub has some delivery guarantee tradeoffs versus other systems.

LayerCI

Chrome's Ambitions for Moving Towards A Faster Web— Chrome has announced plans to highlight whether a site is known for loading fast or slow. Quick sites will be ‘rewarded’ with a green loading bar, whereas slow sites will be flagged with an on-screen ‘badge of shame’!

Google

💻 Jobs

Senior Web Developer at Dr. Bill— Dr. Bill helps Canadian doctors save time by streamlining their billing. Help lead our team into the next phase of growth.

Dr.Bill

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials and Stories

Microsoft Looks to React Native As A Way to Tackle Cross-Platform Development— It’s interesting to see Microsoft skipping its own Xamarin platform in favor of React in more places.

The Register

Let's Create a Simple Load Balancer With Go— Specifically, a round-robin load balancer. This is very much in Go’s sweet spot.

Kasun Vithanage

Ask HN: How Would You Start an Anonymous Blog in 2019?— We’re not just talking about creating a random Blogger account here, but going through the whole process of being as anonymous and untraceable as possible.

Hacker News

Making Test Automation Easy at Luminate Security

Gauge sponsor

How to Sleep At Night Running a Cloud Service: Common Architecture Do's— A nice high level piece that covers a few helpful things for keeping a service running 24/7 such as load balancers, centralized logging and anomaly detection.

Daniel Sada

Handling Line Endings in git— These issues can be a real pain if you’re working on different operating systems.

Jessica Joy Kerr

How to Send Good Pull Requests on GitHub— A checklist to follow when creating a PR for your favorite project.

Eli Bendersky

You Need to Use HSTS From Top to Bottom— HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) is a standard for protecting sites (and users) against protocol downgrade attacks (where a site that should be accessed via HTTPS is offered up over unencrypted HTTP instead), but even if you use HSTS, you have to get it right.

Troy Hunt

Developers Mentoring Other Developers: Practices I've Seen Work Well

Gergely Orosz

How Kubernetes Made My Latency 10x Higher..

Galo Navarro

🛠 Code and Tools

instant.page 3.0: Make Your Pages (Even More) Instant— instant.page provides a brief JavaScript snippet which adds just-in-time preloading to the links on your pages, providing a noticeably briefer latency when navigating to a new page. Version 3 takes some ideas from Google’s quicklink to seem even faster on mobile.

Alexandre Dieulot

Project Quay: Open Source Container-Native Image Registry— A Red Hat-built container image registry that enables you to build, organize, distribute, and deploy containers.

Red Hat

Speed Up Frontend Development with FaunaDB's Auth and Native GraphQL

FaunaDB sponsor

Brave Launches Version 1.0 of Its Privacy-Oriented Web Browser

Brave

Pipedream: A Serverless Integration Platform based on Node.js— The idea is that you deploy event-driven workflows which essentially join services together. Think a more developer-oriented alternative to Zapier.

Pipedream

Helm 3.0 Released— Helm is basically a package manager for Kubernetes.

Helm

Volatile: A Key-Value API in the Cloud for Everyone— More an interesting experiment than a reliable service.

Neatnik

Tools for Turning Descriptions Into Diagrams

Avdi Grimm

VulnX: A Tool for Detecting Vulnerabilities in Multiple CMSes— Detects CMSes like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. and checks for vulnerabilities.

Anouar Ben Saad

#243 — November 20, 2019

Read on the Web

Google Cloud Run Now Generally Available— Cloud Run is a serverless compute platform for running stateless HTTP-driven containers (as opposed to Cloud Functions’ purely function-based approach). It’s based on Knative and is available on GCP and for Anthos.

Google Cloud

A Private Equity Company is Acquiring the .ORG Registry— A few months ago, we mentioned the problems many people and organizations were having with price caps being removed for the .org TLD and.. the .org registry is now, perhaps unsurprisingly, being sold, though some are trying to get the sale blocked.

Andrew Allemann

Range: Know What's Happening on All Your Teams — Eng, Product, and Design— Reinvent your standup with Range. Deep integrations with GitHub, Jira, and Slack. Built for remote teams. Try free today.

Range sponsor

Windows to Improve User Privacy with DNS Over HTTPS— It’s certainly a big step to see Windows aiming to support DNS over HTTPS right in its core networking system. They note that “supporting encrypted DNS queries in Windows will close one of the last remaining plain-text domain name transmissions in common web traffic.”

Microsoft

Is Docker in Trouble?— Docker, Inc. recently had to sell off the enterprise portion of its business, raise another $35 million, and change its CEO (again).

J Cole Morrison

Writing Userspace USB Drivers for Abandoned Devices— I seem to love everything this guy writes, and this is no exception.. an amazing post about hacking together a USB driver for some old VGA frame grabbers he found on eBay.

Ben Cox

💻 Jobs

Site Reliability Engineer (Remote)— Join our Search Team where we build the infrastructure for search and discovery of Wikipedia content. We are working on Open Source stacks.

The Wikimedia Foundation

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials

The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile— A mixture of a love letter to Makefiles and a practical guide to using them for yourself. Goes into more depth than the typical introduction.

Ben Brodie

Building a Serverless 'Weather Bot' with Two-Way SMS, AWS SAM, and AWS Lambda— Sending SMS text messages with Amazon SNS is easy, but did you know messages can go both ways? There’s quite a few moving pieces on show here but the end result is pretty neat with the technique easily applicable to other use cases.

James Beswick

Video for Mobile: Build Video in Just Two API Calls

Mux sponsor

Intent to Explain: Demystifying the Blink Shipping Process— How do features get added to Chrome? What process goes on behind the scenes to bring the latest Web features to Chromium, Blink, et al.? Here’s an overview of the process, and if you prefer a talk/video version, there’s one of those too.

Google

▶  Become An HTML Email Geek With These Videos From Rémi Parmentier— Genuinely useful guides to designing HTML emails and working with the quirks of targeting email clients (truly a minefield compared to normal browsers).

Rachel Andrew

▶  A Tour of Blazor, A New Framework for Browser-Based .NET Apps— It’s been around a while, but as a technology and approach, it’s still taking off and is becoming a headline feature in .NET Core 3.0 and beyond.

Steve Sanderson

Doing Real Web Development on an iPad— It doesn’t appeal to me but people are doing it successfully. This post outlines how to get set up for full-stack development on the iPad, including a look at how iOS automation can help.

Lachlan Campbell

How to Build a WhatsApp Chatbot With Python, Flask and Twilio

Miguel Grinberg

How Containers Work: Overlayfs

Julia Evans

💡 Stories and Opinions

Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers at Shopify— A look behind the scenes at Shopify, the popular ecommerce platform, and how they’ve implemented a ‘merge queue’ to enable them both to deploy updates from a large number of developers quickly.

Shopify Engineering

The Early History of Usenet, Part I— Usenet, an early Internet based discussion system (though it was also available over BBSes early on), was a huge deal before the Web took off, and it’s 40 years old this month. I miss the 90s Usenet a great deal.

Steven M. Bellovin

A List of All the Tools Used to Create a Hit HTML5 Game on Steam— They sold over 200k units so they clearly got something right.

Maschinen-Mensch

Labeling 1M Data Points/Week for OpenAI's GPT-2

Akshat Bubna

Ask Hacker News: Do You Write Tests Before The Implementation?— TDD is no panacea.

Hacker News

🛠 Code and Tools

Sourcetrail is Now Free and Open-Source— Sourcetrail is a cross-platform ‘source explorer’ that makes it easier to get a look at how a codebase is structured and to navigate through it for yourself.

Coati Software

Clusterman: A Cluster Autoscaler for Kubernetes and Mesos— “Remember Clusterman? Now It’s Open-Source, and Supports Kubernetes Too!”

Yelp

AWS Data Exchange: Find, Subscribe To, and Use Data Products— Another week, another new AWS service! Data Exchange is an addition to AWS Marketplace that contains “licensable data products from over 80 data providers” in areas like financial services, health care / life sciences, geospatial, weather, and mapping.

Jeff Barr

Communicate Your Service Status Simply and Effectively— Reduce downtime impact, take advantage of automation and save time. And resolve issues quickly and with less stress.

StatusHub sponsor

How to Run an Internet Speed Test from the Command Line— A brief guide to two tools, both ultimately leaning upon the popular speedtest service.

Steven Vona

Localstack: A Fully Functional Local AWS Cloud Stack— Yet another way to develop and test your cloud and serverless apps offline :-)

LocalStack

Chatwoot: Simple, Open Source Live Chat Software— Built in Ruby and bills itself as an open source alternative to a service like Intercom.

Chatwoot

faster-utf8-validator: A (Very) Fast Library for Validating UTF-8 using AVX2/SSE4— “Using AVX2, it can validate random UTF-8 text as fast as .26 cycles/byte, and random ASCII text at .09 cycles/byte.”

Zach Wegner

SF-Mono-Powerline: Apple's SF Mono Font Patched for Powerline Support— It wouldn’t surprise me if this gets taken down, so grab it while you can if you need it.

Twixes

Kotlin 1.3.60 Released
JetBrains

Debian 10.2 Released
Debian Project

Vault 1.3 Released— A popular system for secrets management.
HashiCorp

#244 — November 27, 2019

Read on the Web

RIPE Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses to Issue— RIPE is essentially a group that issues IP address space within Europe and.. they’ve just issued their final /22 IPv4 allocation. “We have now run out of IPv4 addresses.” We’ve known this was coming for years, though, but they’re calling for even greater progress to be made on deploying IPv6.

RIPE Network Coordination Centre

A Campaign to 'Save .ORG'— Last week we featured news about the .org TLD being acquired by a private equity firm. If you want to stand up against this, the EFF is running a campaign to ‘Save .ORG’.

EFF

We Help Make Your Great Idea a Great Reality— Chances are you have a handful of really great ideas that you’d love to see developed, but you just don’t have the time. Let Big Nerd Ranch help. We partner with you to develop the best version of your best idea.

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

Diagram.codes: An Instant Diagram Generation Tool— Describe diagrams in simple text form and this online tool generates the graphical part. Check out this flowchart, for example. The code reads almost like BASIC! As well as flowcharts, trees, graphs, and sequence diagrams are also supported.

Volare Labs

CNAME Cloaking, The Dangerous Disguise of Third-Party Trackers— An in-depth exploration of a new method used by tracking companies to disguise their third-party trackers as first-party trackers.

Romain Cointepas

💻 Jobs

Data Pipelines, Reinvented. Find Your Place at Fivetran— Rooted in Oakland, we are a fast-growing company hiring across software engineering, SRE, product, and data analytics. Come join us.

Fivetran

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials

How Does a Video Codec Work?— A fantastic document that digs into how video technology and codecs work, explained in a relatively easy, accessible way. You are almost sure to learn something here.

Leandro Moreira

▶  K3S Under the Hood: Building a Product-Grade Lightweight Kubernetes Distro— K3S is a special lightweight Kubernetes distribution aimed at IoT and edge computing (think Raspberry Pis!)

Darren Shepherd (Rancher Labs)

AWS Serverless WebSockets — Introduction Around the Pitfalls— I’ve played briefly with API Gateway’s WebSockets support and was impressed, but there are a lot of moving parts to take into account when actually using it.

Joonas Laitio

Managed PostgreSQL by DigitalOcean— Deploy a highly scalable PostgreSQL cluster with no admin overhead.

DigitalOcean sponsor

How to Build a Startup's Engineering Team— Plenty of practical advice here.

Kevin Stewart

The Two Most Important Challenges with an API Gateway when Adopting Kubernetes

Daniel Bryant

💡 Stories and Opinions

'It’s Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name'— Or, at least, easier than it should be, though a bit of fraud is still involved.

Krebs on Security

How Twilio Scaled Its Engineering Structure— How the popular communications platform scaled from just three to over 2000 developers by focusing on ‘small teams’.

Ott Kaukver

What Tracking Down Missing TCP Keepalives Taught Me About Docker, Go, and GitLab— An in-depth recap of debugging a bug in the Docker client library.

Stan Hu (GitLab)

Edge vs. Chrome: Microsoft's Tracking Prevention Hits Google The Hardest— The new Edge browser, built on the same open source code as Google Chrome, contains a new Tracking Prevention feature that blocks third-party trackers and, at the Strict setting, many ads.

Ed Bott

100k+ Page Views a Month for $5 with a Self Hosted Static Site— It’s hardly a high traffic site, but I always enjoy reading about how people have things rigged up.

Nick Janetakis

'I'm Not Burned Out, I'm Pissed Off'— A rant about the state of information security that has resonated with a lot of people in the ops and security engineering space.

Anonymous Engineer

Choosing Go at American Express— Why American Express decided to use Go for some of its most critical applications.

Benjamin Cane

Real-World AWS Lambda Use Cases for the DevOps Engineer— How can AWS Lambda reduce operational overhead and costs and increase productivity for ops folks?

Emrah Samdan

Ask Hacker News: What's the Best Static Site Builder?— Lots of options to consider here.

Hacker News

🛠 Code and Tools

hyperfine: A Command-Line Benchmarking Tool— If you’re used to prefixing commands with time to see how long they take to run, hyperfine takes things to the next level by providing more statistical analysis, warmup runs, cache clearing, etc.

David Peter

Postwoman: An API Request Builder and Tester— A free alternative to Postman, a popular app for debugging and testing HTTP APIs. Postwoman works in the browser and supports HTTP and WebSocket requests as well as GraphQL. Insomnia is a similar tool if you want to run something as a desktop app.

Liyas Thomas

Sell Your API to Millions of Developers with One Integration

Manifold sponsor

HAProxy 2.1 Released— Yes, we’re huge fans of the popular TCP and HTTP load balancer and proxy server here. 2.1 rips out the legacy HTTP mode (in favor of the new HTX model), adds FastCGI support, is more efficient when there are huge amounts of certificates, and lots of tidying up.

HAProxy, Inc.

KEDA 1.0: Kubernetes-Based Event-Driven Autoscaling— KEDA is an open sourced component that can run in any Kubernetes cluster to provide event-driven autoscaling for every container. KEDA can also be paired with the open source Azure Functions runtime to enable additional serverless capabilities within Kubernetes.

Microsoft

EasyDB: A 'One-Click' Server-Free Database— A quick way to provision a temporary database (that’s basically a key/value store) and use it from JavaScript or Python (though the API is simple and HTTP based so it could be used from anywhere). Ideal for hackathons or quick once-off scripts, maybe.

Jake and Tyson

git-subtrac: All Your Git Submodules in One Place— A helper tool that makes it easier to keep track of your git submodule contents by collecting them and their history into a separate git branch on your project.

apenwarr

Vesper: An HTTP Framework on the Unix Shell— A collection of shell functions that can generate valid HTTP responses. Check out a basic ‘webapp’ here. Neat idea, though clearly with its limitations.

Christoph Hartmann

#245 — December 4, 2019

Read on the Web

Amazon are currently holding their re:Invent conference which means a flood of new releases and previews are coming out. We're including some of the more code-oriented ones here, but they have a list of releases so far on their blog too.

— Peter Cooper, editor

The Advent of Code 2019— If you have a little time each day to do some programming challenges, you could do a lot worse than the Advent of Code which is now in its fifth year. I’ve really enjoyed the puzzles so far and there’s even a sub-Reddit where people discuss their solutions.

The Advent of Code

BPF: A New Type of Software?— BPF (and eBPF) was originally designed to capture and filter network packets using various rules, but you can use the interface they provide with the kernel to do other things too (under what Brendan calls a ‘new model of programming’) such as intelligent load balancing, DDoS mitigation, observability, and more. You’ll learn a lot here.

Brendan Gregg

Next Release Is DevOps for Your Release Notes— Next Release automates creating, sharing, and distributing release notes and changelogs based on your existing GitHub pull requests. With tons of configuration options.

Next Release sponsor

How The Most Copied StackOverflow Snippet of All Time Is Flawed— An interesting part to this story is it’s the answer’s original author who’s also written the correction.

Andreas Lundblad

SQL and Java Top the List Of Most In-Demand Tech Skills— SQL is the most in-demand tech skill by US employers claims the IEEE.

IEEE Spectrum

AWS Introduces The Concept of 'Local Zones'— Are AWS’s usual regions and availability zones just a little too distant for your use cases? Local Zones are a new concept in the AWS system where certain services will be provided in a specific geographic area (in this case Los Angeles) but managed via the ‘parent’ region (in this case US West (Oregon)).

Jeff Barr (AWS)

AWS Outposts Let You Bring AWS In-House— If 'local zones' aren't local enough for you, AWS has also released Outposts, basically racks of AWS hardware you can bring in-house to your own data center. Don't expect this to be cheap though!

Jeff Barr (AWS)

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)— Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials

A Guide to Distributed Teams— Two VPs (of Splice and Buffer, respectively) have put together a collection of thoughts on how to foster and grow happy, efficient teams who may be located around the world.

Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley

▶  Discussing gRPC with Mark Rendle— Don’t do .NET? Doesn’t matter. I quite enjoyed this recent podcast episode that digs into just what gRPC is all about and why it’s so much faster than older RPC mechanisms like SOAP.

The .NET Core Podcast podcast

Video for Serverless: Build Video in Just Two API Calls— Mux Video is an API-first platform, powered by data and designed by video experts to make beautiful video possible for every development team.

Mux sponsor

0.30000000000000004— How different languages deal with the ‘0.1 + 0.2 not equalling exactly 0.3’ problem.

Erik Wiffin

A Guide to Helm 3 with a Node.js Express Microservice— Helm is a package management tool for the Kubernetes ecosystem. ‘Charts’ are basically the packages/pre-packaged apps it can work with, and this tutorial covers creating a chart for an Express.js service.

Alex Ellis

▶  Going Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes Production Like a Pro— A prolific speaker (and ‘container consultant’) gives a ‘best of’ talk in 40 minutes focused at existing Docker users looking for best practices and problems to avoid.

Bret Fisher

💡 Stories and Opinions

How a Comment on Hacker News Led to 4 ½ New Unicode Characters

Terence Eden

A DNS Horror Story: How I Lost and Regained My .IN Domain Name— How someone’s domain got accidentally ‘sinkholed’ as part of an automated campaign to stamp out a years-old botnet.

Susam Pal

The .org Fire Sale: How It Sold for Less Than Half Its Valuation— We’ve featured the story of the .org registry in the past few weeks, but more continues to emerge.

The Longest Now

Hope Is Not A Strategy: How Hardware Issues Affect Your Database's Data— A recent announcement by HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) about some SSDs that would fail suddenly after 32,768 hours of operation might give you some food for thought as to how you’d deal with such a failure in your own setup.

Joe Conway

🛠 Code and Tools

Kubethanos: Kills Half of Your Kubernetes Pods at Random— An interesting way to test the resilience of your Kubernetes setup by killing some pods within a set of your choice.

Berkay

Amazon CodeGuru: A ML Service for Automated Code Reviews— Yes, there’s a new machine learning-based service from AWS for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Athena Adds Support for Running SQL Queries Across Multiple Sources— You can now run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources – so just imagine running a query joining S3, Redshift, CloudWatch, MySQL, DynamoDB, etc. Currently in preview in one AWS region for now, but this could be a big deal.

Amazon Web Services

Managed PostgreSQL by DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean sponsor

Amazon Fraud Detector— Yes, yet another new AWS service and yet another built around machine-learning. This time, you upload your historical fraud datasets to S3 and Fraud Detector will advise you to potential threats over time.

Amazon Web Services

A Big Pile of 'Vim-like' Applications— If you like the lo-fi, terminal-based experience, these programs are worth checking out.

Xaizek

Django 3.0 Released— The popular Python webapp framework steps forward into a new major release with MariaDB support, ASGI support (opening the option of using Django in an asynchronous way), and lots of deprecations.

Django Project

Shieldon: A Web Application Firewall (WAF) for PHP

Terry L.

#246 — December 11, 2019

Read on the Web

Bootstrapping Understanding: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering— A fascinating walkthrough of how someone reverse engineered some data files from an old game, but the principles extend into many other areas. At the least, you might pick up some neat command line tricks here.

Brian Raiter

Low-Cost VPS Testing Results— This is partly neat because it’s from the original creator of PHP but also because it’s rare to see a balanced look across 22 different providers like this.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Continuous Deployment Without Downtime— Do you know what it takes to automate all of the steps necessary to deploy? Learn more about this final stage in the process of software development automation.

CircleCI sponsor

WebAssembly is Now a W3C Recommendation— This is a really big, formal step for WebAssembly and the Web as a whole as languages like Rust, Go, and C# begin to target browsers directly by compiling to WebAssembly. This press release doesn’t explain WebAssembly particularly well, so if you want to learn more about it, enjoy this illustrated guide or this if you want something more advanced. WebAssembly is also making moves into the server side.

W3C

ICANN Delays The Sale of the .org Registry— They’ve not exactly stopped its sale, but ICANN has issued an ‘additional information request’ to the Public Interest Registry over the sale of the .org registry.

ICANN

The “Great Cannon” Has Been Deployed Again— Great Cannon is a coined term for a mechanism within the ‘Great Firewall of China’ that can be used to create DDoS attacks fuelled by JavaScript injected into pages that pass through that firewall.

AT&T Cybersecurity

💻 Jobs

Data Pipelines, Reinvented. Find Your Place at Fivetran— Rooted in Oakland, we are a fast-growing company hiring across software engineering, SRE, product, and data analytics. Come join us.

Fivetran

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials

Using Kafka to Throttle QPS on MySQL Shards in Bulk Write APIs— A thorough look at how Pinterest has a bulk write platform built on top of Kafka to manage load on core databases.

Qi Li (Pinterest Engineering)

▶  AWS SNS vs SQS? Whats The Difference?— A concrete, practical example of why you might use AWS’s Simple Notification Service (SNS) versus their Simple Queue Service (SQS).. something that even Amazon doesn’t tend to explain too well.

YouTube

▶  A Crash Course in Varnish, the HTTP Accelerator— An engaging 50 minute video that covers how Varnish works, setting it up, using it with Caddy (for TLS termination), and why you might (or might not) use Varnish.

Hussein Nasser

▶  Bringing Automation to Web App Hosting and Deployment— A talk from GOTO 19 centered around a live demo of using modern systems to automate deployments.

James Beswick

[Expanded] Top GitHub Best Practices Guide for Developers

Datree.io sponsor

How Threads Can Infect Each Other with Their Low Priority

Tobias Hermann

Making Games with Kotlin— If you’ve ever fancied dipping a toe into the Kotlin pool.. here’s an excuse. Kotlin, an easy to pick up language for the JVM, is also increasingly being used server-side.

Vegard Veiset

▶  Andy Pavlo's Advanced Database Systems Lectures— There’s a lot to go through here and there’s an interesting sense of humor on display (the presenter gets maced in the first video) but for the grand price of free, this is a goldmine of database knowledge.

Carnegie Mellon University

💡 Stories and Opinions

▶  JRuby: From Zero to Scale— Two of the creators of the JRuby project (a popular JVM-based Ruby implementation that’s now 18 years old) talk about its history, how it compares to CRuby/MRI, how to scale it, and more.

Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas E Enebo

Faster Cloudfront Log Queries using AWS Athena and Serverless— How a Python-based Lambda function was used to partition Cloudfront logs so they could be queried 13x faster with AWS Athena.

Ben Hoyt

The Nintendo Switch 'Switch'— More a bridge than a ‘switch’ but a pretty neat project nonetheless.

Cynthia Revström

How Linux Exists Only Because of a Happy Accident— Sadly, when most people accidentally delete their OS, they don’t start working on their own one :-)

August Lilleaas

Latency, Throughput, and Walking on Escalators

Andrew Certain

🛠 Code and Tools

Amazon Launches a Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS)— Cassandra is a powerful system for working with large amounts of structured data but can be tricky to maintain and manage ops-wise at scale. Enter AWS. It’s serverless-style pay-as-you-go pricing too which is neat. It’s only in 5 regions for now, but can be trialed at a low scale under the ‘free tier’ for three months.

Amazon Web Services

DockerSlim: A Tool to Slim Down Your Docker Containers— A tool that aims to ‘throw away what you don’t need’ both reducing the attack surface of your containers and their size too.

docker-slim

Communicate Incidents Internally and Externally— Reduce downtime impact, take advantage of automation and save time. Get systems back online with less stress.

StatusHub sponsor

Benthos: A Stream Processor for 'Mundane Tasks'— Define pipelines to connect together various sources and sinks (e.g. S3, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, files, Kafka, Redis, etc.) and perform operations on the payloads. GitHub repo.

Ashley Jeffs

CurlMail: Quickly Send Email Notifications with cURL— Or any HTTP request, really. An interesting example of a loginless service.

curlmail

New: AWS Step Functions Express Workflows— AWS Step Functions is heavily used for building multi-step workflows in the cloud, now Express Workflows have entered the picture and provide an option specifically for ‘high-volume, short-duration use cases’.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

#247 — December 18, 2019

Read on the Web

Traditionally at Cooperpress, we end the year with a look back at the most popular links of the year (for example, this week's 2019 React roundup or Postgres roundup). StatusCode is so varied, however, that collecting together the most popular links didn't seem quite enough.

Instead, I've put together an issue packed with my favorite stories, videos, and resources from across the entire year that I've personally enjoyed.

Most of you don't read every issue in full (and I don't expect you to!) which means you should find some interesting stories here that you've missed — definitely take a quick skim through this issue at least :-)

Thanks for your continued support — I appreciate it. Remember that if you have any articles, news, quotes or anything else that other readers might be interested in, you can always hit reply and let me know.
— Peter Cooper, your editor

💡 Stories and Opinions

Lessons GitLab Learnt When Debugging A Scaling Problem— GitLab, a popular alternative to GitHub, deals with over 300 Git-over-SSH connections per second so debugging a handful of broken ones is a serious undertaking. It makes for a great story though and you’ll definitely take something away from this one.

Craig Miskell

The Lines of Code That Changed Everything— A fantastic high level look at the bits of code that have ‘transformed our world’ from Spacewar and the JPEG algorithm to the Morris Worm and RSS.

Slate Magazine

Why Our Team Cancelled Our Move to Microservices— A headline like that was always going to attract my attention (and it did yours, too). An interesting story, though, and proof that no one architecture is a one-size-fits-all.

Steven Lemon

Start 2020 Strong. Ultimate Go Training: Charlotte, NC - January 27-29, 2020— Take advantage of the early bird pricing and attend Bill Kennedy's Ultimate Go Training in Charlotte, North Carolina in January 2020. If you have a team of 5 or more engineers request a group discount here.

Ardan Labs sponsor

Everything I Googled in a Week as a Professional Software Engineer— I think most of us identified with things in this post.

Sophie Koonin

'How I Use The Good Parts of AWS, While Filtering Out All The Hype'— A rolled up Twitter thread that was very popular this year and raised some interesting points in how to use AWS well (which controversially involves avoiding Lambda, API Gateway, Kubernetes, and more..)

Daniel Vassallo on Twitter

Teaching A Cheap Ethernet Switch New Tricks— It's fair to say I'm a Ben Cox fanboy as all of his posts are so enjoyable to read. Here we get an interesting story of hacking a cheap router that involves running Go code on it. If you’re a networking/hardware geek who loves a good story, this is for you.

Ben Cox

💻 Jobs

Data Pipelines, Reinvented. Find Your Place at Fivetran— Rooted in Oakland, we are a fast-growing company hiring across software engineering, SRE, product, and data analytics. Come join us.

Fivetran

Find a Job Through Vettery— Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📺 Fun Programming Videos and Talks

▶  GraphQL: The Documentary— How and why did GraphQL come to be and what impact is it having? To learn more, enjoy this smoothly produced 30 minute documentary on GraphSQL starring its co-creators and other ‘big names’ from the community.

Honeypot

▶  Rust At Speed — Building A Fast Concurrent Database— This talk packed in a lot of interesting stuff both for people interested in Rust but also database systems in general and their implementation. Unsurprisingly it’s pretty technical but you’ll learn something here.

Jon Gjengset

▶  A 2.5 Hour Interview with John Carmack— Whatever you think of Joe Rogan, being able to hear John Carmack, the main developer behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, talk about his work is always a joy.

Joe Rogan Experience

▶  Looking Back at 25 Years of PHP (With Its Creator)— Certainly my favorite developer from Greenland.

Rasmus Lerdorf

▶  How Spotify Accidentally Deleted All its Kube Clusters with No User Impact— It happened in 2017 when Spotify was migrating to Google Kubernetes Engine. Spoiler? Spotify have rock solid ops policies around migrations.

David Xia

📕 Tutorials

All the Most Useful git Commands Showed Off in a Single Script— There’s a lot to digest here. I use about 5 of them to be fair :-)

Dvir Volk

Building Interactive SSH Applications— Writing interactive SSH-accessible applications isn’t hard, but requires a little specialized knowledge and good Unix literacy.

Drew DeVault

Everything curl: An Extensive Guide to All Things curl— If curl isn’t a key part of your toolkit, now’s the best time to start, and this book will help. The Curl cookbook may also be useful.

Daniel Stenberg

Your Data Is Your Business— Let us help you build, troubleshoot, and scale your PostgreSQL data systems.

PostgreSQL Experts, Inc. sponsor

There's More Than One Way to Write An IP Address— While it goes into somewhat more depth than this, if you didn’t know you can write 127.0.0.1 as 127.1.. this is for you.

Mattias Geniar

How Multiplexing Changes Your HTTP APIs— One of HTTP/2’s headline features and advantages over HTTP/1 is multiplexing, the ability to have multiple requests and responses in flight on one connection. This has big implications for APIs in general, says Mark Nottingham.

Mark Nottingham

HTTP Security Headers - A Complete Guide— A description of each security header of significance, its importance, and how to use them to secure sites you manage in one way or another.

Charlie Belmer

Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo: An Absurdly Deep Dive— A really deep dive into the practical challenges and issues faced adopting a new stack of webapp technologies.

Zach Schneider

🛠 Tools and Useful Stuff

AWS Architecture Icons: An Official Icon Set— You can download archives of EPS, PNG and SVG icons (the EPS archive is over 400MB in size!) or play right away on draw.io (as an aside, draw.io is a fantastic browser based diagram editor and worth becoming familiar with).

Amazon Web Services, Inc.

free-for.dev: A Bumper List of Stuff That's 'Free' for Developers— An interesting and extensive list of hosted services or otherwise paid-for products that have free tiers or options for developers. Perfect for those Xmas break projects?

R.I.Pienaar

Diagram.codes: An Instant Diagram Generation Tool— Describe diagrams in simple text form and this online tool generates the graphical part. Check out this flowchart, for example. The code reads almost like BASIC! As well as flowcharts, trees, graphs, and sequence diagrams are also supported.

Volare Labs

Reach Millions of Developers with One Integration

Manifold sponsor

Recursive Sans and Mono: A Free Variable Type Family— This is a new ‘highly-flexible’ type family that takes advantage of variable font tech to let you pick the right style along five different axes. It’s pretty clever, well demonstrated, and very suitable for presenting data, code, or to be used in documentation and UIs.

Arrow Type

BADSSL: A Site for Testing Clients Against Unusual SSL Configs— Want to see how your HTTP client, library, or tool of choice copes with an expired certificate, different types of hash algorithms, or invalid certificate authorities? This is very useful.

BadSSL

The Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) Source Code— An interesting historical artefact, and if you want to actually understand it in full, Pluralsight released a course covering how it works. Don't use this in production...? ;-)

Chris Garry

Bazel 1.0: Google's Open Source Build System— Bazel is an open source build system designed to support a wide variety of programming languages and platforms.

Google Open Source

🤞 My hopes for next year..

I've been monitoring a lot of trends and developments this year and have some hopes and dreams for the developer world in 2020. Maybe I'll reflect next year on how many of them come to pass!

• WebAssembly goes mainstream as a runtime target on the server side.
• Something significant happens regarding IPv6 adoption because we are now really, really, really running out of IP addresses.
• Microsoft continues to be a good open source citizen and continues to see the benefits of such.
• Improvements to both DNS and BGP security deployed on a wider scale. We saw quite a few attacks and issues this year using DNS or BGP as vectors.
• AWS to continue to launch services at a dizzying rate, if only so I have things to include in the newsletter each week ;-) But without as much drama as surrounded their implementations of MongoDB and Elasticsearch technology this year.
• Broader industry acceptance that there are clearly many viable ways and systems with which to solve problems, and to avoid running down a Kubernetes, Docker, microservices (or whatever the next buzzword is) rabbit hole just because it's the current fad. Except serverless, which is excellent of course.
• GitHub's Sponsors program continues to grow and attract interest and doesn't just fizzle out as similar efforts have tended to do over the years.
• Google to stop shutting random services down quite so quickly. I can dream.
• More developer podcasts to listen to, but hopefully breaking away from the purely one-on-one interview-driven format somehow.
• Let's Encrypt to continue to be funded and to become more core to how we deploy services. The security certificate market doesn't need to be a sticky swamp any more.
• AWS to cut their egress rates a bit. C'mon, just a bit.
• Gmail to continue to find ways to enable genuine, non-spammy email senders to reach opt-in subscribers inboxes more reliably. We continue to encounter occasional deliverability problems.
• Launching a briefer, daily "here's what you need to know in software development right now" email newsletter. Yes, a StatusCode Daily, if you will. If this sounds interesting, register your interest here.