#225 — July 17, 2019

Read on the Web

StatusCode
Formerly Web Operations Weekly — currently in transition.

⚠️ Several weeks ago we announced that Web Operations Weekly would be gradually becoming StatusCode Weekly, a still ops-leaning but more general development newsletter, reflecting the state of the developer scene in general.

Things are going well and over the next few weeks you'll see the From address and our domain name change, so be aware of that. For now, though, thanks for your ongoing support and we hope you enjoy this issue 🙂
— Peter Cooper, editor

Amazon EventBridge: Event-Driven AWS Integration for SaaS Apps — Most companies now use a vast array of SaaS apps for various tasks (customer service, monitoring, CRM, etc.) and EventBridge aims to.. bridge the divide between these apps and your own by way of a serverless event bus that connects application data from your own apps, SaaS, and AWS services. Trek10 think it's the biggest thing since AWS Lambda.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

QuickJS: A New, Small, Embeddable JavaScript Engine — Fabrice Bellard, the genius behind FFMPEG and JSLinux, is back with another project.. a complete JS engine (supporting the ES2019 spec!) built in a relatively tiny amount of C. This won’t replace engines like V8 in most cases, but could find a use in embedded or WebAssembly-oriented scenarios such as in this live demo.

Fabrice Bellard

Do You Need Golang 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

A Deeper Dive into Cloudflare's July 2 Outage — Cloudflare suffered an hour’s outage on July 2nd and here’s pretty much every detail about the outage that’s worth knowing. The crux of the issue in this case? A bad regular expression!

John Graham-Cumming

YugaByte DB Relicenses as 100% Open SourceYugabyte has been around for a few years and is a high performance, distributed database that supports both SQL and Cassandra APIs. It’s now fully open source including its previously closed-source, enterprise features.

Karthik Ranganathan (YugaByte)

ListMonk: A High Performance, Self-Hosted Newsletter and Mailing List Manager — It’s always great to see new entries in this space as there are so few solid options.

Kailash Nadh

Quick bytes:

💻 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

Land a New Dev Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📖 Tutorials

Using fzf to Turn CLI Tools into Live REPLs — This is a clever idea. It uses the fzf ‘fuzzy finder’ and its preview feature to turn command-line tools into a mini live REPL of sorts.

Pawel Duda

▶  Blazor: A Framework for Browser-Based .NET Apps — Blazor takes .NET into the browser via WebAssembly and can interoperate with JavaScript. One to watch.

Steve Sanderson

Using Time Series for Application Performance Monitoring to Win at the Flight E-ticket Sales Game

InfluxData sponsor

▶  How to Build Your Own Virtual Machine with /dev/kvm and Rust — A brief 10 minute talk that covers the foundational concepts of creating a bare-bones VM of your own.

Josh Triplett

A Guide to Building Scalable Web Scrapers with Scrapy — Scrapy is a popular open-source Python framework for writing scalable web scrapers.

Daniel Ni

💬 Stories and Opinions

How I Made AWS Lambda Work for My SaaS — I always like a good story-meets-case-study. Here, we get the story of how an API monitoring service uses AWS Lambda coupled with distributed background jobs to keep things running.

Tim Nolet

What Happens If You Try To Get 'Your' Username on Various Sites — One man’s attempt to get ‘his’ username on a variety of services, even when that name was already taken. It’s worth thinking about your own policies on this matter if you run a popular online service.

Terence Eden

Your Nines Are Not My Nines — Just because your service has 99.999% availability doesn’t mean there aren’t customers suffering significant problems..

Rachel Kroll

📕 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams

GitPrime sponsor

Why Benchmarking Distributed Databases Is So Hard — Benchmarks are hard to get right, and many articles touting benchmarks are actually ‘benchmarketing’, showcasing skewed outcomes to sell products.

Ana Hobden (PingCAP)

Ask Hacker News: When Does It Make Sense to Roll Your Own 'X'? — Hacker News users discuss when it makes sense to adopt a dependency or roll your own.

Hacker News

.NET Reunified: Microsoft’s Plans for .NET 5 — Microsoft is proposing to merge the source code streams of several key frameworks—.NET Framework, .NET Core and Xamarin/Mono.

Microsoft

From Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Functional Containers — An academic paper presenting gg, a toolset for letting people execute ‘everyday’ applications (e.g. compilation, video encoding, test runs) across thousands of cloud-hosted parallel threads.

Fouladi, Romero, et al.

🛠 Code and Tools

Martian: A Library for Building Custom HTTP/S Proxies — An interesting (unofficial) Google project for inspecting, mocking or otherwise messing with passing HTTP traffic.

Google

Toxiproxy: A TCP Proxy to Simulate Chaotic Network and System Conditions — A fantastic tool you can use to see how your app copes with outages in third party APIs, databases, network accessible caches, etc. It’s written in Go but there are client libraries for Go, Ruby, Python, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Java and Haskell, so you can integrate it directly into your test suites.

Shopify

Microsoft Open Sources Q#, its Quantum Computing DSL — Want to dip a toe into the nascent world of quantum development? MS has open sourced a new F#-based DSL and toolchain.

Microsoft

simdjson: A C++ Library for Parsing Gigabytes of JSON Per SecondJSON is more heavily used as a data interchange format now than ever and servers spend a lot of time parsing JSON documents. This project is an experiment in making such parsing extremely fast.

Daniel Lemire