#237 — October 9, 2019

Read on the Web

StatusCode
Covering the week's news in software development, infrastructure, ops, platforms, and performance.

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

Quick bytes:

💻 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