#249 — January 15, 2020

Read on the Web

StatusCode Weekly
Covering the week's news in software development, ops, platforms, and tooling.

Goodbye, Clean Code — Much as Donald Knuth warned us away from premature optimization, here React expert Dan Abramov tells us to beware of premature refactoring and de-duplication. A well put and interesting argument you might appreciate here.

Dan Abramov

SQL, NoSQL, and Scale: How DynamoDB Scales Where Relational Databases Don't — It’s only a hunch, but I think we’re only going to see DynamoDB and some of its concepts continue to become more popular this decade. This interesting, lengthy article digs deep into scalability and how DynamoDB’s ‘restrictions’ (or tradeoffs) help avoid scaling problems.

Alex DeBrie

Try the Fastest CI/CD Solution for Free — Faster CI/CD means greater productivity for your team and a better experience for your users. Automate your CI/CD pipeline with Semaphore to release 2x faster than with other platforms.

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

Google to Phase Out User-Agent Strings in Chrome — User agent strings have been a part of the Web since (almost) the very beginning, but there’s a growing movement to reduce their status. Chrome plans to shift to using Client Hints and Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla have shown interest in freezing or phasing out user agent strings too.

Catalin Cimpanu

Benchmarking Different Top-Level Domain Names — I’d never thought about this before, but different TLDs have different top level DNS servers, each with different levels of performance. I’m not sure everyone will be rushing to register .biz names after seeing this, however.

Dejan Grofelnik Pelzel (BunnyCDN)

Microsoft's Chromium-Powered Browser Arrives — The new version of Microsoft Edge is now out of preview and available for download. Developer documentation for the updated browser can be found here. (So, what's the nickname for this one then? Edgium? Credge? 😅)

Kyle Pflug (Microsoft)

Google Plans to Kill Off Third-Party Cookies in Chrome 'Within 2 Years' — In more ‘Google is scrapping Web features’ news, they’re asking the wider online advertising industry to help it build more privacy-focused alternatives to the cookie.

Digiday

Quick bytes:

💻 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 is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

📕 Tutorials

The Status of HTTP/3 — HTTP/3 is the next protocol for network communication across the Web, which is meant to partially replace HTTP/1 and HTTP/2. This a brief but link-packed update on where things stand.

Sergio De Simone

Deploying Side Projects for Basically Nothing on Google Cloud Run — One developer’s love letter to Google’s Cloud Run service which provides a fully managed ‘serverless’ container deployment system.

Alex Olivier

Track Down Performance Issues Fast. Get Back to Coding with Scout — Scout continually tracks down N+1 database queries, sources of memory bloat, performance abnormalities and more.

ScoutAPM sponsor

How to Make a Raspberry Pi VPN Server

Moe Long

Raw WebGPU — An overview on how to write a WebGPU application, where WebGPU is an under development W3C spec on bringing modern 3D graphics and compute capabilities to the Web (and JavaScript).

Alain Galvan

💡 Stories and Opinions

Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target for Cheaters — An interesting look under the covers of trying to cheat at an online Web-based game using a man-in-the-middle proxy.

Jakob L. Kreuze

A Bright Future for Moore’s Law? — Intel is bullish about the ongoing viability of ‘Moore’s Law’ due to the innovations it’s making.

VentureBeat

Why is Caddy Better Than HAProxy? — As a huge haproxy fan, this initially pained me to read, but Matt Holt (the creator of Caddy, an HTTP/2 enabled Web server with automatic SSL deployment) makes some great arguments here.

Reddit

Why We’re Writing Machine Learning Infrastructure in Go, Not Python — This isn’t about doing machine learning in Go, but about using it to build the infrastructure needed around the task.

Caleb Kaiser

How Is Computer Programming Different Today Than 20 Years Ago? — A few things here are a bit of a stretch but it’s interesting to think about nonetheless.

Sedat Kapanoglu

The 'No Code' Delusion“I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also think it (the no code movement) is wrong at heart.”

Alex Hudson

▶  Why Developers Love Postgres — A just released, high level talk about why Postgres is a great database, including a section about how a department at Chevron migrated from Oracle to Postgres.

Craig Kerstiens

🛠 Code and Tools

Broot: A New Way to See and Navigate Directory Trees — Better than tree as it makes the output quite compact in the case of big directory trees. It can even replace ls and du and it handles .gitignore files too. Certainly worth a look.

Canop

HTTPie 2.0: A Modern Command Line HTTP Client — A long standing user-friendly curl alternative that has now hit the big v2.

Jakub Roztocil

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite

Buildkite sponsor

Scalene: A High-Perf, High-Precision CPU and Memory Profiler for Python“runs orders of magnitude faster than other profilers while delivering far more detailed information”

Emery Berger

The Beef Programming Language — A cross platform language-meets-IDE (a la Smalltalk, though the language is more Java meets C#-esque).

The Beef Programming Language

AWS Backup Gets A Lot Better — AWS Backup is a fully managed, centralized backup service simplifying the management of EBS, RDS, and other AWS service backups. It now can backup entire EC2 instances, copy backups between regions, and more.

Amazon Web Services

Windows Terminal Preview v0.8 Release — Windows Terminal continues to become more appealing and now includes search functionality, ‘retro’ effects, and numerous UI improvements.

Microsoft

Highlights from Git 2.25 — Take a look at what’s new in the latest Git release, mostly around sparse checkouts.

Taylor Blau (GitHub)

Chromda: An AWS Lambda Function for Capturing Screenshots of Websites — You can pass in the URLs to capture via an SNS topic, SQS queue, scheduled event or over HTTP.

Luis Farzati

VVVVVV’s Source Code Is Now Public — VVVVVV was a very popular indie game released ten years ago. Always neat to see behind the scenes of things like this.

Terry Cavanagh