--- title: "90% of pages loaded in the US with Firefox are now using HTTPS" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 253 published_at: "2020-02-12" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/253" --- Plus solar powered web sites, the history of Git and Let's Encrypt, and more domain price increases. #253 — February 12, 2020 [Read on the Web](https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/253) StatusCode Weekly Covering the week's news in software development, ops, platforms, and tooling. [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/zq9lyodbwnnx0zewkshb.jpg)](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html) [How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html) — Very, it turns out. _“Our self-hosted, solar-powered, off-grid website has been running for 15 months now.”_ I enjoyed this story. LOW-TECH MAGAZINE [GitHub CLI Now in Beta](https://github.blog/2020-02-12-supercharge-your-command-line-experience-github-cli-is-now-in-beta/) — GitHub has unveiled a new command line tool designed to make it easier to work with GitHub and common workflows there like handling pull requests, etc. GitHub [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/5f93ee2f.png)](https://get.mux.com/37gSUhk) [Build Video in Just Two API Calls](https://get.mux.com/37gSUhk) — 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 [ICANN To Allow .COM Price Increases?](https://www.namecheap.com/blog/icann-allows-com-price-increases-gets-more-money/) — Another month, another TLD is in the spotlight. This time, ICANN has announced significant changes to the contract it has with Verisign to operate the top-level domain .COM, including .COM price increases, and Namecheap invites you to make your feeling known. Namecheap [Chrome's Plan to Prevent Insecure Downloads](https://security.googleblog.com/2020/02/protecting-users-from-insecure_6.html) — Starting in Chrome 82, Chrome will block the download of files served insecurely when linked on secure origins. Here’s [The Register’s take](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/07/google_chrome_blocking/). Joe DeBlasio (Google) [The Story of Let's Encrypt](https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/12/lets-encrypt-an-automated-certificate-authority-to-encrypt-the-entire-web/) — Let’s face it, [Let’s Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/)’s automated certificate service has had a _huge_ impact on the rollout of HTTPS across the Internet. This post summarizes [a paper](https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/letsencrypt-ccs19.pdf) (PDF) that details the technical story behind the scenes. the morning paper [The History of Git: The Road to Domination](https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/btc-history-git) — Like JavaScript, the `git` version control system was essentially put together quickly in a week and has steadily grown from there into an industry dominating technology. Here’s the full story. Andy Favell **Quick bytes:** - A calamity with barcodes at Amazon's warehouse makes for [an entertaining Twitter thread.](https://twitter.com/meslin/status/1225834920611848192) (And a lot of granola for this guy.) - [Handshake](https://handshake.org/) is a prototype of a new, experimetal peer-to-peer root naming system. - [Firefox 73](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/firefox-73-is-upon-us/) is out with numerous DevTools improvements. - It's going to take us a while to pick out the highlights but [500+ talk videos from FOSDEM 2020](https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/events/) are now available. Perhaps try searching the page for the names of technologies and languages you like? 😂 - Apparently using Alpine can make [Python Docker builds 50x slower.](https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/) - Most source code has [a short lifespan](http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2020/02/07/source-code-has-a-brief-and-lonely-existence/) and is only ever modified by one person. 💻 Jobs [Find a Dev Job Through Vettery](https://www.vettery.com/tech?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=cooper-webopsweekly&utm_term=tech&utm_content=grouped&utm_campaign=ad-77581) — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery [DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)](https://x-team.com/remote-devops-engineer-jobs/?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=email-ad&utm_campaign=webops) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers. X-Team 📕 Tutorials [Building a Performant Front-End Architecture](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/performant-front-end-architecture) — A technical writeup of the key things to consider performance-wise when building a front-end. DebugBear [Performance Testing HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 Vs HTTP/2 + Server Push for REST APIs](https://evertpot.com/h2-parallelism/) — If you’re unfamiliar with the performance dynamics and differences between these approaches, this is a good writeup and demonstration. Evert Pot [Top GitHub Best Practices for Developers - Expanded Guide](https://try.datree.io/github-best-practices-guide?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=webopsweekly) — Implementing these best practices could save you time, improve code maintainability, and prevent security risks. Datree.io sponsor [Should You Self-Host Google Fonts?](https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/should-you-self-host-google-fonts/) — A detailed and considered look at what you can do to minimize the performance impact of third-party fonts. Barry Pollard [Dynamic Route53 Records for AWS Auto Scaling Groups with Terraform](https://underthehood.meltwater.com/blog/2020/02/07/dynamic-route53-records-for-aws-auto-scaling-groups-with-terraform/) Jim Sheldon [Ask HN: What's The Best Resource for Learning Modern x64 Assembly?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279051) — I’ve been nostalgically dabbling with this recently and while I have no practical use for writing x86, if you do.. this thread will be useful. Hacker News [Build a Lightning Quick Website using Hugo and S3](https://joshbradley.me/building-this-website/) — One developer’s approach to a site that loads in 50ms. Josh Bradley 💡 Stories and Opinions [Analyzing the Attacks On My Web Site](https://dev.to/pluralsight/analyzing-the-attacks-on-my-website-30jf) — _“With a little bit of command line kung fu, some Go and Google Sheets I’ll show you how to visualize who is attacking your site.”_ Jeremy Morgan ▶[How Java is Imitating Functional Languages](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6n-Ci8V2CM) — If you’ve been keeping an eye on Java in recent years, you’ll have seen it taking on a few new features inspired by other languages. Maurice Naftalin and José Paumard [The Fastest Way to Get Great Bug Reports from the Non-Technical Folk](https://bugherd.com/bug-tracker-developers-new?utm_source=statuscode&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=statuscode_sponsored) BugHerd sponsor [The Wall of Technical Debt](http://verraes.net/2020/01/wall-of-technical-debt/) — An interesting method for making technical debt visible and negotiable. Mathias Verraes [Smaller Pieces, Lower Pain](https://blog.jessitron.com/2020/02/07/smaller-pieces-lower-pain/) — It seems obvious when you say it but breaking tasks down into the tiniest possible pieces is a core tenet of engineering (and particularly diagnosis) to me. Jessica Joy Kerr 🛠 Code and Tools [Flash: A Test Service to Mock Slow Server Responses](https://flash.siwalik.in/) — A simple HTTP service that simulates a slow response with a configurable delay in millisecs. I used this to test a “loading” status React library, worked well. Siwalik [Couchbase Cloud: It's Managed Couchbase as a Service](https://blog.couchbase.com/introducing-couchbase-cloud/) — Couchbase, one of the earliest databases to be referred to as ‘NoSQL’, has joined the long line of databases with an official, managed, cloud-based service. Scott Anderson [Shell Git: A Shell-Based `git` Implementation](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/shit) — Sorry, I couldn’t resist given it’s actually called `shit` for short. And it’s by open source hero Drew DeVault, the creator of sourcehut. Drew DeVault [CheerpJ 2.0 Released: A Java to WASM and JS Compiler](https://medium.com/leaningtech/cheerpj-2-0-released-381f6d03e4e) — This is a commercial tool (though free for non-commercial purposes) but as someone who started on the Web in the 90s, the idea of Java being compiled _to JavaScript_ continues to amuse :-) Stefano De Rossi [ssh-over-ssm: Use AWS SSM to Connect to Instances over SSH](https://github.com/elpy1/ssh-over-ssm) L1 [Wrangler: A CLI Tool for Working with Cloudflare Workers](https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler) — _Workers_ is Cloudflare’s platform for distributing JavaScript to run at the ‘edge’ around the world. Cloudflare 🐦 Seen on Twitter.. [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/v1581345606/qp1peqndhseajjjcrntq.png)](https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1225879803598790657) Curated by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/). 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