#254 — February 19, 2020

Read on the Web

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

5 Monospaced Fonts with Cool Coding Ligatures — I like my distinct characters to remain distinct characters, but using fonts with ligatures (where characters are joined into more classically correct symbols, as common in math, etc.) is becoming more popular and does look ‘cool.’

Matej Latin

How 1500 Bytes Became The MTU of the Internet — The ‘MTU’ (or Maximum Transmission Unit) states how big a single packet can be and a value of around 1500 is reasonably normal. But why? Ben Cox does some digging.

Ben Cox

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1500 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Internet Society Told to Halt .org Sale by Its Own Advisory Council? — The drama around the sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm rattles on with a new development.. members of the Internet Society are going to vote on whether or not the sale should go ahead. Viva la revolución!

The Register

▶  9 Talks from the WebAssembly Summit 2020 — WebAssembly is undoubtedly going to become a more significant technology this decade, both in the browser and server side. These talks provide a glimpse at the cutting edge of the phenomenon with Lin Clark’s talk providing perhaps the best overview of the entire space.

YouTube

GitExplorer: Find the Right git Commands To Use — It’s not unusual to have only mastered a handful of commands with tools like git, but what if you want to go a little off piste? Rather than Googling for an answer, this could help you hone in on the command you need.

Summitech

Ask HN: What Automation Tools Have You Used to Replace Mundane Activities? — I like threads like these because I usually pick up things that I’m not yet doing and perhaps should be.

Hacker News

Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Find a Dev 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

Building a Static 'Serverless' Site using S3 and CloudFront — A developer shares a few pointers based on his experiences.

Sander Knape

How to Spin Up a TLS-Enabled Docker Registry in 5 Minutes — How to bootstrap a Docker registry with TLS on public cloud or private infrastructure in less than 5 minutes using OSS tooling and Kubernetes.

Alex Ellis

Mining My Mailbox for Top Email Service Providers — This is really a story but there’s enough code for you to be able to follow along if you want! It’s interesting to see just how much Sendgrid are represented (who we use to send this newsletter to you).

Opeyemi Obembe

Fault Tolerant Job Scheduling System for Cloud Native Environments — Cloud native, distributed Cron service with API and an easy to use dashboard.

dkron.io sponsor

Learn Computer Vision Basics in Microsoft Excel (Using Just Formulas) — Learn some of the core parts of computer vision using algorithms implemented within Excel (!)

Alok Govil (Amazon)

Demoing Web Applications with Firefox Containers — When demoing a feature to stakeholders or other engineers, incognito/private mode can be a big help but fail when you need to keep multiple sessions open at once. Firefox’s ‘multi-account containers’ extension to the rescue!

Piper McCorkle

Container-Native Multi-Cluster Global Load Balancing with Cloud Armor on Google Cloud Platform

Wil Squires

Observability on Heroku: How to Monitor Apps on a Managed Infrastructure

Michael Bogan

A Mobile Friendly Vim Cheat Sheet — One for the Vim users amongst us :-)

Richard Torruellas

💡 Stories and Opinions

▶  The Dawn of 'Sponsorware' and Sponsored Repos — A podcast interview with a developer who has kept his code in a private repo accessible only to sponsors (via the GitHub Sponsors program) until a certain sponsorship threshold was reached. An interesting idea.

Changelog podcast

On the Maintenance of Large Open-Source Projects — A written-up group chat with former Node core team member Bert Belder (of libuv fame) and Leaflet creator Vladimir Agafonkin about what it takes to maintain large open source projects.

Anne-Laure Civeyrac

Calculating Pi: One Person's Attempt at Breaking the Pi World Record — There’s not a lot to this story but it’s neat to see that he pulled it off with relatively little resources. I imagine our phones will be able to do this in seconds in 10 years 😉

Timothy Mullican

Moving to An Era of Decentralized DNS Registry? — An ambitious public blockchain project is trying to reinvent the process of assigning domain names.

Faisal Khan

Pay Up, Or We’ll Make Google Ban Your Ads? — Apparently people are trying to extort AdSense users by threatening to have bots click on their ads to get them booted out of the program.

Krebs on Security

An Argument for Automation — I’m also in the club of developers who’ll spend an hour trying to automate a 10 second task, but Kent explains why this can be a good idea very well.

Kent C Dodds

Is JAMstack All Branding and Little Substance? — Is the JAMstack just fancy buzzword marketing or is there actual substance behind the term?

Brian Rinaldi

🛠 Code and Tools

GDBFrontend: A Graphical Frontend for the gdb Debugger — If you need to use a debugger like gdb but you want a more graphical interface, check this out.

Oğuzhan Eroğlu

Introducing Scalar: Git at Scale for Everyone — A new tool from Microsoft aimed at ‘accelerating’ particularly large Git repos.

Derrick Stolee (Microsoft)

It's Time for You to Install Windows Terminal — If you’re on Windows and you’re down with that text based life, the new Windows Terminal is ready and a must have, according to Scott Hanselman.

Scott Hanselman

Full Visibility with Automated Distributed Tracing for Microservices. Try Free

Epsagon sponsor

Nodebook: A Minimalist Multi Language REPL with a Web-Based UI — I think this started life as a Node specific REPL but it now supports C, C++, Elixir, Go, Node, PHP, Ruby and more. It’s principally written in Go and TypeScript, however.

Jérôme Schneider

goxygen: Generate a Go and MongoDB-Backed React Project in Seconds — An opinionated full stack app generator that builds a skeleton backend that uses Go and MongoDB with React on the front end.

Sasha Shpota

IRedis: A Terminal Client for Redis with Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting — The redis-cli tool is pretty basic, but IRedis takes things up a notch with syntax coloring, reverse searching of previous commands, better display of query results, and more.

赖信涛

🐦 Seen on Twitter..