The History of the URL — Cloudflare’s blog continues to be a great example of technical content with a very thorough walk through the history and anatomy of URLs and how they came into being.

Zack Bloom (Cloudflare)

A Look at Firecracker: AWS's Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications — Firecracker is the (open source) virtual machine monitor that powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. This post summarizes an academic paper on the topic.

the morning paper

Build Video in Just Two API Calls — 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

PowerShell 7.0 Released — PowerShell is a long standing shell-meets-scripting language commonly associated with Windows but now usable on Linux and macOS too. v7.0 introduces new logical operators to the language, pipeline parallelization, and lots of smaller bits and pieces.

Joey Aiello (Microsoft)

Bottlerocket: A New Open Source OS for Container Hosting — Bottlerocket is a new Amazon-designed, Linux-based open source operating system that’s optimized specifically for use as a container host.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

Microsoft Unveils a Free Tier for Azure Cosmos DB — A nice deal if you want to kick the tires of Cosmos DB, Azure's multi-model database that supports numerous APIs out of the box (including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin). For free you get 5GB of storage and 400 RU/s (Request Units/sec) which vaguely correlates to either 400KB/s read or 80KB/s write.

Microsoft

The Life of a Data Byte — In this issue we move from URLs to mere bytes. This is a fun trip through time of various storage technologies and how bits and bytes have formed our storage world.

Jessie Frazelle

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 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

Feedback Ladders: The Code Review System Netlify Follows — An introduction to how Netlify handles code reviews using a system and terminology of their own creation.

Cohn-Wein, Lavavej, and Wang

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

Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute — “Amazon is doubling down on its silicon efforts, having announced the new Graviton2 processor last December, and planning public availability on EC2 in the next few months.”

Andrei Frumusanu

VMware Rejuvenates Once Again With Kubernetes Injection

Mitch Wagner (The Next Platform)

How I Built The Best-Selling BlackBerry App of All-Time — Despite being about an ecosystem that has somewhat come and gone, this is a neat story/look back that leant entirely upon a ‘silly little technical trick’.

Neil Sainsbury

The Story of the PS2’s Backwards Compatibility From the Engineer Who Built It

Tom James

“Let’s Use Kubernetes!” Now You Have 8 Problems

Itamar Turner-Trauring

The Startup CTO Security Checklist

Sqreen sponsor

Run More Stuff in Docker — “In 2020, Docker is the best medium for distributing and running most developer-facing software.” But why?

Jonathan Bergknoff

Managed Kubernetes Price Comparison — Focuses on the Kubernetes platforms offered by Google, AWS, Microsoft and Digital Ocean.

DevOps Directive

Stryker: Test Your Tests with Mutation Testing — Stryker fiddles with your tests (in a large and complicated number of ways) and expects this to break them. If it doesn’t, your tests are too brittle and therefore failed the test. This is not something to run frequently (as it can be very slow) but is an interesting way to stress test your tests, if you will. It comes in JavaScript, C# and Scala flavors.

Jansen, de Lang, et al.

Memcached 1.6.0 Released — The external Flash storage system is now compiled in by default and lets you use external storage as if it were memory.

memcached community

Code Tour: A VS Code Extension for Recording and Playing Guided Tours of Codebases — Lets you create or replay a series of interactive steps where you can walk through and describe (or, as a viewer, learn) a codebase. I hope this idea takes off in popularity.

Visual Studio Marketplace

Introducing a Dart Runtime for AWS Lambda — Dart is a popular general purpose language originally built by Google as a sort of more structured JavaScript replacement but which is now finding its own niches.

Sebastian Doell (AWS)

OpenSilver: A Modern, Plugin-Free Reimplementation of Silverlight — A replacement for Microsoft’s deprecated Silverlight runtime. It’s open-source and runs in current browsers via WebAssembly. Here’s the announcement post.

Userware

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB Now Generally Available — A tool (for both macOS and Windows) to help you build and visualize high-performance data models and accelerate the development of DynamoDB operations.

Amazon Web Services