#258 — March 18, 2020

Read on the Web

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

✍️ Editor's note: Given the developing international situation, you might notice some changes over the coming weeks as we adapt to things. We hope you're doing as well as the situation allows and we plan to stay on the air 🙂 If you release anything or even have something you want to share with the developer community, hit reply and let us know.

Cloudflare on Recent Changes in Internet Traffic — As the COVID-19 emergency continues and increasing numbers of people are working from home (or are quarantined at home in various ways) the Internet has become both more essential and more heavily used. As a carrier of a lot of traffic nowadays, Cloudflare has some unique insights into how things have shifted.

Louis Poinsignon

Finding a Problem at the Bottom of the Google Stack — A write up of how Google’s SRE practices identified and fixed an issue that was, quite literally, at the bottom of their hardware stack, and an interesting example of how physical problems can have software manifestations.

Steve McGhee (Google)

Hosted CI/CD for Teams That Don’t Like Bottlenecks — For every $1 invested in Semaphore, engineers gain $23 in reclaimed productivity. Who said money can’t buy you time?

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

JavaScript: The First 20 Years — Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich (the creator of JavaScript) have written a paper for the forthcoming History of Programming Languages Conference about how a ‘sidekick scripting language for Java’ was built and has grown.

Allen Wirfs-Brock

npm is Joining GitHub — The company behind the leading package repository in the JavaScript ecosystem is being acquired by GitHub (who already launched their own package registry less than a year ago).

GitHub

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

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

📕 Tutorials, Stories, and Opinions

NTP: Building A More Accurate Time Service at Facebook Scale — This is something I’m never going to need to do, but it’s a fascinating tale of how Facebook has squeezed down their time updating accuracy from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds, and released their own public NTP service.

Oleg Obleukhov (Facebook)

Rust and Serverless, with a Focus on Cloudflare Workers“I just wanted to prototype a simple REST API to see how this would work using serverless and Rust. Below are my findings.”

Simon Werner

End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments — Troubleshoot faster & reduce MTTR with automated data correlation, payload visibility, & seamless monitoring. Try free.

Epsagon sponsor

How Netflix Uses Druid for Real-Time Insights“We’re currently ingesting at over 2 million events per second, and querying over 1.5 trillion rows to get detailed insights into how our users are experiencing the service.”

Ben Sykes (Netflix)

The Anatomy of My Kubernetes Cluster — This is a really cool writeup if you like things on the geekier end of the spectrum. An engineer built a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run as a Kubernetes cluster and here’s how it’s formed, complete with photos.

Antonin Stefanutti

How WebAssembly Brings Extensibility to Network Proxies

Google Open Source

On the Chronic Suffering of the VB.NET Community — I’m not in this space, but this is an interesting perspective on the modern Visual Basic community.

Anthony D. Green

The Reckless, Infinite Scope of Web Browsers“I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.”

Drew DeVault

Several Grumpy Opinions About Remote Work and Videoconferencing — These issues have affected remote working companies for ages, and now that many more of us are moving in that direction..

Avery Pennarun (Tailscale)

🛠 Code and Tools

Creative Commons Unveils a 'Catalog API' for Public Use — Integrating the API into your application will give your users access to the largest collection of openly licensed images online.

Creative Commons

Now Available: Amazon ElastiCache Global Datastore for Redis — ElastiCache Global Datastore for Redis lets you replicate a cluster in one region to clusters in up to two other regions.

Amazon Web Services

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite

Buildkite sponsor

Ask HN: Are There Good Self-Hosted Video Conference Tools? — Turns out it’s actually pretty difficult, but there are options.

Hacker News

Ask HN: Which Configuration Management Software Would/Should We Use in 2020?

Hacker News