--- title: "The apps GitLab runs on, a new EC2 instance type, and Swift heads to Windows" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 266 published_at: "2020-05-13" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/266" --- Plus John Conway's esoteric programming language, why we still use on-prem servers, and how SHA-256 hashing works. #266 — May 13, 2020 [Read on the Web](https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/266) 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/v1589382797/d8pyjeivjaelkr5vvorj.png) [How Facebook Has Rebuilt Their Facebook.com Tech Stack](https://engineering.fb.com/web/facebook-redesign/) — Facebook completely rebuilt its tech stack to achieve its performance and growth goals. Here’s how they’ve done it with React, Relay, SVG, code-splitting, and more. Ashley Watkins & Royi Hagigi (Facebook) [GitLab's Tech Stack Applications Diagram and Spreadsheet](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/tech-stack-applications/) — It’s neat to see what systems a popular, widely distributed company like GitLab is using. The [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mTNZHsK3TWzQdeFqkITKA0pHADjuurv37XMuHv12hDU/edit#gid=0) goes into quite some detail. GitLab [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/80c0e2b6.png)](https://www.ardanlabs.com/corporate-training/?utm_source=Cooperpress%20PrimaryV2) [We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training](https://www.ardanlabs.com/corporate-training/?utm_source=Cooperpress%20PrimaryV2) — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible. Ardan Labs sponsor [What The Heck Happened with `.org`?](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/05/11/what-the-heck-happened-with-org/) — Fingers crossed this really is the end of the “.org TLD for sale” story as it’s a high level overview of the whole affair. Eric Rescorla [EC2 Announces Price Reductions](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-price-reduction-for-ec2-instance-saving-plans-and-standard-reserved-instances/) — Though it only affects reserved instances or those using saving plans. On Demand remains as-is. If you’re using EC2 in certain regions though, there are some nice reductions to be had. Amazon Web Services [The Big Cloud Data Boom Gets Even Bigger, Thanks to COVID-19?](https://www.datanami.com/2020/05/07/the-big-cloud-data-boom-gets-even-bigger-thanks-to-covid-19/) — It’s not like the cloud was doing badly beforehand, but the pandemic is apparently encouraging companies to virtualize as much of their operations as possible. Alex Woodie (Datanami) **Quick bytes:** - Cookie consent walls and 'scrolling == consent' approaches to GDPR [are not acceptable](https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/no-cookie-consent-walls-and-no-scrolling-isnt-consent-says-eu-data-protection-body/) says the EU. - AWS EC2 has a new instance type: [M6g instances](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-m6g-ec2-instances-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton2/) that use Amazon's own Arm-based Graviton2 chips. Big performance boosts for traditional use cases are boasted. - Quantum programming is, um, kinda hard and [to put it Internet terms, "we're at the dawn of 1995."](https://www.protocol.com/Manuals/quantum-computing/when-writing-quantum-algorithm-avoid-using-quantum-computer-zapata) - Unfortunately Stack Overflow has had to [lay off 15% of its staff](https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/05/07/the-way-forward/) but this update covers how they're moving forwards. - Has India produced [too many unemployable software engineers?](https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/) - The Eclipse Foundation is [moving to Europe.](https://eclipse-foundation.blog/2020/05/12/moving-to-europe/) - The [next version](https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/) of Apple's _Swift_ programming language is adding support for Windows. - Backblaze is back with their [latest hard drive stats roundup](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/) for Q1 2020. - Apple [seems to be snapping up](https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engineers) a lot of names from the Kubernetes and containers space. 💻 Jobs [Find a 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 specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started. 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) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere. X-Team ℹ️ _Interested in running a job listing in StatusCode Weekly? There's [more info here.](https://booking.cooperpress.com/jobs)_ 📕 Stories and Opinions [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/v1589382302/cj0jnifv90fj8k825tbl.png)](http://raganwald.com/2020/05/03/fractran.html) [John Conway's FRACTRAN, A Ridiculous, Yet Surprisingly Deep Language](http://raganwald.com/2020/05/03/fractran.html) — If you’ve got the time, this is a beautiful deep dive into [FRACTRAN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN), a rather esoteric language that’s written in the form of a list of fractions. Reg Braithwaite [A Google Cloud Support Engineer Solves A Tough DNS Case](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-support-engineer-solves-a-tough-dns-case) — How a Google Cloud support engineer found one customer’s missing DNS packets. We do love a good story. Antonio Messina (Google Cloud Blog) [Ask HN: Is Your Company Sticking to On-Premise Servers? Why?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999) — No-one expected this to turn into a 750+ comment thread but there’s a lot of insights being shared here. Hacker News [How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week](http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/handling-2x-traffic-in-a-week.htm) — _Very_ basic, but always nice to hear something from a place like Khan Academy. Marta Kosarchyn (Khan Academy Engineering) [Patio11's Law: "The Software Economy Is Bigger Than You Think"](https://secondbreakfast.co/patio11-s-law) Will Schreiber [The Modern HTTPS World Has No Place for Old Web Servers](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/HTTPSNoOldServers) Chris Siedenmann [Why We At $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched To $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY](https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/05/10/why-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology/) — Unsurprisingly this is a humorous tongue in cheek piece. Saagar Jha 📖 Tutorials [An Animation of the SHA-256 Hash Function in Your Terminal](https://github.com/in3rsha/sha256-animation) — The animation is cool, but the step-by-step explanation of how SHA-256 works is even better, IMO. You’ll learn something here. Greg Walker [Getting Started with Serverless on AWS](https://emshea.com/post/serverless-getting-started) — Rather than a tutorial, this is a ‘resource guide’ based on the path Emily took, so it links to tutorials, examples, and templates to help you flesh out your own learning path. I like this style of post. Emily Shea [Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite](https://buildkite.com/?pk_campaign=statuscode-130520&pk_source=cp-statuscode&pk_medium=newsletter) Buildkite sponsor [Not Every Container Has An Operating System Inside..](https://iximiuz.com/en/posts/not-every-container-has-an-operating-system-inside/) — This should help you understand containers just a little more. Ivan Velichko [Linux Containers in a Few Lines of Code](https://zserge.com/posts/containers/) — This isn’t for your production use, but for a learning experience. Can you figure out how Linux containers work by implementing them from scratch in C? Serge Zaitsev [How to Build a Serverless Martian Weather Display with CircuitPython and AWS Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-martian-weather-display-with-circuitpython-and-aws-lambda/) — No lie, this tutorial compelled me to buy my own PyPortal last week. Neat device.. has wifi, can load stuff from the Web, basically a 3.2” screen you can code with Python :-) Moheeb Zara (AWS) ▶[Databases on Kubernetes: Why You Should Care](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoj_vSTPB54) — Now Kubernetes supports StatefulSets and CRDs, one of the next logical steps is to run databases on it.. Denis Rosa 🛠 Code and Tools [Introducing Scylla Open Source 4.0](https://www.scylladb.com/2020/05/07/introducing-scylla-open-source-4-0/) — Scylla (a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL data store aiming to be the “world’s fastest column-store database”) now provides production-ready lightweight Transactions (LWT), a DynamoDB-compatible API (Alternator), and operator for Kubernetes, and more. Dor Laor [End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments](https://epsagon.com/try-free/?utm_source=Advertisement&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CooperPress-StatusCodeSL) — Quickly identify and solve issues in your modern environment with full data correlation, payload visibility and automated tracing. Try free. Epsagon sponsor [Announcing TypeScript 3.9](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-3-9/) — If you’re unfamiliar with TypeScript, it’s a language that builds on JavaScript by adding syntax for type declarations and annotations. Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft) [Janet: A Lightweight, Modern Lisp for System Scripting](https://janet-lang.org/) — The entire language packs into under 1MB and it’s easy to port. Calvin Rose and contributors [GCC 10.1 Released](https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2020-May/232334.html) — GCC gets much improved C++20 and C2X language support. Note that GCC 10 overall [switched](https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/changes.html) to many more strict defaults so code not prepared for it can run into compilation problems.. Jakub Jelinek (Red Hat) [BotKube: A Messaging Bot for Monitoring and Debugging Kubernetes Clusters](https://www.botkube.io/) InfraCloud [Fonts Extracted from Old BIOS and VGA ROMs](https://github.com/spacerace/romfont) Stec Dose Curated by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/). [Change your email address](https://webopsweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://webopsweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*). © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom