#273 — July 1, 2020

Web Version

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

Redis's Creator Steps Down from Leading the Redis Project — In the past ten years the Redis data structure and caching server has found itself at the heart of a lot of webapps and stacks. Its creator, who has led the project almost single handed since its creation, is now stepping down and talks about his preference for building new things versus being a ‘maintainer.’

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Amazon Honeycode: A New AWS to Build Apps without Code — Despite some reservations over the name, this feels a bit like Access meets Excel meets the cloud and will allow a wider range of users to build data-driven online apps without learning to code.

Jeff Barr

LogDNA: Log Management Built for DevOps 🔎 — Manage logs on your terms: Ingest logs with turnkey integrations. Retain only what matters to you. Auto-parse common formats, and set up custom parsing for not-so-common ones. Check out our growing library of educational resources.

LogDNA sponsor

Perl 7: It's Going to Be Perl 5 with Modern Defaults — Perl 5 came out in 1994(!) and has been actively used since. Development on Perl 6 began in 2000 but it eventually mutated into its own language and has been renamed Raku. So what was Perl to do? Jump to version 7, which is “going to be Perl 5.32, mostly.”

Brian D Foy

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Use Vettery to connect with growing tech teams at startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Vettery

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — 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.

📕 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

Prefetching? At This Age? — An excellent trip down the rabbit hole of caching, CDNs, what issues can occur when both clients and CDNs are caching content, and how the Age HTTP header helps. Plus a Chromium bug, just for good measure.

Tim Kadlec

RFC8765: DNS Push Notifications — An in-development spec for notifying clients about DNS changes rather than having them needlessly poll over and over.

IETF

A Principled Approach to GraphQL Query Cost Analysis — Why you should measure the cost of your GraphQL queries, and how you should do it.

James Davis

Security Engineer’s First 90 Days Checklist — Prioritize your security efforts, implement the right security processes and develop a security culture in your company.

Sqreen sponsor

DigitalOcean's 'How To Code in Go' eBook — Written by Mark Bates, Cory Lanou, and Timothy J. Raymond, this Creative Commons-licensed 600 page book is very much aimed at beginners.

DigitalOcean

How I Used Lambda and EFS for Massively Parallel Compute — Last week we featured the great news that you can now mount EFS file systems within Lambda functions, and there are already stories about how and why this is a game changer – this is the one of the best ones.

Peter Sbarski

Is it Time to Stop Recommending 'Clean Code'?

qntm

🛠 Code and Tools

Amazon RDS Proxy Now Generally Available — RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for RDS and likely to be of particular interest to folks building serverless apps due to the high number of open database connections that can occur.

Channy Yun (AWS)

DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) — A high quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite. v3.12.0 came out last week with improved table editing and conditional formatting when browsing data (a bit like a spreadsheet might).

Martin Kleusberg et al.

Aviary.sh: A Minimal Bash-Powered Distributed Configuration Management System — Think something like Ansible but entirely written in bash scripts(!)

team.video

Learn Practical Steps to Reduce Your AWS Bill

CloudZero sponsor

GitHubDefreshed: A User Script to Bring Back the Old GitHub Repo Layout — If you happen to hate the new GitHub repository page layout, this Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script brings back the old layout.

Kir Antipov

Find Your Most Expensive Lines of Code: Amazon CodeGuru Now Generally Available — Currently for JVM dwellers only, CodeGuru can be used to detect potential defects in Java code that “are difficult for developers to find” as well as to visualize and fine-tune JVM applications generally.

Amazon Web Services

ec2.shop: A 'Hacker Way' to Compare AWS EC2 Instances — While this is a useful spreadsheet when viewed through a Web browser, you can query it directly from curl too for simpler results.

BetterDev

Wren: A Small, Class-Based Concurrent Scripting Langauge“Think Smalltalk in a Lua-sized package with a dash of Erlang..” It looks a bit like Ruby crossed with C# to me 😁

Bob Nystrom et al.

Lua 5.4 Released — Lua is a popular, lightweight embeddable language (and very commonly used within games or any programs that support user customization). 5.4 brings a generational GC to the table and lots of other niceties.

Lua

PHONK: A Creative Scripting Toolbox for Android Devices — If you’ve got any old Android devices sat around, this could be a way to have some fun with them. It’s based around JavaScript.

Victor Diaz

AWS App2Container: A New Containerizing Tool for Java & .NET Apps

Channy Yun (AWS)