--- title: "GitHub: 'We are taking a stand for developers'" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 293 published_at: "2020-11-18" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/293" --- Plus Firefox's HTTPS-only mode, exporting DynamoDB to S3, and Twitter hires a hacker. #293 — November 18, 2020 [Web Version](https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/293) StatusCode Weekly What's happening in software development, ops, platforms and tools. [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/m9rfywwlmgvfxf2t6pla.jpg)](https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/) ▶[`youtube-dl` Repo Reinstated; GitHub Standing Up for Developers](https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/) — GitHub’s CEO Nat Friedman [says](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432) that a part of the DMCA is _“broken and needs to be fixed. Developers should have the freedom to tinker.”_ And, with that, [the youtube-dl repo](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl) is back and a $1m “developer defense fund” formed. Given GitHub’s owner, Microsoft, is a member of the RIAA which instigated the original takedown, this could get interesting. GitHub [Lightsail Containers: An(other) Easy Way to Run your Containers on AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/lightsail-containers-an-easy-way-to-run-your-containers-in-the-cloud/) — [Lightsail](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/) originally launched as a sort of ‘gateway’ to using AWS by offering EC2’s power packaged up in a more traditional VPS format. _Lightsail Containers_ goes a step further by making container based workloads easier to deploy without going down the full ECS route. Sébastien Stormacq [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/8e034097.jpg)](https://tsdb.co/tobs-github) [🔥 Tobs - The Open-Source Observability Stack for Kubernetes](https://tsdb.co/tobs-github) — Tobs helps you deploy a 💯 observability stack in just a few minutes, complete with Prometheus for monitoring & alerting, Grafana for visualization, and Promscale for long-term storage & SQL + PromQL analytics. [Explore tobs on GitHub to get started >](https://tsdb.co/tobs-github) Timescale sponsor [You're Starting a New Company; What Stack Are You Using?](https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner/status/1325471674171490304) — GitHub’s CTO asked his Twitter followers what language, framework, database, and cloud they’d use if they were starting a new Web oriented service today. The replies were very mixed and might give you some ideas. Jason Warner on Twitter - Twitter [has hired Mudge](https://www.engadget.com/twitter-hires-darpa-google-cybersecurity-expert-052851202.html), a [famous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko) network security expert and hacker, as its head of security. - Firefox has introduced [an HTTPS-only mode](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/11/17/firefox-83-introduces-https-only-mode/) which requests permission before it'll load any non-HTTP resource. - AWS has introduced a new [Network Firewall service](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-network-firewall-new-managed-firewall-service-in-vpc/) for bringing both stateless and stateful traffic inspection rules to your VPCs. Is it cheap? [No.](https://aws.amazon.com/network-firewall/pricing/) - What happens when someone at Facebook reuses the name of your open source project? [This issue thread on GitHub](https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/30395), basically. It seems to have ended well. - Initial reports of the Arm-based M1 chip Macs [are very positive](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro-is-powerful-but-its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/) benchmark and battery-wise. The new Mac Mini compiles WebKit faster than an Intel 12 core Mac Pro and [Rust compilation is much faster](https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328598935380910082) too. - Potential users of Apple's new Arm-based M1 CPU have been concerned about whether Docker will work.. whether or not it needs Rosetta 2's x86 translation. [Here's Docker's update on the matter.](https://www.docker.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-chips-and-docker/) They're working on it. - If you like StatusCode Weekly but want more AI or ML stories, [TheSequence](https://thesequence.substack.com/) is a fantastic option, they cover new ML papers, framework, and approaches every week ([example issue](https://thesequence.substack.com/p/javanet)). 💻 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) — Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers. Vettery ℹ️ _Interested in running a job listing in StatusCode? There's [more info here.](https://booking.cooperpress.com/jobs)_ 📘 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories [Being 'Glue'](https://noidea.dog/glue) — If you’re a software engineer who spends most of your time in meetings, talking to users, asking questions, and generally joining things together rather than writing code, you may be doing a lot of ‘glue work.’ Tanya Reilly [The Light and Dark Side of the 'API Economy'](https://www.swyx.io/api-economy/) — You’d think developers would be at the heart of the ‘API economy’ but it’s a term mostly used in business circles. Shawn explains why it’s really about _“developers reshaping the world in their image.”_ Shawn 'swyx' Wang [Fairness in Multi-Tenant Systems](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/fairness-in-multi-tenant-systems/) — Written by a senior engineer on AWS Lambda, this _“magnum opus about building multi-tenant services at Amazon”_ digs into bringing fairness into multitenant systems to provide predictable performance and availability. David Yanacek (AWS) [How To Execute Ansible Playbooks to Automate Server Setup](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/cheatsheets/how-to-execute-ansible-playbooks-to-automate-server-setup) — A new addition to DigitalOcean’s fantastic suite of ops tutorials. Erika Heidi [How We’re Able to Host 1 Million Sites Per MongoDB Cluster](https://www.wix.engineering/post/how-we-re-able-to-host-1-million-sites-per-mongodb-cluster) — With the right data model everything is possible. Wix Engineering sponsor [A Super Simple Start to Firebase Functions](https://kentcdodds.com/blog/super-simple-start-to-firebase-functions) — I find Google’s cloud services hard to navigate at the best of times so this sort of introduction is always much welcomed. Kent C Dodds [The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders](https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-coders-few-tired/) — _“The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.”_ Clive Thompson [Observy McObservface Episode 7: Operating with Agility—DevOps for Days with Matt Stratton](https://blog.newrelic.com/culture/observy-mcobservface-episode-7-operating-with-agility-devops-for-days-with-matt-stratton/) — First off, did you know New Relic has a podcast called [Observy McObservface?](https://developer.newrelic.com/podcasts/) Second, Red Hat’s Matt Stratton went on to talk about DevOps, developer advocacy and relations, why monitoring matters, and more last week. Jonan Scheffler ▶[The Evolution of AI with Amy Boyd](http://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/739) RunAsRadio podcast [Achieving 100Gbps Intrusion Prevention on a Single Server](https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/11/16/pigasus/) The Morning Paper [How to Make `curl` Request a Site from a Different IP Than in DNS](https://dev.to/peterc/how-to-make-curl-request-a-site-from-a-different-ip-than-in-dns-4n45) Peter Cooper [How Do You Write Simple Explanations Without Sounding Condescending?](https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/11/15/simple-explanations-without-sounding-condescending/) Julia Evans [The Definitive Guide to WSGI](https://developer.okta.com/blog/2020/11/16/definitive-guide-to-wsgi) — Unlocking the mysteries of Python’s WSGI web framework. Phillip Edwards [A Practical Introduction to Container Security](https://cloudberry.engineering/article/practical-introduction-container-security/) Gianluca Brindisi [The Rust Performance Book](https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/) Nicholas Nethercote 🛠 Code & Tools [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/odu1rxzfphpzjee8whvb.jpg)](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-glue-databrew-a-visual-data-preparation-tool-that-helps-you-clean-and-normalize-data-faster/) [AWS Glue DataBrew: A Visual Data Preparation Tool](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-glue-databrew-a-visual-data-preparation-tool-that-helps-you-clean-and-normalize-data-faster/) — Good analytics and reports rely upon good, clean data. _Glue DataBrew_ is a new tool for helping you clean and normalize data stored in S3, Redshift, RDS, and other places which you can then use in systems like SageMaker, Redshift or Athena. Despite the rather dodgy name, this looks like a neat service and I’m looking forward to giving it a try. Amazon Web Services [Elasticsearch 7.10.0 Released](https://www.elastic.co/blog/whats-new-elasticsearch-7-10-0-searchable-snapshots-store-more-for-less) — The latest version of the popular search-focused database features ‘searchable snapshots’, a beta feature for directly searching snapshots (basically Elasticsearch backups!) without restoring them in full which opens up some neat opportunities like keeping larger searchables in snapshots on S3 or Azure Storage, say. Elastic Blog [Engine Yard Kontainers: NoOps App Deployments in Minutes](https://www.engineyard.com/) Engine Yard sponsor [Redpanda: Kafka-Compatible, Real Time Streaming Engine for Modern Apps](https://vectorized.io/open-source/) — _“We go beyond the Kafka protocol, into the future of streaming with inline WASM transforms and geo-replicated hierarchical storage.”_ It’s [open source](https://github.com/vectorizedio/redpanda) and there’s no JVM involved. Vectorized [Electron 11 Released with Experimental Apple Silicon Support](https://www.electronjs.org/releases/stable#11.0.0) — The popular cross platform desktop app environment upgrades its dependencies across the board (hi Chromium 87!) and [begins to take steps](https://www.electronjs.org/blog/apple-silicon) into the Darwin arm64 world. GitHub [Skija: Graphics for the JVM via Google's Skia](https://tonsky.me/blog/skija/) — New Java bindings for Google’s Skia graphics library (used in Chrome, Android, Flutter, and Xamarin). Nikita Prokopov [RAFT: Microsoft's Self Hosted REST API Fuzz Testing Tool](https://github.com/microsoft/rest-api-fuzz-testing) — RAFT stands for _REST API Fuzz Testing._ It’s written in F# and targeted at Azure use cases. Microsoft [Wombat: A Cross Platform GRPC Client Built in Go](https://github.com/rogchap/wombat) Roger Chapman [Hostman: A Deployment Platform for Your Web Apps on DigitalOcean or AWS](https://hostman.com/) — A hosting/deployment platform on top of AWS and DO. Commercial, but with a trial and a free tier for static sites. Hostman - Azure Cosmos DB now has a [serverless/'consumption-based' offering.](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/serverless) - Lucky enough to have an Apple Silicon based machine to play with already? There's [an experimental VS Code build](https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/#osx) for you. - Cloudflare has unveiled [a free tier of Workers KV](https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-kv-free-tier/), their key value store for their _Workers_ serverless edge platform. - AWS's MongoDB-a-like _DocumentDB_ [now supports ACID transactions](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-documentdb-with-mongodb-compatibility-4-0/) and other MongoDB 4.0 features. - You can now finally [export DynamoDB table data directly to S3](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-export-amazon-dynamodb-table-data-to-data-lake-amazon-s3/) for backup or further analysis without jumping through lots of Glue or Data Pipeline hoops. - AWS Step Functions now [supports Amazon EKS service integration.](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/aws-step-functions-now-supports-amazon-eks-service-integration/) 👀 Ooh, interesting.. [quine-relay: An 'Uroboros' Program with 100+ Programming Languages](https://github.com/mame/quine-relay) — An uroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Built by a member of the Ruby core team, quine-relay is a program that starts in Ruby, generates code in a chain of over 100 languages, and ends back at Ruby. The [source](https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb) is a thing of intimidating beauty. Yusuke Endoh 📭 **Got a new email?** You can [change your address here.](https://weekly.statuscode.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) --- **Bored of us?** [Click here to stop getting StatusCode Weekly.](https://weekly.statuscode.com/leave/*|UID|*) --- **Got a link for us?** Reply and tell us. We can't include everything but we'll look at anything you send. Thanks! --- **Want to sponsor?** Email `[kristina@cooperpress.com](mailto:kristina@cooperpress.com)` for details. --- Published by Cooper Press Ltd. 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