What I've Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry — One thing I learnt when doing last week’s ‘best of 2020’ issue was that you really like big picture wisdom.. and this software engineer who has retired after many decades in the profession has some to share.

Joel Goldberg

My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions. Yours Might Be Too — And there’s a tool you can use to test it. Anders kept noticing his idle SSH sessions quickly became dead or frozen – here’s how he hunted down the problem, his ISP!

Anders Trier

Adopt Progressive Delivery. Reduce Your Risk. Empower Your Teams — Make speed a habit and gain the flexibility to ship as fast as your competitors. With less risk and more control. Get your copy of Progressive Delivery by LaunchDarkly for free today.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

Merge Chance: Will Your Pull Request Get Merged? — A bare-bones tool for seeing what percentage of a GitHub-based project’s pull requests from outsiders get merged in. For example, 83% do for Redis whereas only 23% do for Vue.js.

Piotr Zakrzewski

Reverse Engineering the 'Source Code' of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine — In a distant ‘biology is absolutely not software engineering’ kinda way, mRNA-based vaccines kinda act like programs for cells in your body to produce certain types of protein.

Bert Hubert

Learn Go in (About) 5 Minutes — This handy primer was inspired by some other similar recent projects like A Half-Hour to Learn Rust and A Half-Hour to Learn Zig. If you like to get a broad idea of how a language feels and works, these sorts of introductions hit the spot.

James Mills

I Received First-Ever Donation on my Open Source Project And.. — The creator of a VS Code extension reflects on just how much a single initial donation meant to him. If you’re looking to spread a little love, there are worse things you could do than give a few bucks to the creators of tools you love.

Gourav Goyal

Stealing Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time — This isn’t a particularly elaborate hack but it’s neat to see how this ‘wannabe bug hunter’ discovered a way to extract single frames from private YouTube videos.

David Schütz

An Engineering Leader’s Guide to OpenTelemetry

Lightstep sponsor

Using Checksums to Verify Syncing 100M Database Records — A Shopify engineer thinks through the challenge of rapidly checking that two datastores are in sync using SQL.

Simon Hørup Eskildsen

Implementing mTLS and Securing Apache Kafka at Zendesk — Zendesk shares how they secured their Kafka clusters by building a self-hosted mTLS authentication system and how it affected performance.

Joy Nag

Build Your Own Text Editor — “This is an instruction booklet that shows you how to build a text editor in C.” And that, really, is it. A straightforward, practical introduction to C and related topics.

snaptoken

Preparing for a Facebook Senior Software Engineer Interview — Even if you have no desire to work for Facebook, you might find it interesting to get a peek behind the scenes at what you’d be grilled about in an interview. Algorithms mostly!

David Qorashi

gping: Ping, but with a Line Chart — I had a shaky connection a few months ago and wanted a more visual way to see the results of pinging 8.8.8.8 (I know, I know..) – this does the job pretty well and is written in Rust.

Tom Forbes

Squoosh: Browser Based Image Compressor from Google — Make images smaller using best-in-class codecs, right in the browser. There’s also a CLI you can use if you have multiple images to compress at once. If you've heard of this before, yes, it's not brand new but it's had some big updates.

Google Chrome Team

Finally, a Headless CMS That Writers Don't Need Training to Use — GatherContent provides a familiar editing experience for writers, without compromising on headless CMS principles.

GatherContent sponsor

Getting Started with Buildah for Building OCI Container Images — Buildah is an open source tool for building Open Container Initiative Docker and Kubernetes-compatible container images from scratch or from a pre-existing Dockerfile. No daemons needed either so it’s easy to slip into scripts and build pipelines.

Cedric Clyburn

Theseus OS: A Modern Experimental OS Written From Scratch in Rust — This won’t ever be your daily driver, but it’s a place to experiment with ‘novel’ operating system design ideas.

Theseus OS

napi-rs: A Minimal Library for Building Node Addons in Rust — Neon appeared in 2019 as a way to ‘electrify your Node with the power of Rust’ (Rust being an increasingly popular, high performance, safety-first systems language) and napi-rs gives us more of the same with a slightly different take.

LongYinan

AWS Workshops: Workshops Created by Amazon Web Services — Nice to see AWS using their own TLD here (.aws) :-) They’ve long produced numerous workshops covering how to use their services but here they’re all indexed and categorized in a single place.

AWS

Find Your Next Job Through Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Hired