#300 — January 20, 2021

Web Version

😎 If you're looking for something fun to do and virtual breadboards, chips, and 6502 assembly are up your street.. we have a really neat item at the end of today's newsletter :-)
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Peter Cooper, your editor

StatusCode Weekly
What's happening in software development, ops, platforms and tools.

Why Elasticsearch Had to Change Its License — This is a complicated story that ties into a bunch of things that have been happening over the past few years. In short, Amazon/AWS is keen to offer new services and often releases services built on open source projects (e.g. RDS with MySQL and Postgres).

Some companies that steward open source projects (like MongoDB and Elastic) want Amazon to contribute back to the ecosystem and have adopted more restrictive non-‘open source’ licenses. The downsides? Many, but just to start there's the potential disrespect to thousands of contributors to these formerly open source projects. It remains a complex and ongoing issue.

Shay Banon (Elastic)

Putting Food on the Table While Giving Away Codelibcurl is a fundamental part of Internet infrastructure tooling now and its creator has had to balance it being free with keeping ‘food on the table’ and earning a living. Here’s his story.

Daniel Stenberg

Remote Instructor-Led Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, & Python Training — We offer live-streaming remote training sessions for individual engineers and companies that want to augment their knowledge in Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Python. We’ve trained over 10,000 engineers via our carefully crafted classes.

Ardan Labs sponsor

An Unlikely Database Migration — We’ve all simply used text files (whether CSV or a lump of JSON) as adhoc databases, and so was the case at Tailscale, a networking company. Here’s how they migrated from a single JSON blob ‘database’ to etcd to help their control plane scale into the future.

Brad Fitzpatrick and David Crawshaw

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness — A technical director at ThoughtWorks introduces a framework for increasing developer effectiveness through the idea of highly optimized feedback loops.

Tim Cochran

An Alternative Way for Google to Block Sites — Once upon a time, Google dropping you from its search results could be disastrous, but now they can, in theory, block your site from loading in Chrome altogether via the well-intended Safe Browsing system. There are some tips here for mitigating this risk.

Gonzalo Sainz Trápaga

Quick Bits

  • Bugtraq, a long standing (since 1993!) computer security mailing list, is shutting down.
  • GitHub recently fired an employee for making a reference to 'Nazis' on an internal Slack chat room but has since reversed the decision and the head of HR is resigning.
  • Last week we mentioned AWS was dropping 'alt-tech' social media platform Parler as a customer. Here's what Parler is allegedly looking for at a new provider. That's a lot of kit.
  • DuckDuckGo, a privacy oriented search engine, is really taking off and is now beginning to pass 100 million searches per day.

📘 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

Securing Your GitHub Project — 15 tips for improving the security of any projects you have hosted on GitHub from using two factor auth to security scanning and using trusted GitHub Actions.

Marcin Hoppe

Language-Agnostic Guidelines on Naming Variables — JavaScript is used although the basic principles can be applied to most languages.

Artem Zakharchenko

The Cost of Errors: Reduce Churn with Granular Data in Video Analytics — Download our latest whitepaper to learn about error types and how to calculate their potential effect to your business.

Bitmovin Inc. sponsor

Introducing Message Archiving and Analytics for Amazon SNS — How enabling SNS delivery to Kinesis Data Firehose lets you add storage and analytics services into the mix with an example showing how to store SNS messages in S3 via Kinesis Data Firehose.

James Beswick (AWS)

Linux and Powershell — It’s been possible to use Microsoft’s Powershell in Linux for a while. This is a very simple introduction, but the Hacker News discussion off the back of it provides more value if you choose to give it a go.

Matteo Guadrini

A Photo Sharing Website on Less Than a Cup of Coffee Per Month — How one photographer’s site works by tying together a variety of AWS services including Lambda, Rekognition (for label detection), Amplify, Cloudfront, and S3.

Corneliu Croitoru

The Complexities of Creating a New Capability at the BBC — In an organization as complex as the BBC, adding a new feature to their Web site platform involves a lot of collaboration, planning, and process.

Dave Lee (BBC)

How .NET Core 3.1 Has Saved Azure 20,000 CPU Cores — Azure migrated their Active Directory gateway service from .NET to .NET Core and the throughput gains were so significant they could reduce their fleet size by 50%.

Avanindra Paruchuri (.NET Blog)

Building DigitalOcean's API Gateway — The full story of how DigitalOcean built its own API gateway in Go.

Maurício Linhares

Rust Is A Hard Way to Make A Web API — We run so many positive stories about Rust that some balance is always welcomed.

Tom MacWright

6 Simple but Powerful Habits for Effective Developers

Okta sponsor

Fulfilling The Promise of 'CI/CD' — The author says that when we say CI/CD, we’re nearly always talking about continuous integration and not true continuous deployment. Here she makes the case for us all to adopt true CI/CD in our projects.

Charity Majors

Software Effort Estimation Is Mostly Fake Research — Some good HN discussion off the back of this one.

Derek Jones

Why The Service Mesh Should Fade Away From Sight

David Mooter

🛠 Code and Tools

Altair: A Feature-Rich Cross Platform GraphQL GUI Client — A tool clearly written using Web technologies but available for macOS, Windows, Linux, etc. for testing and working with GraphQL and GraphQL APIs.

Sir Muel

Wine 6.0 Released: Run Windows Apps on POSIX-Compliant OS — A significant release for a tool commonly associated with running Windows apps on Linux.

Wine Team

go-enry: A Faster File Programming Language Detector — When they say ‘faster’, they’re comparing to Linguist, as used by GitHub.

go-enry

Foam: A Personal Knowledge Management and Sharing System for VSCode
Foam

.NET NanoFramework: Write C# Code for Embedded Systems
.NET Foundation and Contributors

💻 Jobs

Find a 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

🎉 Fun!

Tejotron: A Virtual Breadboard and 6502 in the Browser — This is a fun project, though it’ll take you a bit of fiddling to get up to speed with it. Here’s a video of it in action to get a better feel. Note: You have to click Start Simulation before Run Simulation will work.

Tejotron