Enriching Excel with Functional Programming and LAMBDA — Microsoft Excel continues to dominate the world of business and has even been called the ‘world’s most popular programming environment’ over the years. New features are set to take this even further by allowing Excel users to define their own functions.

Microsoft Research

Google Cloud Run Adds WebSockets, HTTP-2 and GRPC Bidirectional Streams — Cloud Run, Google’s managed ‘run containers serverlessly’ platform, has added end-to-end HTTP/2 connections, WebSockets support, and gRPC bidirectional streaming. These features are in ‘public preview’ for now.

Google Cloud Blog

Getting Started with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) — What are progressive web apps and how do they compare with native apps? Learn about the benefits of PWAs and see how they remove the friction and roadblocks associated with the adoption of native apps.

OutSystems sponsor

Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After 6 Years in the Industry — This is a fun piece because we surely all change certain technical opinions over time. An Amazon engineer reflects on his shifts in opinion which includes liking typed languages and the blind following of best practices.

Chris Kiehl

Firefox Cracks Down on 'Supercookies' — Firefox has already blocked cookies from known trackers and scripts from known fingerprinting companies and is now partitioning network connections and caches by origin to prevent cache abuse used for surreptitiously tracking users.

Mozilla Security Blog

Postgres on ARM-Based AWS EC2 Instances: Is It Any Good? — As exciting as Apple’s developments with its own ARM-based chips are, AWS also has made big progress with its own Graviton2 CPUs – here’s how they fare when running Postgres.

Jobin Augustine and Sergey Kuzmichev

Basic Scripting with Awk and Gnuplot — There are a lot of ways to solve the “I need to plot some data quickly” problem but what about doing it in a very Unix-y way that will work on 1001 systems? Here’s the bare basics.

Chris Tomy

The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let's Encrypt — Let’s Encrypt, the non profit certificate authority, is huge, and issues about 2 million certificates per day. Unsurprisingly, their database is important and needs to scale, and here’s how they do it (spoiler: they use MariaDB).

Josh Aas and James Renken (Let's Encrypt)

How We Cut Cost on 55% of Our Storage Without Deleting a Single File? — We understood that NOT all files should be treated equally. Read the full story.

Wix Engineering sponsor

Designing a Ruby Serverless Runtime for Cloud Functions — A senior software engineer at Google digs into the design decisions and trade-offs involved in bringing Ruby support to Google Cloud Functions.

Daniel Azuma

The Architecture of My (Automated) Life — A developer goes into serious depth about how he’s automated numerous aspects of his life. I couldn’t keep up with this many systems myself, but hats off to him.

Martijn Steenbergen

Building a Knowledge Graph in Amazon Neptune using Amazon Comprehend Events — Neptune is a managed graph database available on AWS that I rarely see anyone writing about. So this week we get a treat with this writeup of building a knowledge base on top of it, as well as a look at enabling low code graph data apps with Neptune and Graphistry.

Amazon Web Services

Feb 16: Managing Software Development in a High-Compliance Environment

99 Percent Visible - DevOps Tech Talks sponsor

Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon — Details some background information on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these new CPUs.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto (Mozilla)

wuzz: Interactive CLI Tool for HTTP Inspection — Think curl but with a text UI to show off request and response headers, manage params, etc. Written in Go (for which, unsurprisingly, we have a newsletter :-)).

Adam Tauber

Amazon Unveils Open Distro for Elasticsearch (and Kibana) — In case you missed the big Elasticsearch licensing story last week, Amazon has forked Elasticsearch and will be offering its own Apache 2.0 licensed open source variants of Elasticsearch and Kibana from here on.

Amazon Web Services

Twitter Releases a Full-Teatured Rich Text Editor for iOS Apps — Twitter Text Editor is an Apache 2.0 licensed text editor control for use in iOS apps. GitHub repo.

Twitter

Piku: The 'Tiniest PaaS You've Ever Seen' — A Heroku (and dokku)-inspired git push to deploy system. Written in Python and targets Ubuntu and Debian. GitHub repo.

Jeff Lindsay

nq: Simple Unix Command Line Queuing System — Small utilities for creating a lightweight job queue system in a very Unix-y way. Jobs are queued in an interesting way with chains of file locks.

Leah Neukirchen

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