Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers — Reed–Solomon codes are a group of error correcting codes used in technologies as diverse as CDs, DSL connections and RAID. Bert attempts to boil down the math to an explanation you can follow.

Bert Hubert

Forrester New Wave: Feature Management & Experimentation — [Download Today] Learn why leading industry analyst firm Forrester has identified Feature Management and Experimentation as the latest must-have DevOps tools to enable teams to create faster release cycles while staying connected with customers.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

Building a WebAuthn Click Farm — How a developer has attempted to build a ‘click farm’ to ‘bypass’ Cloudflare’s proposed CAPTCHA killer with some USB security keys, an Arduino, and a bit of Python.

Luke Young

Lift 1.0: Easily Deploy Well-Designed Serverless Applications on AWS — Lift uses the AWS CDK to “expand the Serverless Framework beyond functions” and handily comes as an easily installed Serverless Framework plugin. You can then use more CDK features in your project or even ‘eject’ back out once you’re done.

lift

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases — A then-Google-now-AWS engineer shared 17 insights about databases she’d picked up over the years. I still strongly recommend this piece and identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — Not a technical article but an important one nonetheless. Lee Holloway essentially programmed Cloudflare into being. But then he became distant and unpredictable, and what happened to him is something that could affect any of us 😔

Sandra Upson (WIRED)

An Illustrated Guide to How NAT Traversal Works — Just how can peer-to-peer connections be established between two machines in spite of all the obstacles in the way? This is a thorough look at a complex problem and solution.

David Anderson

Why Senior Engineers Get Nothing Done — With a headline like this, it was perhaps no surprise this got a lot of clicks.. It's about how being a senior software engineer in an organization is not necessarily what you think it might be and may not be the actual job you want.

Swizec Teller

A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack — While you can't take pleasure in someone else’s outage, the story behind an outage can make for good reading indeed and so it went here with Slack early in 2020. It came down to how they were using HAProxy.

Laura Nolan

The 'Year 2038 Problem' Is Already Causing Issues — In 2038, the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 (commonly used as an ‘epoch’ point) will exceed what can be stored in a signed 32 bit integer and this is A Problem™. Not only that, but it can be a problem now and seen in this Twitter thread.

John Feminella on Twitter

How Dropbox Migrated From Nginx to Envoy — Two Dropbox engineers took a look at Dropbox’s old Nginx-based infrastructure, its pain points, and why they migrated to Envoy, another open source service proxy.

Alexey Ivanov and Oleg Guba

How The Most Copied StackOverflow Snippet of All Time Is Flawed — An interesting part to this story was that it was the answer’s original author who also wrote the correction.

Andreas Lundblad

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview from an engineer at ScyllaDB. This was posted over a year ago and I am already seeing exciting stuff coming down the eBPF pipeline.

Glauber Costa