--- title: "GitHub's robot coding companion" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 323 published_at: "2021-06-30" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/323" --- Plus StatusCode is going on hiatus for a little while. | #​323 — June 30, 2021 [Web Version](https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/323) 👋**This is the last issue you'll receive for a while.** StatusCode is taking a break. I'm not entirely sure how, if or when it will return, but there are so many stories to tell, links to share, and fantastic readers too, so **I'll be back _somehow_** but StatusCode will be taking a break for at least a month or two. Thanks for your support and, hopefully, I'll be in touch again soon. __ _Peter Cooper, your editor ([@peterc](https://twitter.com/peterc) to follow me on Twitter – a good way to find out whatever's happening next)_ ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/e_grayscale,w_150,h_170,c_pad,g_south/xrupigpv8kyjqotfdgy8.jpg) StatusCode Weekly What's happening in software development, ops, platforms and tools. [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/awdr3uvcvtqhoewctvo6.jpg)](https://copilot.github.com/) [GitHub Copilot: An AI 'Pair Programmer'](https://copilot.github.com/) — A project that GitHub has been working on in the background for some time with OpenAI. It’s a VS Code extension that uses machine learning to suggest useful code snippets as you type and it works with lots of different languages. Everyone I’ve seen has a _lot_ of mixed feelings about this, but it’s undoubtedly an interesting development. Maybe I need to create a newsletter version of this tool.. 😆 GitHub [Tributes Pour In For Near, The Developer Behind One Of The World's Best SNES Emulators](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/06/the_dev_behind_one_of_the_worlds_best_snes_emulators_has_reportedly_passed_away) — A person called [_Near_](https://near.sh/about) created [BSNES](https://bsnes.dev/) and essentially became a developer to spend years working on the ‘perfect’ translation of a Japanese RPG they loved. This may not seem like a developer story on the surface, but this person pushed forward the state of the art in emulation and even went so far as to [hiding PC components in their luggage](https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxezw/a-23-year-perfectionist-journey-to-localize-the-obscure-bahamut-lagoon) as a teenager to be able to scratch their development itch. Nintendo Life [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/a9bf5f13.png)](https://www.pulumi.com/?utm_source=statuscode-weekly&utm_medium=sponsored-link&utm_campaign=iac) [Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi - Any Cloud, Any Language](https://www.pulumi.com/?utm_source=statuscode-weekly&utm_medium=sponsored-link&utm_campaign=iac) — Build, deploy, and manage modern cloud applications and infrastructure using familiar tools and programming languages like Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, & C#. Harness the power of software engineering practices for the cloud. Get started for free. Pulumi sponsor [rfc.fyi: Search for RFCs, Fast](https://rfc.fyi/) — When they say ‘fast’ they’re not lying. This site is amazingly nimble at helping you track down the particular RFC you want, whether you want to read the FTP spec, a protocol for controlling coffee pots, or how QUIC works. rfc.fyi **IN BRIEF:** - Last week Microsoft unveiled the next version of Windows would be called [Windows 11](https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22546791/microsoft-windows-11-announcement-features-updates). - Forget about the hypothermia or deafness caused by hanging out too long in the datacenter.. [robots are increasingly being used for datacenter maintenance](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/caves-of-steel/). - In today's dystopic news, Ars Technica reports that Amazon is allegedly [using algorithms 'with little human intervention' to fire workers](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/amazon-is-firing-flex-workers-using-algorithms-with-little-human-intervention/). - If you had just one shot to redesign a part of the Internet, [what would you change?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27663618) - Martin Fowler is [stepping back from speaking](https://martinfowler.com/articles/202106-reducing-speaking.html) in future: _"I far prefer a trip to the dentist to have fillings done"_. - DigitalOcean has extended their range of managed database systems with [Managed MongoDB](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-managed-mongodb/) joining Redis, MySQL, and Postgres. [Ask HN: Do You Self-Host Your Database?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671376) — I’ve seen the self host vs managed database debate all over the place recently, so it was neat to see Hacker News take it on. Given the audience it’s perhaps unsurprising the majority expressed a preference for maintaining full control. Hacker News ▶[Building Apps on the Decentralized Web with Nader Dabit](https://www.serverlesschats.com/106/) — Jeremy Daly chats with Nader Dabit, a well known developer in the AWS and JavaScript worlds, about decentralized protocols, the ‘Web3’ movement, and what sorts of applications they enable. This is an area that continues to mystify me, so was a well timed episode :-) Serverless Chats Podcast podcast [Change Data Capture at DeviantArt](https://www.wix.engineering/post/change-data-capture-at-deviantart) — How we made a streaming data replication solution from sharded MySQL to Apache Iceberg using Debezium. Wix Engineering sponsor [Hosted Monitoring: Evaluating InfluxDB Cloud and Grafana Cloud](https://pqvst.com/2021/06/22/hosted-monitoring-evaluating-influx-and-grafana/) — Experiences from someone who’s worked on self-hosted Grafana and InfluxDB setups but has explored the potential of managed cloud solutions. PQVST [Giving Your Web Publications 'LaTeX Style'](https://goessner.github.io/mdmath/publication.html) — A quick guide to using VS Code for creating documents for the Web with the academic [LaTeX](https://www.latex-project.org/) look and feel. Stefan Gössner [Remote Repositories Extension for Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/06/10/remote-repositories?WT.mc_id=devcloud-00000-cxa) — If you use VS Code, this extension from GitHub itself offers a quicker way to open GitHub repos remotely direct from the editor. Microsoft [El Carro: A Way to Run Oracle Databases on Kubernetes](https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/elcarro-oracle-operator) — Coming from Google, rather than Oracle itself, is an Oracle operator for Kubernetes. Google Cloud Platform [Why Tracing Might Replace (Almost) All Logging](https://go.lightstep.com/register-tracing-will-replace-logging-guide-co21?utm_campaign=statuscode&utm_source=cooper&utm_medium=Email) Lightstep sponsor [How to Migrate DynamoDB Tables from One AWS Account to Another with AWS Data Pipeline](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-to-migrate-amazon-dynamodb-tables-from-one-aws-account-to-another-with-aws-data-pipeline/) Sodabathina and Gong (AWS) [When It Comes to Git History, Less Is More](https://brennan.io/2021/06/15/git-less-is-more/) Stephen Brennan # Diving Into The Queue Whenever I discover something I think would be a good fit for StatusCode, I add it to a queue of items to review. Due to the limitations of email (and your attention), a lot of good things never make it out of the queue and into a real issue. It seemed fitting, then, for me to take a look over the queue and see if anything jumped out to share in this issue before we take a break. Here's some of what caught my eye: **STORIES AND TUTORIALS:** [How I Hijacked The Top-Level Domain of a Sovereign State](https://labs.detectify.com/2021/01/15/how-i-hijacked-the-top-level-domain-of-a-sovereign-state/) — This tale of how an engineer temporariliy took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo had StatusCode feature written all over it, but it still didn’t make it in :-) Fredrik N. Almroth [Security Headers Quick Reference](https://web.dev/security-headers/) — This article lists and shares basic explanations of some useful HTTP security headers, including `Content-Security-Policy` and `Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy`. Eiji Kitamura and Artur Janc [`curl` vs `wget`](https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html) — Both popular tools when it comes to making HTTP requests, and I didn’t realize curl’s creator also contributes to wget too. Daniel Stenberg [How to Protect Domains That Don’t Send Email](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/protect-domains-that-dont-send-email) — The British government has some technical tips for ensuring (or _hoping_ to ensure, at least) that domains (which don’t need their own email services running) can’t be so easily used for spoofing. GOV.UK [Create Animated GIF and WebP From Videos Using FFmpeg](https://mattj.io/posts/2021-02-27-create-animated-gif-and-webp-from-videos-using-ffmpeg/) — Being able to cast the right incantations to get good results out of FFmpeg also impresses me. I have to keep articles like this bookmarked to figure it out afresh every time. Matt Joseph [A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work](https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-avoiding-actual) — How in 1982, the author successfully hacked his way out of having to fill in potholes. Mad Ned [Making a 'Digital Clock' in Google Sheets](https://www.therobinlord.com/making-a-digital-clock-in-google-sheets/) — Spreadsheet tomfoolery never fails to amuse me. I’ve seen a lot of such tricks over the years, but never bothered to dig into quite how they work till now.. Robin Lord [A `tcpdump` Tutorial with Examples — 50 Ways to Isolate Traffic](https://danielmiessler.com/study/tcpdump/) Daniel Miessler **TOOLS:** [Search 1 Million Linux Kernel Commit Messages](https://linux-commits-search.typesense.org/) — This is a fun demo of a fuzzy search engine called [Typesense](https://github.com/typesense/typesense) but trained specifically on commit messages for the Linux kernel. TypeSense [Crontab.guru: The `cron` Schedule Expression Editor](https://crontab.guru/) — The `cron` job scheduling format is something I’ve used for 25 years and _still_ haven’t memorized perfectly, so tools like this can provide a handy reminder. There [are](https://crontab.cronhub.io/) [others](http://corntab.com/), if you prefer. Cronitor [Slowfil.es: Deliberately Slow HTTP Resources for Testing](https://slowfil.es/) — We’re all told to make our sites as fast as possible and there are numerous ways to improve the experience when page elements like images or fonts are slow to load, but if you want to test what happens _for real_.. this service could help introduce some true sluggishness into your system. Harry Roberts and Ryan Townsend Admittedly a bit of a random grab bag of stuff, but I enjoyed them all, and look forward to one or two of them making it to Hacker News later today, perhaps.. 😄 **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|*) --- Published by Cooper Press Ltd. Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom [Stop getting this newsletter.](https://weekly.statuscode.com/leave/*|UID|*)