GitHub Copilot: An AI 'Pair Programmer' — 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 — A person called Near created BSNES 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 as a teenager to be able to scratch their development itch.

Nintendo Life

Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi - Any Cloud, Any Language — 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 — 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

Ask HN: Do You Self-Host Your Database? — 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

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 — 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' — A quick guide to using VS Code for creating documents for the Web with the academic LaTeX look and feel.

Stefan Gössner

Remote Repositories Extension for Visual Studio Code — 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 — Coming from Google, rather than Oracle itself, is an Oracle operator for Kubernetes.

Google Cloud Platform

Why Tracing Might Replace (Almost) All Logging

Lightstep sponsor

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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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

Daniel Miessler

Search 1 Million Linux Kernel Commit Messages — This is a fun demo of a fuzzy search engine called Typesense but trained specifically on commit messages for the Linux kernel.

TypeSense

Crontab.guru: The cron Schedule Expression Editor — 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 others, if you prefer.

Cronitor

Slowfil.es: Deliberately Slow HTTP Resources for Testing — 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