#308 — March 17, 2021

Web Version

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

AWS Fault Injection Simulator: Controlled Chaos Experiments — Taking over from using us-east-1 (we kid, we kid..!) Fault Injection Simulator is a fun new addition to AWS for performing controlled chaos testing on your AWS workloads in order to see how resilient your setup is. EC2, ECS, EKS, and RDS are supported initially with more services to come. I suspect other clouds will follow with similar services in coming years.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

Improving Large Monorepo Performance on GitHub — An update from GitHub on the work they’ve done to make monorepos (a repo that holds numerous projects) work better on GitHub, inspired by performance issues they were encountering with their own. If you need to learn more about monorepos generally, What is a monorepo? (and Should You Use Them?) is a good place to start.

Scott Arbeit (GitHub)

The Definitive Guide to Feature Management — Feature management is a new class of software development tools & techniques powered by feature flags. A feature management platform like LaunchDarkly fills the gaps of conventional feature toggles. Ship fast. Rest Easy. LaunchDarkly.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

Java 16 Released — Or, more technically, JDK 16 has reached GA. Java 16 has been anticipated for some time and includes new features like sealed classes, first steps towards a foreign linker API (which will eventually replace JNI), an initial vector API, and a foreign memory access API (to access memory outside of Java’s heap). The Modern Java Platform - 2021 edition may also be of interest.

Oracle

Quick Bits

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer — Remote Senior Software Engineer for a software consultancy company based in NYC.

Def Method

Find Software Engineering Jobs with Hired — Take 5 minutes to build your free profile & start getting interviews for your next job. Companies on Hired are actively hiring right now.

Hired

📘 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

What Does a Database Administrator Actually Do? — Brent is a big name in the SQL Server world (he makes SQL Server go faster) in particular, so it’s neat to get some insights from him on the 20th anniversary of his popular site.

Brent Ozar

The Case For and Against Amazon Cognito for AuthCognito is AWS’s ‘pay as you go’ authentication service which I’ve noticed has a reputation for being tricky to get started with.

Yan Cui

How We're Able to Increase Dev Velocity & Boost Local Development While Using Bazel — The story of reducing Bazel local dev complexity and boosting velocity using a proprietary IntelliJ plugin without freaking out.

Wix Engineering sponsor

A Developer's Guide to HIPAA Compliance — HIPAA (short for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a US law and essentially entire framework of behavior around managing patient data in healthcare situations.

TrueVault

How a Confusing UX (and Some User Mistakes) Cost a Company $7K in Extra S3 Charges — One person’s sour experience with a poorly explained feature around editing the storage class of files in S3. (And yet another reminder to set up billing alerts on your AWS account to catch such things quickly.)

Michael Morgenstern

How We Optimize EC2 Costs at Intercom — Plan, plan, and plan some more. Plus use the right types of instance and savings plans.

Brian Scanlan

So, Why Are Software Engineers Better CEOs? — What are the underlying forces that account for the success of software engineering CEOs (such as at Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook)? While I find this article interesting, it feels like much credit is given to what has surely involved a lot of luck.

Gene Bond

Learn How Pipeline Automation Helps PagerDuty Run 500+ Builds Daily

Buildkite sponsor

Awesome git Aliases — Git is almost the universal source control system now so most of you are probably using it. Aliases are just one way you can get more out of it and these very simple examples may give you food for thought.

Landon Schropp

How to Read ARM64 Assembly Language — A rather niche skill that will surely become a little more useful in the coming years (see all the ARM activity at both AWS and Apple).

Scott Wolchok

The 5 Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers
Csaba Okrona

Uber's Journey Toward Better Data Culture From First Principles
Krishna Puttaswamy (Uber)

Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now?
Brian Krebs

🛠 Code and Tools

Highlights from Git 2.31git maintenance is a new command for letting git perform its auto packing, garbage collection, and similar activities behind the scenes without blocking your work at an inconvenient moment.

Taylor Blau (GitHub)

Self-Hosting Git with cgit — How to set up an admittedly ‘bare bones’ web interface to git. Gitea and Gogs are other weightier alternatives in this space.

Akshay Nerdypepper

Ghost 4.0: Popular Open Source Publishing Tool and CMS — Ghost began life a sort of Node.js-powered alternative to WordPress but has become a platform in its own right. This major new point release adds a new dashboard, membership features, integration tweaks, and neat frontend changes such as responsive, lazy-loading images everywhere, and performance gains. GitHub repo.

Ghost

Audacity 3.0.0 Released — This isn’t usually StatusCode territory but Audacity is a hugely popular open source audio editor and this is a significant release.

Audacity Team

What’s New in SQLite 3.35 — Quite a lot, it turns out.

Anton Zhiyanov

SQLAlchemy 1.4.0: The Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper

Mike B