#310 — March 31, 2021

Web Version

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

Input: A Customizable Font for Code — There’s nothing new about fonts aimed at developers (we link to them a lot) but Input is interesting as it lets you customize the font (in terms of alternate letterforms, line height, weight, etc.)

Ross, Sherman and Lewis

Behind the Scenes at a Viral Website — When a giant ship somehow got stuck in the Suez Canal last week, someone registered IsTheShipStillStuck.com and it blew up fast. This is the ‘behind the scenes’ story of what it’s like to be in that situation including traffic levels, the tech, and monetization.

Tom Neill

Remote Instructor-Led Go, Docker, Kubernetes & Python Training — We offer live-streaming remote training sessions for individual engineers and companies that want to augment their knowledge in Go, Docker, Kubernetes and Python. We’ve trained over 10,000 engineers via our carefully crafted classes.

Ardan Labs sponsor

'SQLite Is Not a Toy Database' — We are huge SQLite fans here, so you didn’t need us to tell you SQLite isn’t a toy, but this article provides a nice roundup of just how useful SQLite can be in case there are any skeptics out there.

Anton Zhiyanov

Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture — A few years ago, big announcements from Arm might have been merely of mild interest to developers generally, but now (thanks to Apple, Amazon, et al.) what Arm says paints a picture that could increasingly affect the environment for years to come.

Andrei Frumusanu (AnandTech)

▶  Discussing WebAssembly and WASI with Aaron Turner — The use of WebAssembly for deploying code generated by languages like Rust and Go to the Web is reasonably well understood, but this interview digs more into WebAssembly’s uses on the server and how WASI makes it possible.

Serverless Chats Podcast

💻 Jobs

Lead Cloud Engineer (UK) — We’re seeking a cloud engineer with operational k8s experience to help build/scale a greenfield platform based on Amazon EKS for a billion dollar ecommerce business. If you feel this is you and you’re up to the challenge please apply now.

Fanatics

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

'Stop Using Ridiculously Low DNS TTLs' — I have to admit I’ve turned TTLs down to 300 or even 60 seconds when making transitions, but surprisingly this is the norm with the ‘vast majority’ of TTLs between 0 and 300 seconds.

Frank Denis

Building a Full-Text Search Engine in 150 Lines of Python Code — I really enjoyed this. It’s nothing super advanced, but a basic principle quickly implemented.

Bart de Goede

Oktane21: Free Identity Conference on April 6 — Hang with other devs in the identity space and catch sessions on OAuth and OIDC, WebAuthn, SAML, Hands-On Developer Labs, and more. Register today.

Okta sponsor

How I Conquer My AWS Costs“Take the time to regularly drill down into your AWS bill using the AWS Cost Explorer. Write a script if necessary, and share it with the world, so that we can reuse it.”

Yann Stoneman

How an Agency Approached Choosing a New Serverless Database Technology — It’s not often you get an extensive writeup of how technologies are chosen. I think this piece focuses too heavily on the eventual choice than the options available, but it’s still nice to see the thought process.

Smashing Magazine

How GitHub Actions Renders Large-Scale Logs in the Browser — Rendering logs in a web UI might seem simple: they are just lines of plain text. At scale, though, it’s not quite so simple. GitHub ran some experiments and ended up writing its own library to render and manage a subset of logs at a time.

GitHub

'Font Size' is Useless; Let’s Fix It — What happens when you set fontSize: 32 in your favorite editor? It’s complicated.

Nikita Prokopov

How We Built a PaaS for 1500 Engineers — This is from 2020 but we missed it at the time and I’ve just enjoyed it.

Galo Navarro

Human-Readable JavaScript: A Tale of Two Experts — JavaScript gives you many ways to do things, but deciding which way can be tricky. This post looks at two broad approaches to choosing different paths and could as easily apply to any language IMHO.

Laurie Barth

If Google Docs and a Headless CMS Has a Baby…

GatherContent sponsor

'Why All My Servers Have an 8GB Empty File'
Brian Schrader

Setting Up End-to-End TLS Encryption on Amazon EKS with the New AWS Load Balancer Controller
Petro Kashlikov (AWS)

Sundial: Fault-Tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters — A look at a recent academic paper.
Murat Demirbas

Running a Kubernetes Job in Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate Using AWS Step Functions
Ramani and Balaraman

🛠 Code and Tools

An Online VS Code Theme Editor — VS Code user and want to tweak the aesthetics of your editor? This is a neat Web-based editor that makes the process about as simple as it could be (or you could use one of the many users have already created).

Mike Tromba

Kafka Without ZooKeeper: A Sneak Peek at the Simplest Kafka Yet

Ben Stopford and Ismael Juma (Confluent)

A Serverless Cost Calculator — A very simple serverless costs tool that helps you compare between AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk. It makes it quite striking how much extra Lambda adds for functions to be called publicly over HTTP.

Peter Sbarski and A Cloud Guru

Hello, HPy: A Better C API for Python — While this project has been brewing for years, it’s still in a reasonably early stage, but if you’re into extending Python with C, it’ll be of interest.

antocuni

Ultimate Plumber: A Tool for Creating Linux Pipes with Instant Live Preview

Mateusz Czapliński

▶  Google Cloud's Serverless Options for Go Developers — Comparing App Engine, Functions, and Cloud Run.

Valentin Deleplace (Google)

awesome-k8s-security: A Curated List of Kubernetes Security Resources

Magno Logan