#259 — March 25, 2020

Read on the Web

StatusCode Weekly
Covering the week's news in software development, ops, platforms, and tooling.

Showing the World You Can Write a Cool Program Inside One Tweet — Over the past few weeks I’ve been following @BBCMicroBot, a Twitter bot that runs user supplied code and replies with a video of the result. It’s built around an emulator for the popular 1980s British microcomputer, the BBC Micro, and some of the creations are truly impressive.. give it a go! Here's a complete online BBC Micro emulator.

IEEE Spectrum

Why Cloudflare Started Putting Unpopular Assets in Memory — Cloudflare’s CDN service has taken a curious step and come up with a way to reduce their hit tail latency and SSD wear by placing unpopular assets in memory. Yuchen Wu explains.

The Cloudflare Blog

Online Lab: Build a Blockchain App with JavaScript — Learn how to build a distributed ledger into your JavaScript application using open source tools and best practices in this interactive lab from IBMers Lennart Frantzell and Dave Nugent.

IBM Developer sponsor

O'Reilly Media Shutters In-Person Conferences Division — This is the end of an era 😔. O’Reilly recently cancelled their popular Strata events due to the current world situation, but has now shuttered the entire in-person events division. This means no more OSCON, too.

O'Reilly Media

FCC Opens Up Spectrum to Keep Mobile Data Smooth During Pandemic — With unprecedented demand thanks to coronavirus, mobile phone companies are getting access to more radio spectrum which will help keep those 4G services rolling.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (ZDNet)

Deals on Services in the Time of COVID-19 — A lot of companies have stepped up to offer various services at a discount or for free to help people working on COVID relating projects or anyone else who’s struggling with working from home, etc. right now. Worth a skim.

Notion

Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Find a Dev Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

📕 Tutorials, Stories, and Opinions

x86's EAX Register: Its History and Why It's Called That — A well explained look back at the history of the x86 architecture through the lens of its most commonly used register..

Vladimir Keleshev

▶  How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations — A fun trip back to the 1980s to get some insights behind the development of Prince of Persia from its creator, Jordan Mechner. Jordan also published his development journals from the time which I enjoyed reading a couple of years ago.

Ars Technica

Setting Up Git 'Identities' — This is where you have different identities across different projects with, say, different GPG keys in each case.

Micah Henning

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1500 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Converting an Old MacBook Into an Always-On Personal Kubernetes Cluster — If you just happen to have an old machine sat around, here’s a potential project to pass the time..

DevOps Directive

Software Development Trends 2019: Results from the Coding Sans Survey — We helped promote a survey asking developers about their development practices and the results are out. JavaScript and Java lead the way but TypeScript has seen a huge jump. Slack and Jira lead the way in project comms tools.

Coding Sans

Building an 8-Bit Home Computer With Just 6 Chips — It’s called the Amethyst. Sourcing the chips right now might be tricky, but if you can get them, an interesting project to take up your time..

IEEE Spectrum

In Praise of S3, The Greatest Cloud Service of All Time — A short but sweet love letter.

Forrest Brazeal

Please Don't Write Your Documentation in Markdown — An interesting argument, but I can’t see it taking off broadly.

Hillel Wayne

Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? — An analysis of the technical and cultural reasons why Facebook is not rolling its own Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, or whatever, despite having the ability.

Kevin Xu

🛠 Code and Tools

Emergency Website Kit — In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic. This could help you get things running fast.

Max Böck

Backstage: An Open Platform for Building Developer Portals from Spotify — This dev portal (recently open-sourced) aims to unify all infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation within a single, consistent UI. Here’s a blog post explaining how it’s used within Spotify.

Spotify

31 Days of #MarchMediaMadness. New Cloudinary Challenges, Win Daily

Cloudinary sponsor

Git 2.26 Released: The Highlights — Git protocol v2 is now used by default (yay for efficiency!) and there are some new config file ‘tricks’ too.

Taylor Blau (GitHub)

The First Docker GitHub Action is Available — A GitHub Action to build and push Docker images.

Nicholas Adcock (Docker, Inc.)

LLVM 10.0.0 Released

Hans Wennborg

Krucible: Temporary Kubernetes Clusters for Testing and Development

Krucible

PGSync: Sync Postgres Data Between Databases — Fast, aims to provide good security, and you can sync partial tables or groups of tables. The README shows off some interesting examples. Written in Ruby.

Andrew Kane

zig cc: A Powerful Drop-In Replacement for GCC/Clang

Andrew Kelley