#276 — July 22, 2020

Web Version

But what GPT-3 can do is still pretty neat.. 😁

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

▶  A Chat with Brian Kernighan of Unix, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Fame — Lex Fridman, a well known AI researcher, spent well over an hour chatting with Brian Kernighan, the even better known computer scientist! Brian touches on the early days of Unix, what programming means to him, what he thinks about JavaScript, and a lot more. There’s a lot to enjoy here and the audio and video quality is great.

Lex Fridman

Why OpenAI's GPT-3 May Be A Big Deal — GPT-3 is a language prediction model created by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, and people are already using it to write articles (spoiler alert!), attempt to pass Turing Tests, create code, and more. Rest assured, all of our newsletters remain created by humans! 😁

Manuel Araoz

Security Engineer’s First 90 Days Checklist — Prioritize your security efforts, implement the right security processes and develop a security culture in your company.

Sqreen sponsor

IaaS Pricing Patterns and Trends 2020 — The developer industry analysts extraordinaire at RedMonk has taken a look at how providers are differentiating themselves via their pricing models for compute, memory and disk space. Prepare to be surprised for how well Oracle fares.

RedMonk

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

One Application, Hundreds of Hiring Managers — Use Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in StatusCode Weekly? There's more info here.

📕 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

Essays on Programming I Think About A Lot — Links to and extracts from a variety of different developer related essays that are worth checking out.

Ben Kuhn

Serverless Rendering with Cloudflare Workers — How to do server-side rendering ‘at the edge’ using Workers Sites, Wrangler, HTMLRewriter, and tools from the broader Workers platform.

The Cloudflare Blog

A Crash Course on Using AWS CDK for Data Work — AWS’s Cloud Development Kit (CDK) makes it possible to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it with CloudFormation. This article looks at the basics of using it to create a serverless app for querying different data systems.

Renato Byrro (Dashbird)

The Docker Handbook: A Practical Docker Intro — If you’re new to Docker, this is one of those great walkthrough/practical style tutorials that covers the main concepts complete with examples.

Farhan Hasin Chowdhury

How to Make a Parallelized Cron Job in AWS, for The Laziest Programmers — There’s not really an AWS service that shouts about being able to do this, but you can rig up the idea of running a service on a frequent basis using… AWS CodeBuild. I’ve done this myself before and it works well.

Karl Pickett

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects - Try Buildkite ✅ — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Could Predictive Database Queries Replace Machine Learning Models? — There’s been a lot of buzz around ‘machine learning’ over the past few years and predictive queries provide an interesting twist on the idea.. where we ask databases not for concrete data that they store, but ML models or ML-powered databases for predictions.

Antti Rauhala

How SHA-2 / (SHA-256) Works Step-By-Step — SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hashing algorithms out there.

Lane Wagner

Implementing Cosine in C From Scratch — This is one of those “you’ll probably never need to do this, but this is cool/educational..” items 😁

Austin Z. Henley

▶  Kelsey Hightower on His Very Personal Kubernetes Journey — Kelsey Hightower speaks about his role in Kubernetes since the beginning, his thoughts on the project’s leadership today and the challenges that lay ahead.

Alex Williams (The New Stack) podcast

How Vercel Frees Frontend Developers from Backend Burden — Vercel is a frontend stack for web developers, which abstracts the backend and makes it easier to build sites and apps with a JavaScript framework.

Richard MacManus

🛠 Code and Tools

Semgrep: Lightweight Static Analysis for Many Languages — A command-line tool for offline static analysis. Use pre-built or custom rules to enforce code and security standards in your codebase. There’s an interactive online demo if you want to try it out more easily.

r2c

Gitify: GitHub Notifications on Your Menu Bar — GitHub can produce a lot of notifications. This utility tames them a little by bringing them down to your menu bar along with a lightweight UI to navigate through them. macOS, Windows and Linux.

Emmanouil Konstantinidis

Download FusionAuth and Get a Free T-Shirt. It's Free to Get Started

FusionAuth sponsor

FastoNoSQL: A Cross-Platform Redis, Memcached, SSDB, LevelDB, RocksDB, UnQLite, LMDB, etc. Client — If you’re using one of numerous non-SQL databases, this cross-platform, native (built using Qt and C++) client may be of interest to you.

FastoGT

Procmon: A Linux 'Reimagining' of the Classic Procmon Tool from Windows — Well, if you can have PowerShell on Linux now, why not Procmon? You can use this for tracing syscall activity.

Microsoft

The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack 2.0 — Want those old school 80s and 90s bitmap fonts? This is catnip to me 😄

INT10h and VileR