#279 — August 12, 2020

Web Version

StatusCode Weekly
Covering what's new in software development, ops, platforms, tech, and tooling.

Building Single Page Applications Using Rust — WebAssembly continues to throw up all sorts of interesting options for the future development of Web applications. This time we see how to build SPAs using Rust, WebAssembly and Yew (a Rust framework for building front-end apps). Some people even think this approach could make Rust the new Elm.

Sheshbabu Chinnakonda

Changing World, Changing Mozilla (But Laying Off 250 Employees) — Very sad news from Mozilla, creators of Firefox, this week as they’ve laid off a signficant number of their employees driven by commercial necessity. There’s been extensive discussion on Hacker News about this.

Mitchell Baker

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 5,000 engineers via our carefully crafted classes.

Ardan Labs sponsor

1Keys: How I Made a Piano in Only 1KB of JavaScriptJS1024 was a recent contest to build the coolest thing possible in just 1024 bytes of JavaScript. It’s well worth looking at all the winners/results, but one winner has put together a fantastic writeup of how he went about the task.

Frank Force

Things You Want to Do in Git and How to Do Them — If you don’t get much further with git than clone, commit, push, and pull, this might help you take some extra steps into its full power.

stu2b50

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💻 Jobs

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📕 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

What Every Developer Should Know About Database Consistency — As a Distributed Systems Team Lead at Microsoft you’d expect Roberto to know a bit about consistency, and he does a good job of explaining the basics at a high level here.

Roberto Vitillo

▶  Resigning from AWS on Ethical Grounds with Tim Bray — In April, Tim Bray famously resigned from AWS over ethical concerns, but in this 45 minute interview both he and Corey Quinn cover a variety of topics such as the genesis of XML and JSON and how AWS was still the best place Tim ever worked.

Screaming in the Cloud Podcast podcast

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

"I want to have an AWS region where everything breaks with high frequency." — Short of travelling back in time to enjoy us-east-1 in its heyday, having a deliberately touchy AWS instance would certainly help in building more resilient systems.

Colin Percival on Twitter

Why the C Language Will Never Stop You from Making Mistakes — Love it or hate it, C remains popular and heavily used. But it certainly doesn’t stop you from shooting yourself in the proverbial foot.

The Pasture

Never Use A Dependency That You Could Replace with An Afternoon of Programming? — I think Carl might have had a little bad luck with introducing dependencies into projects in the past, but I sympathize with his line of thinking.

Carl Johnson

Twiddling with Linux's TCP Extensions and Settings — A guide on TCP window scaling which allows for timestamps and uses the system acknowledgement facility of sysctl.

Florian Westphal

Writing Reactive Microservices for the JVM

Glenn Engstrand

The Information Catastrophe — If you fancy giving your eyebrows a bit of exercise today, this is a rather odd academic paper claiming that, left unchecked, in 500 years, digital content will account for more than half of Earth’s mass.

Melvin M Vopson

Systems Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Caroline Rodewig and Garrett McGrath (Flightaware)

That Coworker Who Never Stops Refactoring.. — This topic has come up on social media a few times lately.. there are developers who prefer providing value to other developers (through refactoring, tooling, etc.) than end users. Maybe there needs to be a specific term for this type of development (“DevQA”?)

Mike Crittenden

When Feature Flags Do And Don’t Make Sense

Rajiv Prabhakar

🛠 Code and Tools

Pysa: Open Source Static Analysis for Python Code — Facebook has open sourced Pysa, a static analysis tool they’ve built to detect and prevent security and privacy issues in Python code.

Graham Bleaney (Facebook Engineering)

The First PHP 8 Beta is Here — The PHP team released the first PHP 8 beta last Thursday and here’s a quick list of the headline features.

Paul Redmond

Stream Chat: The Most Feature-Rich, Scalable & High-Speed Chat Solution

Stream sponsor

Bevy: A Data-Driven Game Engine and App Framework in Rust — This has been getting a lot of kudos, so if you want to put together cross-platform 2D and 3D apps, and don’t mind using Rust to do so, check out this introduction.

Carter Anderson

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