#287 — October 7, 2020

Web Version

✍️ There is so much amazing stuff coming out that's of value to software developers, engineers, and ops folks lately that this is a beefy issue! Starting to think a tighter daily would make more sense, but.. can anyone extend my day to 28 hours, please? 😂

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

Python 3.9 Released: What’s New — Unlike its sister languages like Perl and Ruby, Python has, in spite of a slightly rocky 2.x to 3.x transition, found a way to stay relevant and continue to grow at a rapid pace. 3.9 is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary release and packed with good tidbits. Python 3.9: Cool New Features for You to Try is a more practical and accessible tour of what’s new.

Łukasz Langa

👋  In other Python news, Python 3.5 has reached its end-of-life.

DigitalOcean Wants to Redefine PaaS with New 'App Platform' — A take on ‘reimagining’ Heroku-style PaaS (platform as a service). The idea is you point App Platform to a repo and they deploy it on their hardware. Supports Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, and static sites out of the box, but Docker can also be used. Seems a wise move for DO as many developers continue to move away from wanting ‘boxes’ to more 'managed' deployments.

DigitalOcean

CI/CD with Docker and Kubernetes eBook by Semaphore — Download the free eBook and learn how to deliver cloud-native applications at high velocity.

Semaphore sponsor

Amazon Timestream Goes GA: Time Series Data 'at Any Scale' — Amazon’s formal GA release of its Timestream time series data store comes at an interesting time with the rapidly growing popularity of time series databases.

Amazon Web Services

How Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source — Hacktoberfest is a program (from DigitalOcean) run entirely in good faith but the promise of a t-shirt in return for sending pull requests to open source repos has caused lots of spam in the form of terrible commits. There are lots of causes including a popular YouTuber promoting the idea of making such commits, but there’s good news! Hacktoberfest is becoming an opt-in event so repos have to express an interest before they qualify and 30k+ repos already have 👍

Domenic Denicola

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Lead DevOps or SRE — We are a remote, open-source, mission-driven company building developer tools for IPFS, Filecoin, and the decentralized web.

Textile.io

Find Your Next Job Through Vettery — Create a profile on 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? There's more info here.

📕 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

The Open Source Paradox — The creator of Redis reflects on a couple of psychological and social aspects of open source, user demands, and being paid (or not).

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Git Exercises: A Way to Practice git Skillsgit has become a common part of the modern development experience (hi Mercurial fans! 😁) but it’s common to feel like you only know the basics. Unless you’re already a git expert, this site might help you stretch into more unfamiliar territory.

Wojciech Frącz and Jacek Dajda

Scaling the Root of the DNS — “DNS is simple in the way Chess or Go are simple” starts this interesting opinion piece about the contrasting simplicity and complexity of the domain name system which is facing unprecedented levels of load and strain particularly at the root level.

Geoff Huston (ISP Column)

Building a High-Level SDK for Kafka: Greyhound Unleashed — The story behind our (finally) open sourced Kafka client for Scala & Java - Part 1.

Wix Engineering sponsor

Carbon-Aware Kubernetes — Microsoft has made a few moves in the eco-friendly datacenter space over the years and here they look at how a Kubernetes-based system can be manipulated in order to make ‘carbon-aware decisions’ that minimize the carbon footprint of a system.

Bill Johnson (Microsoft)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Compression — A collection of resources to help you understand compression algorithms, including a couple of interactive examples.

Cutter and Chawla

Avoiding 'Worry Driven Development' — Thoughts on how messy or ‘nightmarish’ tasks in codebases tend to provoke anxiety and get avoided, while at the same time being impactful to resolve.

Sean Goedecke

Always Be Knolling — Some brief thoughts on keeping code and tools tidy and easy to view. “By constantly clearing away detritus, we can take advantage of software’s full potential. Consistency enables change.”

Andri Yngvason

How Apache OpenWhisk is a 'Truly Portable' Serverless Platform — An advocate for OpenWhisk shows off a chess engine running on Adobe I/O Runtime, IBM Cloud, Naver, and Nimbella – four serverless platforms you may not have been aware of till now.

Michele Sciabarrà

How to Type 3x Faster — This isn’t directly programming related but the way this creative idea (which is probably not what you’re expecting) was expressed seemed fitting for this newsletter.

Vasili Shynkarenka

JVM Users, Please Test Your Memory — One of Red Hat’s JVM and performance experts looks at why JVMs are particularly sensitive to bad memory and what to do about it.

Aleksey Shipilёv

Applying Chaos Engineering in Healthcare: Getting Started with Sensitive Workloads

Carl Chesser

Let's Build a Cloudflare Worker with WebAssembly and Haskell

Cristhian Motoche

🛠 Code and Tools

Integrate Draw.io into VS Code — This unofficial extension integrates a popular online diagramming tool now called ‘Diagrams.net’ into VS Code. Could be pretty handy for your flowcharting or diagramming infrastructure, etc.

Henning Dieterichs

Hetty: A HTTP Toolkit for Security Research — An intercepting HTTP proxy with a Web interface and proxy log viewer. The aim is to become an open source alternative to commercial software like Burp Suite Pro.

David Stotijn

Boa v0.10: An Experimental JS Lexer, Parser and Compiler in Rust — A Rust implementation of the EcmaScript specification being worked on by a TC39 delegate. You can play with online here. Want to get more background? There’s a talk from 2019 about what’s involved.

Boa Developers

How Do Top Developers Deliver Video? - Download the 2020 Video Report

Bitmovin Inc. sponsor

Celery 5.0 Released: What's New?Celery is a popular Python-based asynchronous task/job queue (though it can be used from any language supporting its protocol).

Omer Katz

Plausible Analytics: A Privacy-Friendly Alternative to Google Analytics — An EU-hosted GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant site analytics service, but you may be more interested in their self hosted open source version.

Plausible Analytics

KubeDOOM: Kill Kubernetes Pods by Playing DOOM — Playing DOOM took up a serious part of the 1990s for me, but now there’s a practical reason to play it if you have Kubernetes pods to take out 😂

David Zuber

🗣 Notable Quotable

“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.”

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Melinda Varian, developer on the IBM VM OS project in the 1970s.