Bookmarks (1568)

Guietta: A Novel Library for Building Simple Python GUIs — The approach taken here is really neat. You basically lay out labels, fields, and buttons using a plain text approach.

▶  The Story of Building Subversion — A podcast interview (but with full transcript!) with one of the original creators of Subversion, a version control system that saw a lot of popularity in the early 2000s.

Code Only Says What It Does — But, quite often, the why is useful to know too, and “few topics invite a programmer flame war like comments..” Some basic thoughts worth chewing over.

How Hackers Are Exploiting a 5-Alarm Networking Equipment Bug — “Any company that uses a certain piece of networking equipment from Seattle-based F5 Networks had a rude interruption to their July 4 weekend…”

▶  A Professor Tries to Solve 240 Comp Sci Exam Problems in 4 Hours — An almost four hour long video where a CS professor attempts to solve every exam problem from the GATE theory exams (a set of exams administered in India) and explains his thinking along the way.

Running Spot Instances Effectively with Amazon EKS — One of the developers behind Basecamp’s new HEY email service shares some insights on keeping as much of their compute infrastructure on EC2’s cheaper spot instances as possible (around 90% so far, they claim).

Building Serverless GraphQL API in Node.js with Express and Netlify — A very accessible tutorial that will suit anyone who likes to keep things easy to maintain.

Building Domain Driven Microservices — If you’ve been in the industry a while you’ll see the same ideas come around again and again, and DDD is one of those. This is, nonetheless, a good high level overview.

The Evolution of HEY: Basecamp's New Email Service — I’ve not been convinced by HEY for my personal use, but Basecamp has clearly made a splash here and it’s a neat story.

These are Exciting Days for ARM Processors — ARM or ARM-based processors are getting all over the place now, whether in phones, the Raspberry Pi, and, next, the Mac.

Why AnyList Won’t Be Supporting 'Sign In with Apple' — Privacy is good, but Apple’s ‘sign in’ platform can cause a lot of confusion with end users.

The BBC iPlayer Team's Journey with End to End Tests — A brief look at how iPlayer Web achieved a stable end to end testing platform using BrowserStack.

Cloudflare's Approach to Making the WAF 40% Faster — Web Application Firewalls are a key part of protecting modern webapps against security threats nowadays and Cloudflare runs one at mega scale. This post covers a few of the things they’ve done to improve performance.

How Did Vim Become So Popular — Short walk through Vim’s origins and why is Vim so popular today

Gopherspace in the Year 2020 — I know this makes me a huge nerd, but anything to do with ‘old’ Internet protocols is my bag, and did you know there are still Gopher systems out there? Think the Web, but more lightweight and hierarchical. (And modern versions of cURL even support it.)

A Look At The Die of the 8086 Processor — It might be 42 years old, but even so, its complexity and manufacturing process is mind boggling.

unavatar: A Way to Quickly Get User Avatars — Given a username or email address, it’ll query multiple social providers to return an avatar. It’s built using Node.js and is open source if you want to run your own version.

HTTPie: A Command-line HTTP Client for the API Era — JSON and sessions support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, plugins, and more. HTTP Prompt is built on top of this and takes things a step further if you want flag completion or OpenAPI/Swagger spec integration support, say.

Bach: A Testing Framework for Bash Scripts — The idea is that behavior is verified without actually running the commands specified in the scripts.

Red Hat Mandrel Makes Java Native — Mandrel is a new GraalVM-based Java distribution that compiles Java apps directly to native code.

A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack — While I don’t think you can take pleasure in someone else’s outage, the story behind an outage can make for good reading indeed. So it goes here with a significant outage Slack had in May and it came down to how they were using HAProxy, one of my favorite bits of infrastructure software ever.

PHONK: A Creative Scripting Toolbox for Android Devices — If you’ve got any old Android devices sat around, this could be a way to have some fun with them. It’s based around JavaScript.

Redis's Creator Steps Down from Leading the Redis Project — In the past ten years the Redis data structure and caching server has found itself at the heart of a lot of webapps and stacks. Its creator, who has led the project almost single handed since its creation, is now stepping down and talks about his preference for building new things versus being a ‘maintainer.’

Amazon Honeycode: A New AWS to Build Apps without Code — Despite some reservations over the name, this feels a bit like Access meets Excel meets the cloud and will allow a wider range of users to build data-driven online apps without learning to code.

LogDNA: Log Management Built for DevOps 🔎 — Manage logs on your terms: Ingest logs with turnkey integrations. Retain only what matters to you. Auto-parse common formats, and set up custom parsing for not-so-common ones. Check out our growing library of educational resources.

Perl 7: It's Going to Be Perl 5 with Modern Defaults — Perl 5 came out in 1994(!) and has been actively used since. Development on Perl 6 began in 2000 but it eventually mutated into its own language and has been renamed Raku. So what was Perl to do? Jump to version 7, which is “going to be Perl 5.32, mostly.”

Prefetching? At This Age? — An excellent trip down the rabbit hole of caching, CDNs, what issues can occur when both clients and CDNs are caching content, and how the Age HTTP header helps. Plus a Chromium bug, just for good measure.

RFC8765: DNS Push Notifications — An in-development spec for notifying clients about DNS changes rather than having them needlessly poll over and over.

A Principled Approach to GraphQL Query Cost Analysis — Why you should measure the cost of your GraphQL queries, and how you should do it.

DigitalOcean's 'How To Code in Go' eBook — Written by Mark Bates, Cory Lanou, and Timothy J. Raymond, this Creative Commons-licensed 600 page book is very much aimed at beginners.

How I Used Lambda and EFS for Massively Parallel Compute — Last week we featured the great news that you can now mount EFS file systems within Lambda functions, and there are already stories about how and why this is a game changer – this is the one of the best ones.

Amazon RDS Proxy Now Generally Available — RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for RDS and likely to be of particular interest to folks building serverless apps due to the high number of open database connections that can occur.

DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) — A high quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite. v3.12.0 came out last week with improved table editing and conditional formatting when browsing data (a bit like a spreadsheet might).

Aviary.sh: A Minimal Bash-Powered Distributed Configuration Management System — Think something like Ansible but entirely written in bash scripts(!)

GitHubDefreshed: A User Script to Bring Back the Old GitHub Repo Layout — If you happen to hate the new GitHub repository page layout, this Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script brings back the old layout.

Find Your Most Expensive Lines of Code: Amazon CodeGuru Now Generally Available — Currently for JVM dwellers only, CodeGuru can be used to detect potential defects in Java code that “are difficult for developers to find” as well as to visualize and fine-tune JVM applications generally.

ec2.shop: A 'Hacker Way' to Compare AWS EC2 Instances — While this is a useful spreadsheet when viewed through a Web browser, you can query it directly from curl too for simpler results.

Wren: A Small, Class-Based Concurrent Scripting Langauge — “Think Smalltalk in a Lua-sized package with a dash of Erlang..” It looks a bit like Ruby crossed with C# to me 😁

Lua 5.4 Released — Lua is a popular, lightweight embeddable language (and very commonly used within games or any programs that support user customization). 5.4 brings a generational GC to the table and lots of other niceties.

CloudSkew: A Free AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes Architecture Diagram Tool — Icons for all the major services are preloaded in. You do have to sign up but I’ve been seeing good reviews of this. There are samples to look at but I really enjoyed this page where they explain the app’s stack.

Syncthing: A Go-Powered Continuous File Synchronization Tool — If you want an open-source Dropbox, Syncthing is here for you (and it’s written in Go, of course).

Nginx UI: A Web Accessible Way to Access and Modify NGINX Config Files — Note: This is not an NGINX/F5 product.