Bookmarks (2521)

Making a 'Digital Clock' in Google Sheets — Spreadsheet tomfoolery never fails to amuse me. I’ve seen a lot of such tricks over the years, but never bothered to dig into quite how they work till now..

A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work — How in 1982, the author successfully hacked his way out of having to fill in potholes.

rfc.fyi: Search for RFCs, Fast — When they say ‘fast’ they’re not lying. This site is amazingly nimble at helping you track down the particular RFC you want, whether you want to read the FTP spec, a protocol for controlling coffee pots, or how QUIC works.

Create Animated GIF and WebP From Videos Using FFmpeg — Being able to cast the right incantations to get good results out of FFmpeg also impresses me. I have to keep articles like this bookmarked to figure it out afresh every time.

How to Protect Domains That Don’t Send Email — The British government has some technical tips for ensuring (or hoping to ensure, at least) that domains (which don’t need their own email services running) can’t be so easily used for spoofing.

GitHub Copilot: An AI 'Pair Programmer' — A project that GitHub has been working on in the background for some time with OpenAI. It’s a VS Code extension that uses machine learning to suggest useful code snippets as you type and it works with lots of different languages. Everyone I’ve seen has a lot of mixed feelings about this, but it’s undoubtedly an interesting development....

Tributes Pour In For Near, The Developer Behind One Of The World's Best SNES Emulators — A person called Near created BSNES and essentially became a developer to spend years working on the ‘perfect’ translation of a Japanese RPG they loved. This may not seem like a developer story on the surface, but this person pushed forward the state of the art in emulation...

Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi - Any Cloud, Any Language — Build, deploy, and manage modern cloud applications and infrastructure using familiar tools and programming languages like Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, & C#. Harness the power of software engineering practices for the cloud. Get started for free.

curl vs wget — Both popular tools when it comes to making HTTP requests, and I didn’t realize curl’s creator also contributes to wget too.

Security Headers Quick Reference — This article lists and shares basic explanations of some useful HTTP security headers, including Content-Security-Policy and Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy.

How I Hijacked The Top-Level Domain of a Sovereign State — This tale of how an engineer temporariliy took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo had StatusCode feature written all over it, but it still didn’t make it in :-)

El Carro: A Way to Run Oracle Databases on Kubernetes — Coming from Google, rather than Oracle itself, is an Oracle operator for Kubernetes.

Remote Repositories Extension for Visual Studio Code — If you use VS Code, this extension from GitHub itself offers a quicker way to open GitHub repos remotely direct from the editor.

Giving Your Web Publications 'LaTeX Style' — A quick guide to using VS Code for creating documents for the Web with the academic LaTeX look and feel.

Hosted Monitoring: Evaluating InfluxDB Cloud and Grafana Cloud — Experiences from someone who’s worked on self-hosted Grafana and InfluxDB setups but has explored the potential of managed cloud solutions.

Change Data Capture at DeviantArt — How we made a streaming data replication solution from sharded MySQL to Apache Iceberg using Debezium.

▶  Building Apps on the Decentralized Web with Nader Dabit — Jeremy Daly chats with Nader Dabit, a well known developer in the AWS and JavaScript worlds, about decentralized protocols, the ‘Web3’ movement, and what sorts of applications they enable. This is an area that continues to mystify me, so was a well timed episode :-)

Ask HN: Do You Self-Host Your Database? — I’ve seen the self host vs managed database debate all over the place recently, so it was neat to see Hacker News take it on. Given the audience it’s perhaps unsurprising the majority expressed a preference for maintaining full control.

Slowfil.es: Deliberately Slow HTTP Resources for Testing — We’re all told to make our sites as fast as possible and there are numerous ways to improve the experience when page elements like images or fonts are slow to load, but if you want to test what happens for real.. this service could help introduce some true sluggishness into your system.

Crontab.guru: The cron Schedule Expression Editor — The cron job scheduling format is something I’ve used for 25 years and still haven’t memorized perfectly, so tools like this can provide a handy reminder. There are others, if you prefer.

Search 1 Million Linux Kernel Commit Messages — This is a fun demo of a fuzzy search engine called Typesense but trained specifically on commit messages for the Linux kernel.

A Tour of Bitcoin 'From Scratch' in Python — Even if you may own some Bitcoin, do you know how it really works? Maybe even the reasonably simple academic paper didn’t work for you. Here’s another take from a Pythonic perspective.

The 2021 Software Developer Shortage Is Coming? — A big headline from the ACM here, but the argument is that travel embargoes and significant declines in 2021 comp sci student graduation rates coupled with increased competition will only make a tight labor market even tighter. (Better conditions and more pay can always help though..)

Introducing AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio — AWS Step Functions has been around for years and is a serverless orchestrator that lets you build scalable apps using state machines. Workflow Studio takes things to another level providing a low-code visual way to bring things together. Perfect for anyone new to or otherwise intimidated by the usual process.

Benchmarking JavaScript Memory Usage — Historically, memory usage hasn’t been a heavily tracked thing in the JavaScript world, whether for a lack of tooling or motivation. This is changing and new tools and APIs are turning up all the time. Here, Tim has done some analysis of what the top 10k web sites are using in terms of memory and, perhaps controversially, how the...

What Does 'First Normal Form' Actually Mean? — Normalization is a fundamental concept in relational databases but there are different formal levels of it. This is a good explanation of first normal form (aka 1NF). Then you can move on to 2NF and 3NF. Fundamental database concepts worth knowing about even if you don’t memorize their definitions.

What Every Programmer Should Know About SSDs — SSDs have some interesting characteristics that can affect how to get the most out of them. This item led to some interesting discussion on Hacker News going into more detail about the realities of SSD use in production environments.

That Time I Deleted A Production Database, or How Everyone Makes Mistakes — A roller up Twitter thread inspired by last week’s HBO Max test email mistake.

Is AWS Certification Worth It? Weighing All the Factors — Essential qualification or waste of time? As always, it depends.

A Collection of Modern Alternatives to Classic Unix Commands — Relates to our ‘tiny tools’ section below, somewhat, but with a variety of options, each shown off with a screenshot or animation.

Forrester New Wave: Feature Management & Experimentation — [Download Today] Learn why leading industry analyst firm Forrester has identified Feature Management and Experimentation as the latest must-have DevOps tools to enable teams to create faster release cycles while staying connected with customers.

Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers — Reed–Solomon codes are a group of error correcting codes used in technologies as diverse as CDs, DSL connections and RAID. Bert attempts to boil down the math to an explanation you can follow.

Workshop: How to Build Reusable Infrastructure as Code Patterns — Learn how to build a reusable component for a hypothetical “production ready application” in Python.

Lift 1.0: Easily Deploy Well-Designed Serverless Applications on AWS — Lift uses the AWS CDK to “expand the Serverless Framework beyond functions” and handily comes as an easily installed Serverless Framework plugin. You can then use more CDK features in your project or even ‘eject’ back out once you’re done.

Building a WebAuthn Click Farm — How a developer has attempted to build a ‘click farm’ to ‘bypass’ Cloudflare’s proposed CAPTCHA killer with some USB security keys, an Arduino, and a bit of Python.

Building Python Projects at Scale with Pants — Pants is a fast, scalable build system for Python apps specifically aimed at working with large repos and monorepos.

How Netflix Uses eBPF Flow Logs at Scale for Network Insight — Netflix has a network observability sidecar that uses eBPF to capture TCP flows in ‘near real time’ for getting insight into network usage at its large scales.

How an Engineering Team Used Python's AST to Patch Thousands of Lines of Code — This isn’t a new technique but it’s always impressive to see it working at scale. Essentially code is turned into structured ASTs, manipulated in an automated fashion, then turned back into code again.

12 Common Misconceptions About DynamoDB — DynamoDB’s approach is different enough to most other databases that it’s not surprising there are a variety of common misconceptions.

Terraform 1.0 Released — The increasingly popular ‘infrastructure as code’ tool that only seems to be on the up lately. The 1.0 release is less a revolution and more a landmark release around stability and interoperability – congratulations to them.

Making JavaScript Run Fast on WebAssembly — Once upon a time, JavaScript was seen as slow but a huge amount of time, money and research went into making it super fast in the browser. Now, the Bytecode Alliance is supporting work to do the same with optimizing JavaScript performance in new environments opened up by WebAssembly (including server side).

AWS DevSecOps Day: Bridgecrew for CloudFormation — Learn how to codify your AWS security in our hands-on DevSecOps workshop. Bridgecrew and the AWS team walk through how to automate and embed security throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Register for free with AWS credits included for a limited time.

On 'Mercurial' Cores: CPU Cores That Misbehave — CPUs are now so advanced they are "more mercurial than precise," claims a Google engineer. At huge cloud scales, anything with even a tiny risk of corruption eventually becomes a problem! Peter Hochschild spoke on the behalf of his team at Google in a snappy nine-minute talk about the problem and shared an academic paper (PDF)....

Stack Overflow Acquired for $1.8 Billion — Literally minutes after we hit send last week, this pretty big news dropped. Joel Spolsky’s blog post focuses on his thoughts and the history that led to SO being created, but apparently despite the sale, it’ll be business as usual for our foreseeable copy and pasting future.

Introducing the SMS Sandbox for Amazon SNS — Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) lets you deliver notifications via numerous methods, including SMS text messages. The SMS sandbox provides a safe environment to try the SMS features without risking your reputation.

Althttpd: The HTTP Server That Runs SQLite.org — It’s twenty years old, it’s written in C, and you can see all the code in one file. A true example of achieving a lot with a little.

Serverless Rules: Rules to Validate Infrastructure-as-Code Templates Against Recommended Practices — An initial preview of an AWS Labs project for extending CloudFormation and Terraform linters to provide quick serverless-specific feedback on your app templates.

Amazon SQS Now Supports a High Throughput Mode for FIFO Queues — Originally SQS (Simple Queue Service) didn’t promise what order messages would arrive in, but FIFO queues, launched in 2016, changed all that at a cost of lower total throughput. Now, however, there’s a high throughput mode allowing up to 3000 messages per second per API action – a 10x increase over the...