Bookmarks (2015)

Self-Hosting Google Fonts (and Why to Do So) — Self-hosting Google Fonts can improve Largest Contentful Paint by as much as 1.3 seconds.

The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS — A lot of parts here for one person to manage, but I do love a good stack share.

Oasis: A Small Statically-Linked Linux System — It’s more like a BSD than Linux and everything is statically linked. Hopefully less trouble than the eponymous 90s rock band.

CloudQuery: Transforms Your Cloud Infrastructure into SQL Queryable Tables — Open source, written in Go. select * from aws_ec2_instances seems nicer than a CLI. Azure and GCP support are still pending.

Ethr: A Network Performance Measurement Tool for TCP, UDP and HTTP — Yep, this comes from Microsoft. It’s nice to see them writing Go, and it works across multiple platforms too.

Bref 1.0: Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda — When we first mentioned Bref a few years ago, the idea was that Bref would make it as easy to use PHP for serverless functions as it was for JavaScript at the time. They’ve succeeded and hit the major 1.0 milestone. Laravel Vapor is another approach if you’re in the PHP space.

Homebrew 2.6.0 Released — The popular macOS package manager gains Big Sur support (on Intel), partial (and very initial) macOS M1/Apple Silicon support, and the deprecation of brew cask commands.

PHP 8.0 Released — A significant update of the PHP language packed with optimizations and features like named arguments, union types, JIT, and more. This announcement does a good job of showing off the immediate benefits and changes.

AWS Unveils Mac-Powered EC2 Instances — Exciting news because the big clouds have kept away from macOS so far, but.. for good reason. These are ultimately very expensive ($1.21/hr on demand) and restricted (the minimum time you can use one is 24 hours – more on why here). If you’re heavily into AWS, though, and want to wrap macOS-based CI/CD into your monthly bill,...

Why Scientists Are Turning to Rust — Despite the steep learning curve, the performance and safety guarantees of Rust have a lot of appeal at scientific data scales.

How Medium Counts Followers — An interesting look behind the scenes at Medium, the content paywall experts, at both a disruption in their analytics and the underlying data model of how they track followers to its many users and publications.

How Many Registers Does An x86-64 CPU Have? — Certainly a lot more than I had expected given it’s in the hundreds.

Read Only Data Aggregation in a Microservices Environment: A Real Life Use Case — Moving to CQRS from synchronous models, why? And what should you expect?

A Complete State Machine Made with HTML Checkboxes and CSS — Well okay then! While this technique is unlikely to get into many developer’s toolkits, this fully explained walkthrough complete with CodePen embeds will teach you a trick or two.

Self-Hosting Still Pays Off For This Tech Blog — Spin up your own servers or hand everything off to AWS, Azure, et. al? There are pros and cons either way but the proprietor of one IT blog is finding that DIY pays.

Mining Your CLI History for Good git Aliases — How a little shell magic can tell you a lot about your working habits and help you make things even more efficient.

ARM and Lock-Free Programming — “a casual introduction to the perils of lock-free programming … also some explanation of why ARM’s weak memory model breaks some code, and why that code was probably broken already”

1.5 Is the Midpoint Between 0 and Infinity in Ruby — The title is the least confusing part of this article.

Tailwind CSS v2.0 Released — A CSS framework that has taken the frontend development world by storm in the last couple of years.

Docker-Mailserver: A Full Email Server Stack on Docker — Includes SMTP, mail relay, IMAP (or POP3) with SSL support, spam protection, antivirus, and more, supplied by popular open source projects.

7777: Your Remote AWS Database on Local Port 7777 — This is a neat idea. It’s a paid piece of software, but it automates the job of creating AWS jump servers and SSH tunnels to RDS servers and works with MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB, and Aurora.

Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record — Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon to boot microcomputers from cassette tape, and even the IBM PC had (rarely used) support for this. But what about if you only have a boot disk on 12 inch vinyl? Well…

Announcing Modules for AWS CloudFormation — CloudFormation provides a way to define and provision AWS infrastructure in code and now it’s more modular thanks to… reusable building blocks called ‘modules’ ;-)

How An Analytics Service Faced a Malicious, Targeted DDoS Attack Head On — “At the start of November, someone decided that they would try to destroy our company.” This is a fantastic write-up of how a (very) small team faced a DDoS attack on their service and got AWS to help (for a price). The associated Hacker News discussion dug into some potential long term solutions.

▶  The Birth of UNIX with Brian Kernighan — Technically a (50-minute) podcast but with an easily read and complete transcript here. This is a fantastic chat with Brian Kernighan, a hugely influential Unix developer, co-creator of Awk, co-author of The C Programming Language, and more besides.

How To Protect Your APIs Against Top Threats — As more and more data is exposed via APIs, security can no longer be an afterthought. See what the most common threats are and how to instrument your APIs to detect and block them.

A Tale of Going from JavaScript to WebAssembly — A developer of a ‘ultra resolution’ storytelling platform tells the tale of upgrading their Web client’s performance by moving from a pure JavaScript approach to one turbocharged with WebAssembly. There’s a lot to learn here.

The Macro Problem with Microservices — Moving from building big monolithic apps with centralized state to distributed microservices has been a frequent occurrence in the past decade, but for all their advantages, microservices bring plenty of problems too. This article goes into depth, but is essentially a pitch for using a stateful, microservice orchestration runtime to resolve the problems microservices often introduce.

The curl Web Infrastructure — curl is one of the most fundamental pieces of Internet tooling there is, and here’s a quick look at the stack its maintainer uses for its official site.

Today I Learnt.. eBPF is Awesome — If you’re not familiar with eBPF (based on a technology originally designed for monitoring network packets, but now a way to dynamically tinker with the Linux kernel) or why you might use it, this is a nice entry point. How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux is another take.

'Everything You Know About MongoDB is Wrong' — Both fairly and unfairly, MongoDB has been the target of numerous assertions over the years that they’re keen to correct and refine here.

Use a Docker Container as a Development Environment with VS Code — Do you live in VS Code? Did you know you can create and configure a full-featured container based development environment from it? Here’s all the pieces to take into account.

How Do Spotify Codes Work? — ‘Spotify Codes’ are QR-like codes that Spotify users can generate to share songs, playlists, etc. This is a fun bit of digging into how they work and are constructed.

'Why I Left IBM to Work on CockroachDB' — Despite the title, this is more an interesting story of what a self described ‘database nerd’ got up to at IBM working on its autonomic computing team and on their Db2 database products.

Even Faster Bash Startup — “I sped up bash startup from 165 ms to 40 ms. It’s actually noticeable. Why and how did I do it?”

What Was It Like to Be a Software Engineer at NeXT? — NeXT was Steve Jobs’ company between 1985-1997 and its technology formed the underpinnings of what is now macOS and iOS.

Build a Flask Microservice with OpenFaaS — Which is better: Flask or serverless-style Python functions? Or.. you could just have both ;-)

Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware — A refresh of the hardware that Cloudflare uses to run analytics provided big efficiency improvements with lots of numbers shared here.

Dev Fonts: Live Preview Fonts Aimed at Developers — An interactive tool to test drive dozens of coding fonts that are live-displayed in dozens of different themed embeds. Includes both free and non-free fonts.

Lightsail Containers: An(other) Easy Way to Run your Containers on AWS — Lightsail originally launched as a sort of ‘gateway’ to using AWS by offering EC2’s power packaged up in a more traditional VPS format. Lightsail Containers goes a step further by making container based workloads easier to deploy without going down the full ECS route.

How To Execute Ansible Playbooks to Automate Server Setup — A new addition to DigitalOcean’s fantastic suite of ops tutorials.

Fairness in Multi-Tenant Systems — Written by a senior engineer on AWS Lambda, this “magnum opus about building multi-tenant services at Amazon” digs into bringing fairness into multitenant systems to provide predictable performance and availability.

The Light and Dark Side of the 'API Economy' — You’d think developers would be at the heart of the ‘API economy’ but it’s a term mostly used in business circles. Shawn explains why it’s really about “developers reshaping the world in their image.”

Being 'Glue' — If you’re a software engineer who spends most of your time in meetings, talking to users, asking questions, and generally joining things together rather than writing code, you may be doing a lot of ‘glue work.’

You're Starting a New Company; What Stack Are You Using? — GitHub’s CTO asked his Twitter followers what language, framework, database, and cloud they’d use if they were starting a new Web oriented service today. The replies were very mixed and might give you some ideas.

🔥 Tobs - The Open-Source Observability Stack for Kubernetes — Tobs helps you deploy a 💯 observability stack in just a few minutes, complete with Prometheus for monitoring & alerting, Grafana for visualization, and Promscale for long-term storage & SQL + PromQL analytics. Explore tobs on GitHub to get started >