Programmer Weekly (Issue 185 December 14 2023)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 185

December 14, 2023

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 185 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors." - Tony Hoare

Reading List

We recently upgraded from Postgres 11.9 to 15.3 with zero downtime by using logical replication, a suite of support scripts, and tools in Elixir & Erlang’s BEAM virtual machine. This post will go into far too much detail explaining how we did it, and considerations you might need to make along the way if you try to do the same.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit versatile capabilities, they often produce harmful and biased content, exemplified by human-designed jailbreaks. This study introduces Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated approach utilizing tree-of-thought reasoning to iteratively refine prompts, requiring only black-box access to the target LLM. TAP assesses and prunes prompts before sending them, demonstrating superior effectiveness in generating jailbreaks for state-of-the-art LLMs with minimal queries, surpassing previous black-box methods.

Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?

Using OpenGL's compute shaders to dispatch fractal computation to the GPU and render in realtime.

A detailed analysis of our iterations to implement a Parser for Postgres.

The article explores the concept of representing Git commits as folders in a filesystem, providing insight into the similarities between Git commits and folders. The author discusses the challenges faced and the motivation behind creating a project called git-commit-folders, which allows the mounting of filesystems using both FUSE and NFS, offering an experimental approach to understanding the underlying structure of Git. The article also mentions the existence of other similar projects such as giblefs, GitMounter, and git9 for Plan 9, and reflects on the practicality and utility of the project.

Engineers and major companies are pushing a technology called L4S that they say could make the web feel dramatically faster. But how?

This is the story of how we upgraded our fleet of 1200+ MySQL hosts to 8.0. Upgrading the fleet with no impact to our Service Level Objectives (SLO) was no small feat–planning, testing and the upgrade itself took over a year and collaboration across multiple teams within GitHub.

Explore the optimization of PostgreSQL queries using tactics such as efficient indexing and partitioning and judicious use of data types.

Distilling the core components of generative LLMs into an accessible framework.

Watch and Listen

Learn how to use vector search and embeddings to easily combine your data with large language models like GPT-4. You will first learn the concepts and then create three projects.

During this talk, we'll explore Kubernetes resource management, including its basics, best practices, and real-world situations. We'll discuss how requests and limits simplify Linux kernel capabilities and affect Kubernetes scheduling. We'll cover Quality of Service (QoS) classes, explaining how Kubernetes measures usage and handles node pressure. Finally, we'll demonstrate how to use Resource Quotas and Limit Ranges to manage large-scale Kubernetes deployments.

This video serves as a comprehensive introduction to DevSecOps, illustrating its integration of security throughout the software development lifecycle. Emphasizing automation through tools like Chef compliance and GitHub actions, it provides practical insights into security checks, Docker image scanning, and the significance of vulnerability management, offering valuable guidance for those looking to enhance their skills in DevSecOps.

Laura Nolan, Principal Software Engineer at Stanza, shares expertise with Corey on Screaming in the Cloud about leveraging SRE to prevent significant production delays. She emphasizes addressing major issues over day-to-day challenges, discusses the impact of system transparency on new engineers, and explains her dedication to opposing companies like Google involved in inefficient government target selection during conflicts.

Books

The book is a work in progress, with the author planning to release new chapters steadily and integrate feedback to create a comprehensive resource on data engineering design patterns. The book aims to explore how design patterns can help data engineers solve common challenges, providing insights into problem statements, solutions, implementations, use cases, advantages, limitations, variations, relationships to other patterns, best practices, and further reading.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

An experimental development project to turn a local desktop environment into an on-device AI agent.

Rust for native business logic, Flutter for flexible and beautiful GUI.

An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

Private and secure AI tools for everyone's productivity. 

Future proof secrets management. 

A network diagnostic tool.

Kubernetes CLI tool for scanning clusters for network policies and identifying unprotected workloads.

The application simplifies the process of initiating and terminating multiple port forwarding configurations through a user-friendly interface.

Desktop environment in the browser.

Our Other Newsletters

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

- A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.