Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 192 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

That hardly ever happens is another way of saying "it happens". - Douglas Crockford

Reading List

Hacking a Smart Home Device

How I reverse engineered an ESP32-based smart home device to gain remote control access and integrate it with Home Assistant.

Improving Antibot Biometric Protections Through Threat Intelligence and Reverse Engineering: An Harsh Lesson From Akamai

The post discusses enhancing antibot biometric protections through threat intelligence and reverse engineering. It explores strategies to improve the effectiveness of antibot measures by analyzing threats and employing insights gained from reverse engineering processes.

Startup Infrastructure: Scaling from Zero to Enterprise

The article discusses the transition to enterprise-level infrastructure, emphasizing the need to build teams with expertise in setting up infrastructure and the role of a CTO in guiding this transition. It highlights the importance of preparing the infrastructure and teams for future challenges and opportunities. The author suggests that at the enterprise level, it is no longer feasible for the CTO to be directly involved in hands-on work

How I reduced the size of my very first published docker image by 40% 

A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts.

How we built our customer data warehouse all on Postgres

The article discusses the construction of a customer data warehouse at Tembo using Postgres. It details the use of foreign data wrappers, pg_cron, and pg_partman to connect to external sources, schedule tasks, and improve performance. The authors emphasize the simplicity, maintainability, and ease of onboarding new engineers with this approach, and they have made their tools open source for deployment on Tembo Cloud.

Dealing with diverged git branches

The post discusses the concept of diverged branches in Git and how to handle this situation. It explains the four basic configurations when two branches have diverged and provides guidance on recognizing and resolving this issue. The post aims to help readers understand and navigate the complexities of dealing with diverged branches in Git.

Using DuckDB-WASM for in-browser Data Engineering

Rapid prototyping SQL Queries & Data Visualizations.

Lessons From Our 8 Years Of Kubernetes In Production

The post shares insights from experiences with Kubernetes, including two major cluster crashes due to expired certificates, and the decision to move from self-managed to managed Kubernetes. The post emphasizes the complexity of Kubernetes, the importance of understanding internal certificates, and the benefits of proactive communication during such incidents.

BuildKit in depth: Docker's build engine explained

This article explains how BuildKit works in depth, why it's faster than Docker's previous build engine, and what it looks like under the hood. 

How we Increased Search Traffic by 20x in 4 Months with the Next.js App Router

A technical look at how we optimized the performance of Hardcover over the last year.

Watch and Listen

Exploring Verse, Haskell, Language Design and Teaching (with Simon Peyton Jones)

This week, we chat with Simon Peyton Jones, a leading language designer pivotal to Haskell's development, now working on Epic Games' Verse language. Exploring the design philosophy shared by Haskell and Verse, the conversation delves into Functional Logic Programming—a fusion of functional and logic languages with potential implications for modern software. Simon also discusses reshaping computing education in England, advocating for its fundamental importance alongside mathematics and sciences.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

LocalSend

An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop.

tokamak

Server-side framework for Zig, relying heavily on dependency injection.

wirequery

Capture, explore, and analyze data flowing in and out of your applications - without compromising confidentiality.

FireflyDB

FireflyDB is a fast, thread-safe, JVM-based key-value storage engine with microsecond latency.

Stanchion

A SQLite extension that brings column-oriented tables to SQLite.

dep-tree

Visualize the entropy of a code base with a 3d force-directed graph. 

stract

Stract is an open source search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results.

VersionFox

A cross-platform and extendable version manager with support for Java, Node.js, Flutter, .Net & more.

DotSlash

Simplified executable deployment.

Our Other Newsletters

Python Weekly

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

Founder Weekly

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