Programmer Weekly (Issue 34 December 17 2020)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 34 December

December 17, 2020

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 34 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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Quote of the Week

 

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." - Alan Eagleson

News

What could go wrong when your employees commit internal information to public GitHub repos?

Google fingers its storage quota system for the outage affecting Gmail, YouTube and Google Cloud Platform.

Intel unveiled ControlFlag – a machine programming research system that can autonomously detect errors in code. Even in its infancy, this novel, self-supervised system shows promise as a powerful productivity tool to assist software developers with the labor-intensive task of debugging. 

Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers.

Amazon will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programs, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals.

Previously, security researchers found web skimmers (Magecart scripts) inside favicons, site logos, live chat windows, and, most recently, in social media sharing buttons.

The survey was conducted in the second half of September 2020 over a two-week period. Let’s dive into the analysis!

Reading List

Abstracting away the complexity of payments has driven the evolution of our APIs over the last decade. This post provides the context, inflection points, and conceptual frameworks behind our API design.

In this article, Wenbin Fang shares his journey of building Listen Notes API business, the technology behind it, and hopefully you can learn one thing or two and build your own API business in the future.

All software developers spend time debugging code written by someone else. By slowing down just a little bit and building theories about the code, they can produce better fixes and learn career lessons.

This is the story of how close we came to shutting down before even launching our first product, how we survived, and the lessons we learnt. You can read the

.

Netlify makes deploying your front end quick and easy, and Netlify functions makes running a serverless backend just as easy. In this guide, we'll get setup on how to use Netlify functions.

The Web Almanac is an annual state of the web report combining the expertise of the web community with the data and trends of the HTTP Archive.

A first part in a series of articles that explains the challenges engineers face when building native iOS and Android apps at scale.

A narrative description of tracking down a difficult bug which broke Netflix playback on a certain Android TV device.

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics.

This post focuses on how LinkedIn  uses Coral to integrate to the Dali Catalog, and use to virtualize views, to improve their accessibility, expressibility, and understandability by the engines, and to better control their behavior. Coral has proven its value at LinkedIn by making Dali views more user-friendly, agile, secure, and portable. 

Did you know most Chrome extensions are written in good ol' JavaScript? Turns out, creating one with React is pretty straight forward, too! Let's look at how you can use your existing JavaScript skills to spread some holiday cheer!

Get a deep understanding of Docker, targeted at web and Mac software engineers.

Pinterest’s distributed cache fleet spans an EC2 instance footprint consisting of thousands of machines, caching hundreds of terabytes of data served at more than 150 million requests per second at peak. This cache layer optimizes top-level performance by driving down latency across the entire backend stack and provides significant cost efficiency by reducing the capacity required for expensive backends. We’ll do a technical deep dive into the infrastructure that supports Pinterest’s cache fleet at scale.

Perceus is an algorithm for precise reference counting with reuse and specialization. Starting from a functional core language with explicit control-flow, Perceus emits precise reference counting instructions such that programs are garbage free, where only live references are retained. This enables further optimizations, like reuse analysis that allows for guaranteed in-place updates at runtime. This in turn enables a novel programming paradigm that we call functional but in-place (FBIP).

By reducing the number of flaky builds by 18x, the new system makes CI more trustworthy and red builds more meaningful. If your pull request has a failure, it’s a sign you need to change something, not a sign you should hit Rebuild. When it comes time to deploy, you can be sure that your build won’t go red late in the day because a test doesn’t take into account daylight saving time.

Watch and Listen

Learn about your database options when building new or refactoring old apps with serverless, the process that Trustpilot uses to choose how to store data, and problems they solved using a serverless-first approach.

The talks from Chrome Dev Summit 2020 are now available.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Command line access to AWS resources and tools directly from a browser.

Rocky Linux is a community enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux created in response to the effective discontinuation of CentOS. 

Open source platform for deploying static sites and frontend applications.

Calculate the size and performance impact of switching to modern JavaScript syntax.

ConsoleMe consolidates the management of multiple AWS accounts into a single interface. It allows your end-users and administrators to get credentials for your different accounts, and allows your users/administrators to manage or request cloud permissions.

Dockerfile best practices for writing production worthy Docker images.

Crush is a command line shell that is also a powerful modern programming language.

PlotJuggler is a tool to visualize time series that is fast, powerful and intuitive.

Self hosted application to access IMAP and SMTP accounts over REST.

PoloDB is an embedded JSON-based database.

Code-First, Type-Safe, GraphQL Schema Construction.

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