Programmer Weekly (Issue 39 January 28 2021)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 39

January 28, 2021

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 39 of Programmer Weekly. An exciting well funded early stage startup is looking for experienced

Full-Stack Engineers

with strong

Python

and

React

expertise. They are a remote-first company, but you need to be within +/- 4 hours of PT. If you or someone you know are interested, send me the latest resume and mention the candidate's location.

Quote of the Week

 

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.” - Alan J. Perlis

News

Raspberry Pi Pico is built on RP2040, a brand-new chip developed at Raspberry Pi. Whether you’re looking for a standalone board for deep-embedded development or a companion to your Raspberry Pi computer, or you’re taking your first steps with a microcontroller, this is the board for you.

DDoS attack trends in the final quarter of 2020 defied norms in many ways. For the first time in 2020, Cloudflare observed an increase in the number of large DDoS attacks. Specifically, the number of attacks over 500Mbps and 50K pps saw a massive uptick.

Twitter is giving third-party academic researchers free access to the full history of public conversation via the full-archive search endpoint, which was previously limited to paid premium or enterprise customers.

Last week, Elastic announced they will change their software licensing strategy, and will not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2).  In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Reading List

Learn engineering lessons from a decade ago to prevent mistakes today.

We’ve all had a hard drive fail on us, and often it’s as sudden as booting your machine and realizing you can’t access a bunch of your files. It’s not a fun experience. It’s especially not fun when you have an entire data center full of drives that are all important to keeping your business running. What if we could predict when one of those drives would fail, and get ahead of it by preemptively replacing the hardware before the data is lost?

We’ve scaled Kubernetes clusters to 7,500 nodes, producing a scalable infrastructure for large models like GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL·E, but also for rapid small-scale iterative research such as Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models. This post summarizes the lessons so that others in the Kubernetes community can benefit from them, and ends with problems we still face that we’ll be tackling next.

The goal of this article is to show how Apple leverages the fact that it produces the hardware to protect its software. To explore this, we will try to connect via Apple Push Notification (APN) directly on the network level, and see what challenges we face. Along the way, we’ll reverse engineer small parts of the apsd daemon on macOS and the APN protocol itself using popular open-source tools.

5 essential engineering management lessons from Plaid and Dropbox leader Jean-Denis Grèze.

Or the story of how I received an 18K$ bug bounty for a critical Amazon Kindle vulnerability.

There are a lot of misconceptions about container security - A lot of people assume that containers are secure by default, which is unfortunately not true. There are quite a few tools that can help you improve security of your containers and therefore also security of Docker and Kubernetes. One of the ways to harden them is to apply proper seccomp profiles. If you have no idea what seccomp is, then read on and see what it is and how to use it to protect your Docker and Kubernetes from security threats! 

In this tutorial, you’ll verify that variables always have sensible values and you’ll specify exactly which versions of providers and modules you need to prevent conflicts. You’ll also enable various levels of debug mode verbosity, which can help you diagnose an underlying issue in Terraform itself.

Leaders, you owe it your teams, and to your users, to free them from the tyranny and stress of uncertainty. You must do the work to go beyond vision, create concrete actions, and make boring plans.

Introducing the Experiment Guardrails framework we implemented at Airbnb, which helps us prevent negative impact on key metrics while experimenting at scale.

Thorough and data-rich comparison of two cloud computing giants, Google Cloud vs AWS. We'll analize products and pros vs cons for your business

Do you script in bash? If so, you can provide your users with a more robust and simple TUI for entering information into scripts.

Watch and Listen

A conversation with Dr. Sam Scott, the CTO of Oso, about what the average developer should know about Cryptography. SSL, TLS, public/private key, certs, PKIs, hashing, encryption, salts, algorithms, sessions, bearers etc.

GoF Design Patterns with "Real-World" examples involving Food-Related Businesses and mock dependencies.

A chat with Michael Behrendt from IBM Cloud about IBM's involvement with serverless 1.0, how their serverless point of view addresses a wider array of application types, how IBM Cloud Code Engine opens up more serverless use cases, their view of a serverless future, and so much more.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Superset is a data exploration platform designed to be visual, intuitive, and interactive

Open source Observability Platform. SigNoz helps developers find issues in their deployed applications & solve them quickly.

Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing.

Open Web Docs supports web platform documentation for the benefit of web developers & designers worldwide.

State-of-the-art learned data structure that enables fast lookup, predecessor, range searches and updates in arrays of billions of items using orders of magnitude less space than traditional indexes. 

A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust to explore novel OS structure, state management techniques, and how to maximally leverage the power of language by shifting OS responsibilities into the compiler.

A command line calculator made for programmers working with multiple number representations and close to the bits.

The Hassle-Free JavaScript Tool Manager.

Tooling to generate metadata for Win32 APIs in the Windows SDK.

Communicate with web Workers and other Windows using a simple Promise based API.

SOUL (SOUnd Language) is an attempt to modernise and optimise the way high-performance, low-latency audio code is written and executed.

A standalone, flexible API that provides a full-featured rich text editor for iOS applications. 

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