Programmer Weekly (Issue 47 March 25 2021)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 47

March 25, 2021

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 47 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Big difference." - Scott Ambler

News

Slowly but surely the Rust language is making its way into Linux. I talked with Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about where they see Rust and Linux working together.

One clear sign of a maturing platform is when the company exposes to other developers the services it uses for its own tools. Zoom has been doing that for some time, introducing Zoom Apps last year and the Marketplace to distribute and sell these apps. The company has introduced a new SDK (software development kit) to help developers embed Zoom video services inside another application.

Avi Wigderson and László Lovász won for their work developing complexity theory and graph theory, respectively, and for connecting the two fields.

Amazon and startup Hugging Face say the ability to rapidly assemble thousands of neural networks inside of Amazon SageMaker, and train them with greater ease, will “democratize” use of deep learning.

Reading List

Audio Fingerprinting is used to uniquely identify visitors without cookies. A deep dive into this highly stable browser fingerprinting technique.

This post shares the technical details of this vulnerability and how it happened, what we did to respond to it, and the steps we are taking to ensure this does not happen again.

Computer Networking Basics Every Developer Should Know.

SQL's UNION operation isn't usually regarded as a way to optimize query performance, but in many cases it can be used to achieve massive improvements in speed.

How are containers made? Usually, from a series of statements like RUN, FROM, and COPY, which are put into a Dockerfile and built. But how are those commands turned into a container image and then a running container? We can build up an intuition for how this works by understanding the phases involved and creating a container image ourselves. We will create an image programmatically and then develop a trivial syntactic frontend and use it to build an image.

Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware that these documents can compromise sensitive information like authors names, details on the information system and architecture. All these information can be exploited easily by attackers to footprint and later attack an organization. In this paper, we analyze hidden data found in the PDF files published by an organization.

As outlined in the State of Secrets Sprawl report, 5 million credentials and other secrets get leaked on Github every year. This is an in-depth look into what file extensions most commonly contain secrets.

Chaos engineering for Kubernetes gets more and more popular, and rightly so: after all, K8s was designed with the ideas of availability and resiliency in mind. Therefore these marvelous features must be tested on real-life projects occasionally. This article reviews existing tools for implementing chaos engineering in K8s. 

When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability. All of those things are important. But in this post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming.

Watch and Listen

Learn AWS basics right through to advanced cloud computing concepts.  Ideal for beginners - absolutely no cloud computing experience is required!

Remember the amazing adventure it was to learn a new thing every day as a Junior Developer? It's easy to feel a little stuck or lost as a Senior developer since there aren't roadmaps or people looking to mentor seniors. (Besides Charles Max Wood.) Chuck talks about how he felt that way at different points in his career and how podcasting and connecting with the programming communities helped him get past that.

In this episode, we chat with Tom Limoncelli, a site reliability engineering manager at Stack Overflow. Tom talks about his time at places like Bell Labs and Google, how he creates runbooks, and the secret to building a healthy relationship between developers and operations.

In this episode, Jeremy chats with Aaron Turner about the use cases for WebAssembly, how WASI makes serverless compute at the edge even more portable and powerful, some popular WASM toolchains, and what the future of this technology looks like.

Need a quick overview of Google Cloud core technologies? Quickly learn these 21 Google Cloud products—each explained in under two minutes.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Git-like capabilities for your object storage.

Run context-aware commands from your source code comments.

VS Code extension that allows you to record and playback guided tours of codebases, directly within the editor.

A command-line tool and library for generating regular expressions from user-provided test cases.

Directus is a real-time API and App dashboard for managing SQL database content.

Modulo12 is a novel SQL like language for parsing data and metadata about music (from midi and musicxml files).

Open-source Autonomy Software in Rust-lang with gRPC for the Roomba series robot vacuum cleaners.

CSS data visualization framework.

A self-hosted calendar and scheduler server.

Free, lightweight and hackable open source code editor for the web.

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