Programmer Weekly (Issue 6 May 28 2020)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 6

May 28, 2020

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 6 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

News

Learn about some new ways students can code in the browser. With online integrated development environments (IDEs), students can get right to work in a web browser, avoiding software conflicts that might happen on their local machines.

Google software engineers are looking into ways of eliminating memory management-related bugs from Chrome.

At this year’s Microsoft Build event, the company announced a new AI supercomputer, a toolkit for creating ‘responsible’ machine learning and a cloud offering for healthcare.

Idle capacity is a terrible thing to waste. Now you can lease high spec machines left idle by COVID-19.

Texas Instruments has removed the ability for some of its most popular calculators to run programs written in assembly or C. The change is being made to try and stop students from circumventing the calculators’ exam mode restrictions, but in the process it also removes a key avenue that hobbyists have used to run their programs.

GitLab 13.0 released with Gitaly Clusters, Epic Hierarchy on Roadmaps, and Auto Deploy to ECS.

Reading List

 

There are 163 different services that are available from the Amazon Dashboard, each with their own way of working, difficulties, catches and best practises. This post explain them in one line each.

At the very heart of Actual is a custom syncing engine. Recently I implemented full end-to-end encryption (not released yet) and it inspired me to audit the performance of the whole process. This post talks about a PostgreSQL feature that enabled a 9-10x performance improvement.

Microsoft has quietly added a built-in network packet sniffer to the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, and it has gone unnoticed since its release. This post shows you how to use it.

If you are new to serverless and looking for a high level web architecture guide, you've come to the right place! We'll see how key AWS services (Lambda, EventBridge, Cognito, Step Functions,...) fit together in a serverless architecture.

Tips and tricks for scaling SQLite for 4M real-ish queries per second on a single server, and how bare metal compares to EC2 for this workload.

This article explains how the Zip file format and its compression scheme work in great detail: LZ77 compression, Huffman coding, Deflate and all. It tells some of the history, and provides a reasonably efficient example implementation written from scratch in C. 

A Review of Open Source Software Supply Chain Attacks.

A story of a convoluted, not-very-useful method for extracting codez from unwitting JavaScript developers working on top secret projects.

GameGAN, a generative adversarial network trained on 50,000 PAC-MAN episodes, produces a fully functional version of the dot-munching classic without an underlying game engine.

A replica of the Sinclair Scientific demonstrates how a cheap chip was tricked into performing miracles.

In this post, the author tries to document the characteristics and habits of the highest-performing teams he has been on.

Org-mode is a fabulous organizational tool originally built by Carsten Dominik that operates on plain text files. Org-mode is part of Emacs.

What is it and why the hell do we use it.

Sometimes the best hiding place is the one that’s in plain sight.

This post explains how to run GitHub actions on self-hosted scalable runners on AWS spot instances.

Google Fonts is fast. Now it’s faster. Much faster.

Kindie (Kubernetes Individual) is an opinionated Kubernetes cluster setup for individuals or small business. Batteries included so that you can hit the ground running and add production workload in no time. Target audience Sysadmin, DevOps, Cloud engineer with Linux and Kubernetes experience looking to build a Kubernetes cluster for production usage with bells and whistles focussed on web workloads. You should be able to have the cluster ready in a few hours.

To change the culture around testing at Squarespace, we knew it would take more than a single team. We started a working group, bringing together both engineers and non-engineers from across the company to address the problem. If you have a cross-organizational issue that needs to be solved, here’s how to do it.

Did you ever enjoy writing XML files by hand? No, OK, I thought so. Was it better with JSON? No. What about YAML where the indentation is so easy right? No, none of these are enjoyable. The reason for all these no is simple: formats are meant to be read or written by machines and not by humans.

Every 10 years there is a changing of the guard in JavaScript. I think we have just started a period of accelerated change that could in future be regarded as the Third Age of JavaScript.

Watch and Listen 

Learn how to write a script to automatically search Glassdoor for job listings, aggregate every application URL, and apply to each job using pre-populated data. All with one click!

Learn web app penetration testing. You will learn pentesting techniques, tools, common attacks and more. The tools covered in the course include Burp Suite, Nikto, Dirbuster, curl, sublist3r, nmap, and many others.

Keavy is an engineering leader who believes that the management path isn't the only way to be a technical leader! In fact, she doesn't want to be a manager! How do you "become senior" and move into a technical leadership path without becoming a people manager?

With e-commerce driving up package deliveries into the millions per day, the systems that manage shipping and freight need to be reimagined. Learn how Innovapost and Purolator developed an all serverless solution with AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon RDS to not only scale, but also simplify and add extensibility to the workflow

A series about building a powerful virtual machine in JavaScript.

This week we chat about Deno 1.0, a new runtime for executing JavaScript and TypeScript outside of the web browser. Plus, Stack wins a Webby for best Community website, and the ins and outs of copying other people's code the right way.

Books

This book is for anyone who is interested in computing, and wants to learn more about the exciting, but sometimes daunting world of “The Shell”!

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

A collection of unofficial apis. Designed to inspire your next Friday night hack.

Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. It can be used to power Instant Messaging, VoIP/WebRTC signalling, Internet of Things communication - or anywhere you need a standard HTTP API for publishing and subscribing to data whilst tracking the conversation history

codefence.io is an easy to embed editor and compiler for over 25 server-side programming languages. Everything is run securely inside dedicated sandboxed Docker containers and, once executed, destroyed.

MiniConf is a virtual conference in a box. It manages the papers, schedules, and speakers for an academic conference run virtually. It can be easily integrated with interactive tools such as video, chat, and QA.

An Educational Sandbox For Web3... And Much More.

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity.

The easiest way to configure a performant, secure, and stable NGINX server.

Shell-agnostic, declarative CLI autocomplete specification.

DuckDB is an embeddable SQL OLAP Database Management System.

Accessible HTML/CSS charts with markdown support.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Create a custom, lightweight macOS app from a group of websites.

Prowler is a security tool to perform AWS security best practices assessments, audits, incident response, continuous monitoring, hardening and forensics readiness

Upcoming Events 

Through talks, polling, and panels, 'SRE From Home' will explore how Site Reliability Engineers are adapting to 'all-remote' operations and what we can learn from each other.

International Java & JavaScript Conference

Join experts from across the ecosystem for hands-on demos of cloud native technologies and thought leadership on best practices and trends you should be on the lookout for. Whether you’re a developer or administrator, or a business leader on a microservices journey, this is the party to be at to learn about the latest and greatest in the Cloud Native ecosystem.

Hasura Con is a free, online conference. Join us for a week of talks and hand-on workshops about pushing the boundaries of GraphQL forward!

Our Other Newsletters

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