Programmer Weekly (Issue 76 October 14 2021)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 76

October 14, 2021

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 76 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"The central enemy of reliability is complexity." - Daniel Geer

News

A newly discovered security flaw in GitHub allows leveraging GitHub Actions to bypass the required reviews mechanism and push unreviewed code to a protected branch, potentially allowing malicious code to be used by other users or flow down the pipeline to production.

Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they trained what they claim is the largest and most capable AI-powered language model to date: Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP). The successor to the companies’ Turing NLG 17B and Megatron-LM models, MT-NLP contains 530 billion parameters and achieves “unmatched” accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks, Microsoft and Nvidia say — including reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and natural language inferences.

Reading List

Memcached and Redis. More different than first appearances would suggest. From how they use memory to how they expire items, the differences are not as subtle as you would expect.

How PayPal used the Platform Agnostic Automation Framework to simplify SDK testing.

In this post, I'll be explaining how I did it and how I evaded detection, as well as the aftermath when I revealed myself and didn't get into trouble.

In this article, you’ll learn how to make your website’s text dynamic and more engaging using typewriter effects in pure CSS.

The 'how' and 'why' of CORS, from start to finish.

Google Chrome experiments you should try.

When we look at software through a sociotechnical lens, we begin to appreciate the complexity inherent in software development and operations. The systems we are building and operating are constantly being modified by different people, with different contexts, at different times, who may or may not speak to each other directly. This emergent collaboration can present unique challenges that are fun to navigate.

Watch and Listen

Facebook was down for five hours last week. What happened and what do DNS and BGP have to do with it?

A chat with Eric Newcomer about the recurring patterns he's seen as the CTO of WSO2 and across his career as a technologist building large systems. We'll talk about complexity vs. simplicity, abstraction vs. control, and one of Eric's favorite topics - transactions and eventual consistency. Eric will also explain the value of the new Ballerina open-source programming language for the cloud that makes it easier to use, combine, and create network services, and how it is used in Choreo - a new integration Platform as a Service for API developers.

Carissa Blossom walks through the monitoring service that Uber developed to identify issues in production at the individual city level all across the globe.

Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate at Honeycomb, introduces us to the concept of error budgets for service-level objectives (SLOs) and demonstrates how to accelerate software delivery with observability.

A case study of how simple, straightforward coding can turn several thousand lines of code and 10's of seconds of runtime into a few dozen lines of code and a sub-second runtime. It attempts to provide concrete examples of why software is often an order of magnitude (or more) slower than it should be.

Books

The definitive guide to SSH tunneling, port redirection, and bending traffic like a boss. 

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

A Git implementation in AWK.

Learn Linux commands by playing a simple text adventure.

Ask and search questions on Stackoverflow directly from inside VS Code.

A practical hand tracking engine.

GUI of live indexed grep for source code, files locator, search and replace. Index management for multiple projects.

Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms.

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format.

An online whiteboard.

Build terminals in the browser.

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