#215 — May 8, 2019

Read on the Web

Web Operations Weekly

Microsoft Announces .NET 5 — One of the biggest announcements so far from this week’s Build conference is that .NET’s future lies in .NET 5, a bringing together of .NET Core and mainstream .NET. It’ll support Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, WebAssembly, and more, and ultimately form the core of the entire Microsoft-oriented development ecosystem. Its final release is due in November 2020.

.NET Blog

What Does Unsplash Cost to Run in 2019? — If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I love it when companies explain what infrastructure, services, and stack they use and how much it costs, so this roundup from free stock photo company Unsplash is fantastic. Spoiler: It’s $100K per month, including $5K/mo on logging alone!

Luke Chesser (Unsplash)

How to Test Software: Mocking, Stubbing, and Contract Testing — We’ll cover the techniques of mocking and stubbing, and test-driven development to help each testing layer. First, let’s review the test pyramid. This helps illustrate the difference between different kinds of tests and when it’s advantageous to do them.

CircleCI sponsor

The New Evergreen Googlebot — Googlebot, the spider that Google uses to crawl sites for its index, is now using the latest Chromium rendering engine (currently 74) meaning it now supports many more modern Web standards such as Web Components and ES6.

Google

JMAP: A Modern, Open Email Protocol — FastMail and the IETF have been working on a new standard for email, creatively incrementing IMAP to JMAP. JMAP is flexible enough to support RFC 5322 compliant mail but stores mail in a structured JSON format.

Bron Gondwana and Neil Jenkins

Amazon S3 Deprecating Path-Style Requests in 2020 — This has the potential to break all sorts of older code. Basically, if you’re using URLs like //s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/key then those aren’t going to work after September 30, 2020, and you need to upgrade to the new, host-based ways. Hacker News had an extensive discussion about this move.

Amazon

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X-Team

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Vettery

📖 Tutorials & Stories

HTTP Headers for the Responsible Developer — A nice primer to some of the fundamentals every developer should know about HTTP (and HTTPS) that moves on to talk about particular headers like Strict-Transport-Security, Content-Security-Policy and Cache-Control. This is a good one to share with the team to plug up any knowledge gaps.

Stefan Judis (Twilio)

Negotiations Failed: Has Oracle Killed Java EE?“Oracle announced that Java EE will be open sourced [..] After 18 months of intensive negotiations the effort has come to an end: It failed. There will be no trademark agreement.”

Markus Karg

How Far Out is AWS Fargate?Fargate is AWS’s service for running containers without managing servers (or clusters) and while AWS doesn’t bill it as in the ‘serverless’ realm, ultimately serverless concepts have had a huge inspiration. Michael compares it to Lambda here.

Michael Lavers

Technical Debt — Leverage or Liquidate? — A look at three signs that existing tech debt might soon cause you problems.

Matthew O'Riordan

Repeatable MongoDB Performance Tests: How CPU Options Are Best Disabled — A great post from the MongoDB Engineering Journal looking at recent efforts to improve the repeatability of MongoDB performance tests being run on EC2 instances. In short, there are a variety of CPU options that can make tests ‘noisier’, so turn them off if you want to do direct comparisons.

Henrik Ingo

🛠 Code & Tools

Windows to Get a New Open Source Terminal with All The Modern Trimmings — Microsoft is launching a brand new Windows Terminal app built on the updated and refactored Windows console subsystem with support for lots of new features and capabilities.

Mary Branscombe

Linux 5.1 Arrives — Linus Torvalds stresses that it’s a ‘normal’ release with no big, exciting features, but it does include support for non-volatile memory to be used as RAM (such as with NVDIMMs), a SafeSetID security module, and Atomic Replace which will help in updating systems without dreaded reboots.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (ZDNet)

Future-Proof Your Platform with a Video Stack That Scales

Mux sponsor

Up Your AWS CloudFormation Testing Game using TaskCat — TaskCat is an open source tool developed by the AWS Quick Start team to automate the testing of AWS CloudFormation templates.

Amazon Web Services

CSS Only Chat: A 'Truly Monstrous' Async Web Chat using No Frontend JS — This is firmly in the “don’t do this, but it’s good to know this is possible” stable of experiments. Background images loaded via pseudo-selectors are the vector here.

Kevin Kuchta