#226 — July 24, 2019

Read on the Web

StatusCode
Covering the week's news in software development, infrastructure, ops, platforms, and performance. — Formerly Web Operations Weekly and currently in transition.

Microsoft Says We Need A Safer Systems Programming Language — And, spoiler alert, Microsoft actually thinks it’s Rust! A huge boost for the still up and coming language originally built at Mozilla, but should we get ready for see R# soon? 😄

Microsoft Security Response Center

Smashtest: A Language for Describing Test Cases — A Cucumber-esque way to write end to end tests in a more natural way but which essentially boil down to JavaScript powered tests. The examples on the homepage do a good job of selling the idea.

Smashtest

The Early Security Engineer’s First 90 Days Checklist — Check out the latest best practices for WebOps and security engineers to prioritize and ramp up their security efforts.

Sqreen sponsor

HTTP Security Headers - A Complete Guide — A description of each security header of significance, its importance, and how to use them to secure sites you manage in one way or another.

Charlie Belmer

Introducing Osgood: A New V8-Based Platform for Building HTTP Servers — Built using Rust and the V8 JavaScript engine, Osgood is a new platform (a la Node) focused around building secure HTTP services. Security comes by demanding that I/O requirements are specified and enabled ahead of time. GitHub repo.

Thomas Hunter II

Economics-Based Answers to 'Why Wasn't This Page Found?' — A fun find on the Financial Times site where their 404 Not Found page explains why the page wasn’t found using different economic theories and principles (e.g. socialism or Keynesian economics).

The Financial Times

Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

CI/CD Solutions Engineer - Semaphore CI (Remote - Europe) — You will apply your DevOps and CI/CD expertise to be the creative force behind the successful onboarding of Semaphore's customers.

Semaphore

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery matches top tech talent with growing companies. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

When A Rewrite Isn’t: Rebuilding Slack on the Desktop — A brief look behind the scenes at how chat service Slack has made significant improvements to their Web technology-based desktop client.

Mark Christian and Johnny Rodgers (Slack)

Standby in Production: Scaling at the Second Largest Classified Site in the WorldAvito is Russia’s largest classified ads site and stores 20TB of data across a hundred PostgreSQL nodes. Here’s a very detailed, behind the scenes look at their Postgres high availability setup.

Konstantin Evteev

How Uber, Facebook, and Netflix Do SSH — A look at three companies who are setting an example for others to follow and who have written publicly how they’re approaching SSH.

Jon Silvers

Do You Need Golang or Kubernetes Training? — On-site corporate training. Having trained over 4,000 engineers since 2013, we've crafted classes for students to get as much as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

What It's Like to Be a Developer in Iran — Censorship and sanctions undoubtedly play a role.

Shahin Sorkh

How We Built a GDPR Compliant Website Analytics Platform Without Cookies — It involves creating multiple complex hashes for each visitor that can’t be connected to one another.

Fathom Analytics

The Business Executive's Guide to Kubernetes — Some ‘hard truths’ about Kubernetes and what it means for your business.

Jessie Frazelle

8M Lines of Hotel-Related Code Exposed in Elasticsearch Database Configuration Failure? — If you don’t have a system around setting and checking both the authentication and network access policies of all your database systems, now is the time to start.

SiliconANGLE

📖 Tutorials

What's Coming in Python 3.8 — The next version of Python is feature complete and will finally release in October.

Jake Edge

Do-Nothing Scripting: The Key to Gradual Automation? — An interesting idea for handling manual procedures within ops teams by creating scripts that give instructions but don’t perform any tasks themselves.

Dan Slimmon

Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us — A nicely accessible introduction to algebraic effects, a concept from functional programming research that Dan hopes will catch on in at least one mainstream language soon.

Dan Abramov

The History and Effective Use of vim — A must-read for Vim fans.

Joe Nelson

Managing a Secure JSON Web Token Implementation

Daniel Fanfara

What Were CGI Scripts? — If you were building webapps prior to 2005, you probably encountered CGI scripts, essentially scripts or executables that would be run on a per-request basis (we used one for newsletter signups till 2014!)

Rick Carlino

🛠 Code and Tools

Fork: A 'Fast and Friendly' Git Client for Mac and Windows — An attractive and feature-rich Git client which, while it’s ‘freeware’, is not open source.

Dan Pristupov and Tanya Pristupova

Redis Gears: A New Scripting Language for Redis — An interesting addition to the Redis data structure key/value store. Gears is a new module that adds a Python-based, cluster-aware scripting language for performing more advanced queries upon data. GitHub repo.

Redis Labs

Pantheon’s Webops Platform Achieves 156% ROI and CMS Upgrade Management by 1.7x on Average

Pantheon sponsor

Announcing Docker Enterprise 3.0 General Availability

David Hamdani (Docker)

The Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) Source Code — An interesting historical artefact, and if you want to actually understand it in full, Pluralsight has released a free course covering how it works.

Chris Garry