#264 — April 29, 2020

Read on the Web

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) Released — Lots of goodies in the latest Ubuntu release which will surely form the basis for many a server over the next several years (its standard support will end in April 2025). Some related info:

• It uses Linux kernel 5.4 which introduces WireGuard VPN support and kernel lockdown.
• Phoronix have run tons of Ubuntu 18.04 vs 20.04 benchmarks on a 48 core Xeon server and found significant performance improvements for server use cases.
• There's also Lubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu MATE 20.04 and Xubuntu 20.04 if you prefer alternative desktop environments.
• People are still frustrated by snaps, but you can disable them.

Canonical

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases — A Google engineer shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

Audit Every SQL Query — JackDB is a modern database client with comprehensive audit logging and role-based access controls. Learn more about auditing database operations with JackDB.

JackDB, Inc. sponsor

How The Final Python 2 Release Marks the End of an Era — Last week we casually slipped in a note about 2.7.18 being Python 2’s final release but.. maybe it deserved a bigger story than that. Luckily Stack Overflow’s Ryan Donovan is here with one.

Ryan Donovan

AMP Introduces 'User-Friendly' Content Encryption Support — AMP aims to be all about providing speed to mobile consumers of content but paywalls just, well, get in the way. So Google and the AMP folks have come up with a way where protected content can be served and unlocked client-side for more performance. Cynically, of course, you could consider this yet another form of DRM for Web content..

The AMP Blog

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

???? Stories and Opinions

Two Months with PowerShell on a UNIX — You can’t use it as a login shell yet, but otherwise Microsoft’s PowerShell (which is more commonly associated with Windows) isn’t too bad.

Joe Wright

'Teleforking' a Process Onto a Different Computer — Imagine if instead of calling fork you could call telefork and have a process forked onto other machines within a cluster.. this developer rigged up a fun prototype.

Tristan Hume

▶  Discussing Serverless Use Cases with Gareth McCumskey — A chat with Gareth McCumskey (of Serverless Inc) about different production-level serverless use cases including RESTful APIs, GraphQL, WebSockets, and capturing clickstream data.

The Serverless Chats Podcast podcast

How Twitter Engineers Hunted Down a Linux Kernel Bug — When two Twitter engineers reset a Linux server’s firewall config, they expected things to work.. but it didn’t, and they unearthed (and fixed!) a kernel bug along the way.

Cong Wang and Dan Luu (Twitter)

To Microservices and Back Again: Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith — When Segment moved to a microservices architecture, they gained environmental isolation, but at a cost of higher operational overhead. Three years later, the costs were too high, and the team migrated back to a monolith..

Thomas Betts and Alexandra Noonan

How Mozilla Engineers Code Quality in the Firefox Browser — An insider’s look at Firefox’s code quality toolchain that’s been designed to manage the ongoing development and releases of the popular desktop browser.

Mozilla Hacks

???? Tutorials

The Tool That Really Runs Your Containers: Deep Dive Into runc and OCI Specifications — runc is a container runtime that was extracted from Docker over the years and is now maintained separately but which still does the work of spawning and running containers.

Kirill Shirinkin

Decoupling Larger Applications with Amazon EventBridge — How to use an event-based architecture to decouple services and functional areas of applications. (EventBridge is AWS’s serverless app-to-app event bus.)

James Beswick (AWS)

The Complete Guide to Distributed Tracing

Lightstep sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

A Variety of C Obfuscation Tricks — C is, like many languages, well suited to trickery and here’s a look at some of it.

Colin Ian King

???? Code and Tools

Will It CORS? — A handy online tool/wizard for establishing how your (potential) use case will (or won’t!) operate alongside CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

HTTP Toolkit

sls-dev-tools v1.0: Think DevTools But for Serverless — “Think Chrome Dev Tools but for Serverless” say the team behind sls-dev-tools. They work with AWS Lambda and alongside tools like Serverless Framework or SAM.

Theodo

IPFS 0.5.0 Released: A Major Leap Forward for Peer to Peer Kind — IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is perhaps the best known peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol and it has been seeing some high profile adoption as shown here.

Molly Mackinlay

The Super Simple AWS Storage Calculator — A quick way to compare how much it costs to store certain amounts of data on various AWS services at differing levels of robustness.

The Duckbill Group

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Windows Terminal Preview v0.11 Release — A lot of updates here for Microsoft’s official terminal app prior to an even bigger 1.0 release.

Microsoft

MsQuic: Microsoft Open Sources Its QUIC Library — A cross-platform, general-purpose library that implements the QUIC transport protocol. GitHub repo.

Daniel Havey (Microsoft)

Editly: Slick, Declarative Command Line Video Editing — I’ve long wondered why there isn’t a good way to “code” video editing at the command line other than wrangling with arcane ffmpeg options. Well.. this uses ffmpeg, but it handles a lot of the wrangling for you.

Mikael Finstad

Pomerium: An Identity-Aware Secure Access Proxy — An identity aware access-proxy modeled after Google’s BeyondCorp. Think VPN access benefits but without the VPN. Built in Go, naturally.

Pomerium

98.css: CSS for Building Faithful Recreations of Windows 98 — If for any reason you need your Web site’s interface to look like Windows 98…

Jordan Scales

pxy: A Go Livestream Proxy from WebSocket to External RTMP Endpoints

Chua Bing Quan