#263 — April 22, 2020

Read on the Web

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — This is not a technical article but is an important one nonetheless. Lee Holloway essentially programmed Cloudflare into being. But then he became distant and unpredictable, and what happened to him is something that could affect any of us ????

Sandra Upson (WIRED)

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview.

Glauber Costa

Slow CI Build? Get a 41:1 ROI by Switching to Semaphore — For every $1 invested in Semaphore, engineers gain $41 in reclaimed productivity. Who said money can’t buy you time?

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

▶  Mob Programming and the Power of Flow — I enjoyed this insightful walk through the idea of bringing people together and attempting to develop things in an efficient way with numerous people around the same machine (a.k.a. ‘mob’ programming). It’s not for everyone, but it’s neat to see how it can work.

Woody Zuill

Cloudflare Workers Now Supports.. COBOL — COBOL is one of the earliest things you could really call a programming language (it first appeared in 1959!) and is often a source of amusement because it’s seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, it’s still in use (particularly in legacy systems) and you can use with Cloudflare Workers too!

John Graham-Cumming

???? Jobs

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

X-Team

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

Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

How 'Memories', a 256 Byte Demo, Was Coded — You can watch the demo here or enjoy learning just how these unusual developers cram so much into so little space.

HellMood/DESiRE

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories — For pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression.

Quanta Magazine

▶  Discussing NGINX and Service Meshes with Alan Murphy — I enjoyed this SE Daily episode last week and learnt a fair bit.

Software Engineering Daily podcast

End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments — Optimize service costs and reduce MTTR with full data correlation, payload visibility and automated tracing. Try free.

Epsagon sponsor

▶  Performance Profiling for Web Applications — An overview of how to use Chrome DevTools to understand a Web application’s performance bottlenecks.

Sam Saccone

Are Object Stores Starting to Look Like Databases? — A bit, yes.

Alex Woodie (Datanami)

The Case Against CS Master’s Degrees

Oz Onay

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tutorials

Ask HN: I'm A Software Engineer Going Blind, How Should I Prepare? — This is something I hope none of you have to go through, but we’ve linked to other stories about being a blind coder in the past, and some form of sight loss will affect many of us over the years.

Hacker News

Writing an 'Emulator' in JavaScript (and Interfacing with Multiple UIs) — Tania built a Chip-8 interpreter in JavaScript and has gone into quite a bit of detail about what was involved here. Lots of neat bits and pieces to pick up from this.

Tania Rascia

What It Took to Build a Serverless App That Texts Positive COVID-19 News — Code, a screencast tour, and an article looking at what it took to build a simple serverless app using C#, Azure Functions, and Twilio to text news alerts (but only ones with positive sentiments!)

Gwyneth Pena S.

If You Use grep On Text Files, Use the -a (--text) Option — I could explain why but then you wouldn’t need to read this. Makes a good point.

Chris Siebenmann

Event-Reduce: An Algorithm to Optimize Frequently Running Queries? — In brief, the idea is that rather than having to re-run queries when data changes on a table, you can basically merge in changes to previous query results. Be sure to check the FAQs.

Daniel Meyer

Embedding Binary Objects in C

Ted Unangst

???? Code and Tools

Desed: A Debugger for sed — Demystify and debug your sed (the text processor that comes with nearly every Unix) scripts, from the comfort of your terminal. Step through line by line, place breakpoints, etc.

SoptikHa2

Falcon: An Open-Source, Cross Platform SQL Client — Built around Electron and React, this basic client can quickly do chart visualizations of query results and can connect to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite and more.

Plotly

The SaaS CTO Security Checklist

Sqreen sponsor

Termible: Offer Terminal Apps in the Browser Without Installation — This is a commercial service but I find the idea intriguing. You provide a Dockerfile, embed some code on your site, and let people play with your product/service “live”. HTTPie seems to use it for its live examples.

Termible

X410: An X Server for Windows 10 — If you’re using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to run Linux behind the scenes of a Windows 10 install, X410 takes things to another graphical level.

Choung Networks

60 Linux Networking Commands and Scripts — “I decided to create a network tools go-to-list for myself. Then, I thought, why not turn the list into a blog post?”

Hayden James

Brök: A Tool to Find Broken Links in Text Documents — Built in Haskell.

Mark Wales

xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust. — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data.

Andrew Gallant

#500 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Welcome to issue 500! A bit of an arbitrary milestone but thanks to you all :-)

Ruby Weekly

Ruby Next: Make All Rubies Quack Alike — Ruby Next is a Ruby-to-Ruby transpiler that allows you to use the latest features of Ruby in previous versions without monkey patching or refinements. Could this be how experimental features are released going forward?

Vladimir Dementyev

Ruby 3 'Guilds' Proposal Now Called Ractor — This documentation is in Japanese (though the source code examples are easy to follow) but the news is that the new, proposed concurrency mechanism for Ruby 3 called Guilds (explained here) has been renamed to Ractor (as in ‘Ruby actors’, Ruby’s take on the actor model).

Koichi Sasada

Don’t Do Auth From Scratch. Focus On Your App — Spend less time on authentication and authorization and more time developing your awesome app. Auth built for <devs>. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Take the 2020 Ruby on Rails Survey — This is the sixth outing for Planet Argon’s survey which began in 2009. We try and support it each time as the results always make for interesting reading (see 2018’s results). Participate and become data ????

Planet Argon Team

Alt::BrightonRuby: A Slightly Odd, Quasi-Conference for Strange Times — Alt::BrightonRuby is not happening in-person this year. Instead, you can buy the recorded talks, get a _why book, and get some podcasts with the speakers.

Alt::BrightonRuby

???? 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

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

???? Articles & Tutorials

▶  How To Begin Contributing to a Gem — If you’ve been using a library for a while and you want to contribute back, how do you get started? A 12 minute introduction here.

Drifting Ruby

How to Set Up Factory Bot on a Fresh Rails Project — Factory Bot is a library for setting up Ruby objects as test data – an alternative to fixtures, essentially.

Jason Swett

Using Postgres's DISTINCT ON to Avoid an N+1 Query — “Recently I fixed a tricky N+1 query and thought I should write it up..”

John Nunemaker

Need to Upgrade Rails? Don’t Know How Long It Will Take? — Get an action plan for your Rails upgrade and an in-depth report about your technical debt and outdated dependencies ????.

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrade Services sponsor

5 Uses for 'Splats' — 5 different ways to leverage Ruby’s splat (*) operator.

Jason Dinsmore

Running Multiple Instances of Webpacker — If you’re working on multiple Rails apps at once, changing where Rails gets served up is easy by configuring the port, but what about Webpacker? That requires another tweak.

Scott Watermasysk

Performing Asynchronous HTTP requests in Rails — How to update parts an app’s pages with asynchronous HTTP requests. A step-by-step how-to with JavaScript’s fetch() function, and Rails native server-side partial rendering.

Remi Mercier

How to Use AWS SimpleDB from Ruby — If you haven’t heard of AWS SimpleDB, you wouldn’t be alone as it’s not very popular, but it’s a pretty simple and cheap way to store simple documents in the cloud.

Peter Cooper

What's The Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Ways to Reduce Your Heroku App's Slug Size — You might be surprised Heroku didn’t already do some of this for you.

Rohit Kumar

A Chat with Thibaut Barrère — If you missed our interview with Thibaut Barrere (Rubyist, and creator of the Kiba ETL framework) in last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

Glenn Goodrich

???? Code and Tools

Rodauth 2.0: Ruby's 'Most Advanced' Authentication Framework — A authentication framework that can work in any Rack-based webapp. Built using Roda and Sequel, Rodauth can be used with other frameworks and database libraries if you wish. Why’s it so advanced? More info on that here.

Jeremy Evans

RubyGems 3.1.3 Released — Lots of little bug fixes and tweaks.

RubyGems Blog

Business: Business Day Calculations for Ruby — Define your working days and holidays and then you can do ‘business day arithmetic’ (for example, what’s in 5 working days after now taking holidays and weekends into account?)

GoCardless

Lockbox: Modern Encryption for Rails

Andrew Kane

split: The Rack Based A/B 'Split' Testing Framework — A mature framework with robust configuration and multiple options for determining the winning option.

Split

P.S. In last week's issue, one of the links to our sponsors was incorrect and some readers emailed us to say they really wanted to read the promised article, Let’s Explore Big-O Notation with Ruby, so here it is. Apologies for any inconvenience.