#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

#303 — May 8, 2020

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Database Weekly

Introducing Scylla Open Source 4.0 — Scylla (a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL data store aiming to be the “world’s fastest column-store database”) now provides production-ready lightweight Transactions (LWT), a DynamoDB-compatible API (Alternator), and operator for Kubernetes, and more.

Dor Laor

The Best Medium-Hard Data Analyst SQL Interview Questions — This article begins with a quote: “The first 70% of SQL is pretty straightforward but the remaining 30% can be pretty tricky.” True! This article focuses on the tricky ‘medium-hard’ area that few tutorials venture into.

Zachary Thomas

????Live Coding: Guide to Grafana 101 - Getting Started with Alerts — Join us on May 20th to see how to use Grafana’s alerting functionality to get notified about anomalies in your data, dig into root causes, and respond to critical issues. Step-by-step demos + tips = cheaper, more flexible monitoring ✅.

Timescale sponsor

TileDB 2.0 and the Future of Data Science — TileDB is an embeddable storage engine focused on working with dense and sparse multi-dimensional arrays. It’s a C++ library with official Python, R, Java and Go integrations, but it can integrate with other database systems too. 2.0 introduces dataframe support, a new API for R, and support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

Stavros Papadopoulos

Time-Series Compression Algorithms, Explained — Delta-delta encoding, Simple-8b, XOR-based compression, and more - these algorithms aren’t magic, but combined they can save over 90% of storage costs and speed up queries. Here’s how they work.

Joshua Lockerman and Ajay Kulkarni

CockroachDB Creators Raise $87 Million of New Investment — Quite a raise and quite a valuation in these times for the creators of CockroachDB, a popular distributed SQL database.

Cockroach Labs

The Big Cloud Data Boom Gets Even Bigger, Thanks to COVID-19? — It’s not like the cloud was doing badly beforehand, but the pandemic is apparently encouraging companies to virtualize as much of their operations as possible.

Datanami

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days. — Using MongoDB Atlas? Studio 3T is the professional GUI and IDE that unlocks the power you need.

Studio 3T sponsor

Speeding Up count(*): Why Not Use max(id) - min(id)? — A warning tale in case you decide to take this shortcut. While you might be able to estimate or fudge a number that’s close, you can’t guarantee sequences will give you an exact, correct answer here.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Using AWS API Gateway to Run Database Queries — API Gateway is commonly used to hook up HTTP endpoints to AWS Lambda functions but did you know it can directly connect to DynamoDB? (Or any AWS service that lets you query over the AWS API, so not RDS.)

Renato Byrro

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility (particularly early on in the development cycle when your eventual access patterns aren’t always known) – there are some mitigations, however.

Rob Cronin

Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Tooling

pgModeler: A Postgres Database Modeler — An easy way to create and edit database models in a visual way. It’s packaged up as a paid product but is also open source so you can build your own.

Raphael Araújo e Silva

AvionDB: A Decentralised Database with MongoDB-like Developer Interface — An admittedloy ‘alpha stage’ database system built on top of OrbitDB, a serverless, peer-to-peer database that uses IFPS for storage and implements the core decentralized database logic/protocol.

Dappkit

mssql-cli, a CLI Tool to Manage SQL Server, Now on macOS and Linux — mssql-cli is a tool for working with SQL Server from the command line, complete with Intellisense, syntax highlighting, and paging.

Alan Yu (Microsoft)

#497 — April 16, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Bye Bye Ruby 2.4, Support Has Ended — From the end of April 2019 till now, Ruby 2.4 has been in its ‘security maintenance’ phase but now you won’t even get that, Ruby 2.4.10 should be the final 2.4 release. 2.5 will follow in 2.4’s footsteps next year, so upgrading to 2.6 or 2.7 should now be a priority for those older apps.

Ruby Core Team

Testing Ruby Decorators with super_method — Have you ever wondered how you can properly test the behavior of a method overridden by Module#prepend? Enter super_method which returns a Method object of which superclass method would be called when super is used or nil if none exists.

Simone Bravo

You Hacked the Gibson? Yeah, They Built Their Own Login — Don't let Crash Override pwn your app. FusionAuth adds secure login, registration and user management to your app in minutes not months. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Heya: A Sequence Mailer for Rails — “Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences.” Note: It’s open source but not free for commercial use beyond a certain point.

Honeybadger Industries LLC

A Final Report on Ruby Concurrency Developments — A report on work funded by a 2019 Ruby Association Grant that puts forth a proposal of using non-blocking fibers to improve Ruby’s concurrency story.

Samuel Williams

Mocking in Ruby with Minitest — Minitest has basic mocking functionality baked in, but be judicious in your use of it.

Heidar Bernhardsson

???? Jobs

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

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

Vettery

▶️ Get ready for your next role: Pluralsight is free for the entire month of April. Stay Home. Skill Up. #FreeApril — SPONSORED

???? Articles & Tutorials

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression in Ruby — Linear regression is a mathematical approach to modelling a relationship between multiple variables and is demonstrated here by exploring whether the tempo of a song predicts its popularity on Spotify.

Julie Kent

Feature Flags: A Simple Way to 'De-Stress' Production Releases — Feature flags bridge a gap between the abstract concept of continuous delivery and tactical release of features.

Matt Swanson

A Guide to Deprecation Warnings in Rails — If you’ve upgraded Rails and you start seeing warnings screaming at you, you can either get Googling or.. read this ????

Luciano Becerra

What's the Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Understanding webpacker.yml — Have you ever really gone through the Webpack config?

Ross Kaffenberger

Using Optimizer Hints in Rails — Rails 6 removes the need to write raw SQL to use optimizer hints, so that’s cool.

Prateek Choudhary

Dissecting Rails Migrations — You should pick up something new about migrations by reading this article as it covers all of the essentials and a little more.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

The Basics of Custom Exception Handling — Never hurts to revise the basics of effective exceptions.

Mark Michon

How to Improve Code Readability with Closures

Andrey Koleshko

???? Code and Tools

ruby-prolog: A Pure Ruby Prolog-like DSL for Logical Programming — Solve complex logic problems on the fly using a dynamic, Prolog-like DSL inline with your normal code.

Preston Lee

Anyway Config: Keep Your Ruby Configuration Sensible — Get your Ruby project out of ‘ENV Hell’ with anyway_config, a framework for managing configuration.

Vladimir Dementyev

The End of Heroku Alerts — Rails Autoscale keeps your app healthy. Simple and effective autoscaling for Web, Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Que.

Rails Autoscale sponsor

Tomo 1.0: A Friendly CLI for Deploying Rails Apps — There’s a short tutorial for deploying Rails, and the documentation is thorough.

Matt Brictson

ActiveLdap 6.0: An Object Oriented Interface to LDAP — A very long standing project (16 years!) that has just had an update. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and while I don’t hear about it much anymore, it has plenty of established use cases.

Sutou Kouhei

Elasticsearch Integrations for ActiveModel/Record and Rails

Elastic

RubyMine 2020.1 Released

Natalie Kudanova

#335 — April 23, 2020

Read on the Web

Node Weekly

Node.js 14 Released — Woo-hoo another major release of Node.js is here. v14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October.. so production apps would, ideally, remain on v12 for now. So what’s new..?

• Diagnostic reports are now a stable feature.
• It's based on V8 8.1.
• An experimental Async Local Storage API
• Improvements to streams.
• An experimental WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) to support future WebAssembly use cases.
• Bye bye to the ESM module ‘experimental’ warning (though it still is experimental).

Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs

Learn Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript — Join Brian Lonsdorf and learn how to apply such concepts as pure functions, currying, composition, functors, monads and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Puppeteer 3.0: Say Hello to Firefox — Best known as a way to headlessly control Chrome from Node, Puppeteer has recently seen some competition in the form of the cross-browser Playwright recently. But competition can be good and Puppeteer now supports Firefox too.

Mathias Bynens

ZEIT Is Now Vercel — You probably best know ZEIT as the creators and maintainers of the popular Next.js React framework and their ‘Now’ deployment and hosting platform.

Vercel

New OpenSSL Security Release To Require Node Updates? Maybe Not.. — A key security update to OpenSSL raised the possibility of widespread Node releases to incorporate the fixes, but initial suggestions are that Node isn’t affected. Fingers crossed!

Sam Roberts

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer 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

???? Articles & Tutorials

OneTesselAway: Building a Real-Time Public Transit Status Device — A developer wanted to know when the next bus would arrive.. while using lots of cool tech, including Node, the OneBusAway API, and the Tessel 2 IoT platform.

Robert McGuire

What is the toJSON() Function? — If an object has a toJSON function, JSON.stringify() calls toJSON() and serializes the return value from toJSON() instead.

Valeri Karpov

Top GitHub Best Practices for Developers - Expanded Guide — Implementing these best practices could save you time, improve code maintainability, and prevent security risks.

Datree.io sponsor

Refactor Your Node and Express APIs to Serverless with Azure Functions — John Papa points out a Microsoft tutorial that walks through the process of taking a Node API serverless with Azure’s Functions service.

John Papa

Querying SQL Server from Node with async/await

Rob Tomlin

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

lazynpm: A Terminal UI for npm — One of those sort of things you don’t realize you need until you give it a go. There’s a four-minute screencast if you want to see how it works without downloading.

Jesse Duffield

node-sqlite3 4.2: Async, Non-blocking SQLite3 Bindings for Node — 4.2.0 just came out.

Mapbox

ts-gphoto2-driver: A Node Wrapper for libgphoto2 — libgphoto2 provides a way to control a variety of digital cameras/DSLRs.

Lenzotti Romain

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

Rosetta: A General Purpose Internationalization Library in 292 Bytes — Less than 300 bytes, but does have a few dependencies. Aims to be very simple and is targeted at basic string use cases.

Luke Edwards

nodejs-dns 2.0: The Google Cloud DNS Client for Node

Google

node-osc 5.0: Open Sound Control Protocol Library — OSC is a protocol used to communicate between media devices.

Myles Borins

ts-node: TypeScript Execution and REPL for Node

TypeStrong

???? And One for Fun..

npm trends: Compare NPM Package Downloads — A site to compare package download counts over time. For example, what about koa vs restify vs fastify?

John Potter

#337 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

✍️ With a few of the links today, this is a good time to note we sometimes link to things we disagree with or that are controversial if they are newsworthy or of relevance to our community. Inclusion is not always endorsement but you can read any summaries we write alongside items to get our take on things ????

Node Weekly

Node v14.2.0 (Current) Released — The latest version of Node gains a new experimental way — assert.CallTracker — to track and verify function calls and the amount of times they occur. Also, require('console').Console now supports different group indentations

Node.js

Deno 1.0: What You Need to Know — Two years ago Ryan Dahl, the original creator of Node, gave a popular talk called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js where he revealed Deno, his prototype of how he'd build a better V8-based JavaScript runtime. With 1.0 due next week, Deno is poised to be a particularly exciting release and this article does a good job of cruising through the reasons why.

David Else

Enhance Node.js Performance with Datadog APM — Debug errors and bottlenecks in your code by tracing requests across web servers and services in your environment. Then correlate between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues without switching tools or contexts. Try Datadog APM free.

Datadog APM sponsor

Deno Weekly: Our Newest Newsletter — We really like what we see from Deno (above) so far, so we're launching a new newsletter all about it! ???? Rather than keep mentioning Deno in Node Weekly, we'll be giving it its own space. Even if you're not planning to use Deno, feel free to subscribe for a while, see what happens, then unsubscribe if it doesn't suit you — the next issue will drop on 1.0's release (due next Wednesday).

Cooperpress

Controlling GUIs Automatically with Nut.js — Write Node code that clicks on things, opens apps, types, clicks buttons, etc. Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Hit the GitHub repo to learn more or check out some examples.

Simon Hofmann

A Practical Guide to Node Buffers — You’ll often encounter Buffer objects for holding binary data in the form of a sequence of bytes during interactions with the operating system, working with files, network transfers, etc.

DigitalOcean

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

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

???? Articles & Opinions

How to Build a REST Service with Fastify — How to build a basic RESTful service using Fastify, a popular Node Web framework focused on performance/low overheads.

Wisdom Ekpot

▶  How to Use Node.js for Load Testing — A straightforward tour of an approach for hitting a Web site over and over from multiple child processes.

Tom Baranowicz

How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code — A quick fire tip.

David Walsh

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

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Node: Best Practices for Performance — Covers very similar ground to another memory leak article we linked recently.

Deepu K Sasidharan

'Some thoughts on the npm acquisition..' — The creator of Hapi and an investor in npm Inc. shared his thoughts on GitHub’s acquisition of npm. I disagree with his conclusion (and his views have also caused concern on Twitter) but it’s nonetheless interesting to get views from behind the curtain.

Eran Hammer

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

npm 6.14.5 Released — Just a couple of minor bug fixes.

The npm Blog

actions-cli: Monitor Your GitHub Actions in Real Time from the Command Line

Tommaso De Rossi

SQL Template Tag: Tagged Template Strings for Preparing SQL Statements — For use with pg and mysql, for example.

Blake Embrey

webpack-blocks: Configure webpack using Functional Feature Blocks

Andy Wermke

JavaScript Error Tracking with AppSignal v1.3.0 is Here

AppSignal sponsor

FarmHash 3.1: A Node Implementation of Google's High Performance Hash Functions — FarmHash is a family of non-cryptographic hash functions built by Google mostly for quickly hashing strings.

Lovell Fuller

do-wrapper 4.0: A Node Wrapper for the DigitalOcean v2 API

Matthew Major