WebAssembly is now a W3C Recommendation

Plus China's DDoS 'cannon', comparing 22 VPS providers, and two nefarious Python libraries.

#246 — December 11, 2019 Read on the Web StatusCode Covering the week's news in software development, infrastructure, ops, platforms, and performance. Bootstrapping Understanding: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering — A fascinating walkthrough of how someone reverse engineered some data files from an old game, but the principles extend into many other areas. At the least, you might pick up some neat command line tricks here. Brian Raiter Low-Cost VPS Testing Results — This is partly neat because it's from the original creator of PHP but also because it's rare to see a balanced look across 22 different providers like this. Rasmus Lerdorf Continuous Deployment Without Downtime — Do you know what it takes to automate all of the steps necessary to deploy? Learn more about this final stage in the process of software development automation. CircleCI sponsor WebAssembly is Now a W3C Recommendation — This is a really big, formal step for WebAssembly and the Web as a whole as languages like Rust, Go, and C# begin to target browsers directly by compiling to WebAssembly. This press release doesn't explain WebAssembly particularly well, so if you want to learn more about it, enjoy this illustrated guide or this if you want something more advanced. WebAssembly is also making moves into the server side. W3C ICANN Delays The Sale of the .org Registry — They've not exactly stopped its sale, but ICANN has issued an 'additional information request' to the Public Interest Registry over the sale of the .org registry. ICANN The "Great Cannon" Has Been Deployed Again — Great Cannon is a coined term for a mechanism within the 'Great Firewall of China' that can be used to create DDoS attacks fuelled by JavaScript injected into pages that pass through that firewall. AT&T Cybersecurity Quick bytes: The new Mac Pro is finally out, but it'll cost you over $50K if you max out the spec (though, to be fair, you can spec a Dell workstation at $150k..) Electron, the hugely popular GitHub-founded toolkit for building desktop apps on Web technologies, has joined the OpenJS Foundation. Facebook's head of AI says AI will soon 'hit the wall' as the limits of purely machine learning-based approaches are reached. The latest instalment (or fascicle) of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is now out. More background info on Knuth's own news page. Twitter has started a project to build an open and decentralized social media standard which Twitter itself hopes to eventually use itself. Two malicious Python libraries have been caught stealing SSH and GPG keys. Google Compute Engine is introducing E2, a new class of cost-optimized general purpose VMs. 💻 Jobs Data Pipelines, Reinvented. Find Your Place at Fivetran — Rooted in Oakland, we are a fast-growing company hiring across software engineering, SRE, product, and data analytics. Come join us. Fivetran Find a Job Through Vettery — Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Vettery 📕 Tutorials Using Kafka to Throttle QPS on MySQL Shards in Bulk Write APIs — A thorough look at how Pinterest has a bulk write platform built on top of Kafka to manage load on core databases. Qi Li (Pinterest Engineering) ▶  AWS SNS vs SQS? Whats The Difference? — A concrete, practical example of why you might use AWS's Simple Notification Service (SNS) versus their Simple Queue Service (SQS).. something that even Amazon doesn't tend to explain too well. YouTube ▶  A Crash Course in Varnish, the HTTP Accelerator — An engaging 50 minute video that covers how Varnish works, setting it up, using it with Caddy (for TLS termination), and why you might (or might not) use Varnish. Hussein Nasser ▶  Bringing Automation to Web App Hosting and Deployment — A talk from GOTO 19 centered around a live demo of using modern systems to automate deployments. James Beswick [Expanded] Top GitHub Best Practices Guide for Developers Datree.io sponsor How Threads Can Infect Each Other with Their Low Priority Tobias Hermann Making Games with Kotlin — If you've ever fancied dipping a toe into the Kotlin pool.. here's an excuse. Kotlin, an easy to pick up language for the JVM, is also increasingly being used server-side. Vegard Veiset ▶  Andy Pavlo's Advanced Database Systems Lectures — There's a lot to go through here and there's an interesting sense of humor on display (the presenter gets maced in the first video) but for the grand price of free, this is a goldmine of database knowledge. Carnegie Mellon University 💡 Stories and Opinions ▶  JRuby: From Zero to Scale — Two of the creators of the JRuby project (a popular JVM-based Ruby implementation that's now 18 years old) talk about its history, how it compares to CRuby/MRI, how to scale it, and more. Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas E Enebo Faster Cloudfront Log Queries using AWS Athena and Serverless — How a Python-based Lambda function was used to partition Cloudfront logs so they could be queried 13x faster with AWS Athena. Ben Hoyt The Nintendo Switch 'Switch' — More a bridge than a 'switch' but a pretty neat project nonetheless. Cynthia Revström How Linux Exists Only Because of a Happy Accident — Sadly, when most people accidentally delete their OS, they don't start working on their own one :-) August Lilleaas Latency, Throughput, and Walking on Escalators Andrew Certain 🛠 Code and Tools Amazon Launches a Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS) — Cassandra is a powerful system for working with large amounts of structured data but can be tricky to maintain and manage ops-wise at scale. Enter AWS. It's serverless-style pay-as-you-go pricing too which is neat. It's only in 5 regions for now, but can be trialed at a low scale under the 'free tier' for three months. Amazon Web Services DockerSlim: A Tool to Slim Down Your Docker Containers — A tool that aims to 'throw away what you don't need' both reducing the attack surface of your containers and their size too. docker-slim Communicate Incidents Internally and Externally — Reduce downtime impact, take advantage of automation and save time. Get systems back online with less stress. StatusHub sponsor Benthos: A Stream Processor for 'Mundane Tasks' — Define pipelines to connect together various sources and sinks (e.g. S3, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, files, Kafka, Redis, etc.) and perform operations on the payloads. GitHub repo. Ashley Jeffs CurlMail: Quickly Send Email Notifications with cURL — Or any HTTP request, really. An interesting example of a loginless service. curlmail New: AWS Step Functions Express Workflows — AWS Step Functions is heavily used for building multi-step workflows in the cloud, now Express Workflows have entered the picture and provide an option specifically for 'high-volume, short-duration use cases'. Jeff Barr (AWS)

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