PlusUz: The apps GitLab runs on, a new EC2 instance type, and Swift heads to Windows

#266 — May 13, 2020

StatusCode Weekly

Covering the week's news in software development, ops, platforms, and tooling.

How Facebook Has Rebuilt Their Facebook.com Tech Stack — Facebook completely rebuilt its tech stack to achieve its performance and growth goals. Here's how they've done it with React, Relay, SVG, code-splitting, and more.

Ashley Watkins & Royi Hagigi (Facebook)

GitLab's Tech Stack Applications Diagram and Spreadsheet — It's neat to see what systems a popular, widely distributed company like GitLab is using. The spreadsheet goes into quite some detail.

GitLab

We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

What The Heck Happened with .org? — Fingers crossed this really is the end of the ".org TLD for sale" story as it's a high level overview of the whole affair.

Eric Rescorla

EC2 Announces Price Reductions — Though it only affects reserved instances or those using saving plans. On Demand remains as-is. If you're using EC2 in certain regions though, there are some nice reductions to be had.

Amazon Web Services

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.

Alex Woodie (Datanami)

Quick bytes:

Cookie consent walls and 'scrolling == consent' approaches to GDPR are not acceptable says the EU.
AWS EC2 has a new instance type: M6g instances that use Amazon's own Arm-based Graviton2 chips. Big performance boosts for traditional use cases are boasted.
Quantum programming is, um, kinda hard and to put it Internet terms, "we're at the dawn of 1995."
Unfortunately Stack Overflow has had to lay off 15% of its staff but this update covers how they're moving forwards.
Has India produced too many unemployable software engineers?
The Eclipse Foundation is moving to Europe.
The next version of Apple's Swift programming language is adding support for Windows.
Backblaze is back with their latest hard drive stats roundup for Q1 2020.
Apple seems to be snapping up a lot of names from the Kubernetes and containers space.

💻 Jobs

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Vettery

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

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📕 Stories and Opinions

John Conway's FRACTRAN, A Ridiculous, Yet Surprisingly Deep Language — If you've got the time, this is a beautiful deep dive into FRACTRAN, a rather esoteric language that's written in the form of a list of fractions.

Reg Braithwaite

A Google Cloud Support Engineer Solves A Tough DNS Case — How a Google Cloud support engineer found one customer's missing DNS packets. We do love a good story.

Antonio Messina (Google Cloud Blog)

Ask HN: Is Your Company Sticking to On-Premise Servers? Why? — No-one expected this to turn into a 750+ comment thread but there's a lot of insights being shared here.

Hacker News

How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week — Very basic, but always nice to hear something from a place like Khan Academy.

Marta Kosarchyn (Khan Academy Engineering)

Patio11's Law: "The Software Economy Is Bigger Than You Think"

Will Schreiber

The Modern HTTPS World Has No Place for Old Web Servers

Chris Siedenmann

Why We At $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched To $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY — Unsurprisingly this is a humorous tongue in cheek piece.

Saagar Jha

📖 Tutorials

An Animation of the SHA-256 Hash Function in Your Terminal — The animation is cool, but the step-by-step explanation of how SHA-256 works is even better, IMO. You'll learn something here.

Greg Walker

Getting Started with Serverless on AWS — Rather than a tutorial, this is a 'resource guide' based on the path Emily took, so it links to tutorials, examples, and templates to help you flesh out your own learning path. I like this style of post.

Emily Shea

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite

Buildkite sponsor

Not Every Container Has An Operating System Inside.. — This should help you understand containers just a little more.

Ivan Velichko

Linux Containers in a Few Lines of Code — This isn't for your production use, but for a learning experience. Can you figure out how Linux containers work by implementing them from scratch in C?

Serge Zaitsev

How to Build a Serverless Martian Weather Display with CircuitPython and AWS Lambda — No lie, this tutorial compelled me to buy my own PyPortal last week. Neat device.. has wifi, can load stuff from the Web, basically a 3.2" screen you can code with Python :-)

Moheeb Zara (AWS)

▶ Databases on Kubernetes: Why You Should Care — Now Kubernetes supports StatefulSets and CRDs, one of the next logical steps is to run databases on it..

Denis Rosa

🛠 Code and Tools

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

End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments — Quickly identify and solve issues in your modern environment with full data correlation, payload visibility and automated tracing. Try free.

Epsagon sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 3.9 — If you're unfamiliar with TypeScript, it's a language that builds on JavaScript by adding syntax for type declarations and annotations.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Janet: A Lightweight, Modern Lisp for System Scripting — The entire language packs into under 1MB and it's easy to port.

Calvin Rose and contributors

GCC 10.1 Released — GCC gets much improved C++20 and C2X language support. Note that GCC 10 overall switched to many more strict defaults so code not prepared for it can run into compilation problems..

Jakub Jelinek (Red Hat)

BotKube: A Messaging Bot for Monitoring and Debugging Kubernetes Clusters

InfraCloud

Fonts Extracted from Old BIOS and VGA ROMs

Stec Dose