Programmer Weekly (Issue 2 April 30 2020)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 2

April 30, 2020

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 2 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

News

Apple  and Google  have released the first version of their exposure notification API, which they previously called the contact tracing API. This is a developer-focused release, and is a seed of the API in development, with the primary intent of collecting feedback from developers who will be using the API to create new contact tracing and notification apps on behalf of public health agencies.

It could help tomorrow's AI converse more naturally with people.

What are the skills in demand for remote programmers today? Here’s what the analysis of ~1,000 remote software engineering vacancies has shown.

Amazon AppFlow allows you to automate the data flows between AWS services and SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. SaaS application administrators, business analysts, and BI specialists can quickly implement most of the integrations they need without waiting months for IT to finish integration projects.

Articles,Tutorials and Talks

Over the years, we’ve detected and responded to countless Amazon Web Services (AWS) incidents, ranging from public S3 bucket exposures to compromised EC2 instance credentials and RDS ransomware attacks. Recently, we identified an incident involving the use of compromised AWS access keys. In this post we’ll walk you through how we caught the problem, what we observed in our response, how we kicked the bad guy out and the lessons we learned along the way.

A TCP reset attack is executed using a single packet of data, no more than a few bytes in size. A spoofed TCP segment, crafted and sent by an attacker, tricks two victims into abandoning a TCP connection, interrupting possibly vital communications between them. In this post we’re going to: Learn the basics of the TCP protocol, Learn how the attack works and Execute the attack against ourselves using a simple Python script.

An introductory guide to finding radio frequency side channels for data exfiltration.

This post outlines the whole debugging process of a Linux kernel bug we found during an incident and demonstrates how we worked with Linux kernel open source community.

WebGPU is an emerging API that provides access to the graphics and computing capabilities of hardware on the web. It’s designed from the ground up within the W3C GPU for the Web group by all major browser vendors, as well as Intel and a few others. Learn about WebGPU support in Firefox and how it will allow richer and more complex graphics applications to run portably in the Web. It will also make the web platform more accessible to teams who mostly target modern native platforms today, thanks to the use of modern concepts and first-class WASM (WebAssembly) support.

Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.

This guide has recipes for automating Web Performance measurement with Puppeteer.

Software projects are a popular way of funding and organizing software development. They organize work into temporary, build-only teams and are funded with specific benefits projected in a business case. Product-mode instead uses durable, ideate-build-run teams working on a persistent business issue. Product-mode allows teams to reorient quickly, reduces their end-to-end cycle time, and allows validation of actual benefits by using short-cycle iterations while maintaining the architectural integrity of their software to preserve their long-term effectiveness.

This post discusses how Quora was able to scale our usage of MySQL to meet the growing requirements of our content. It focuses especially on the challenge of sharding the data stored in MySQL at scale.

Status Page is a tool for communicating incidents status and maintenance times. Recently we started building this tool at GitLab to provide the best incident management experience both for our internal team and our customers.

A flaw in iPhone, iPads may have allowed hackers to steal data for years.

Cloud providers generally do not disclose to customers how much energy their services consume. To make up for this lack of data, Etsy created a set of conversion factors called Cloud Jewels to help them roughly convert their cloud usage information (like Google Cloud usage data) into approximate energy used. They are publishing this research to begin a conversation and a collaboration that they hope you’ll join, especially if you share our concerns about climate change.

Exceptions are a mainstay of programming languages. They are commonly used to handle anomalous or exceptional conditions that require special processing, breaking out of the normal flow of the application. I find code that throws an exception every time something unexpected happens hard to understand and more difficult to maintain. In this article, I want to talk about using the Either data type as an alternative way of dealing with error conditions. 

An introduction to shell productivity features: autocompletion, keyboard shortcuts, history navigation and shell expansions.

The easiest way to solve Technical Debt, and a framework to help you explain Technical Debt and convince decision makers to let you work on it. 

Here are some of our best tips & tricks for using SSH more effectively. 

In this tutorial we'll implement a very simple VM (virtual machine) and use it to execute a bytecode program.

Books

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Learn how to develop a series of databases and explore different topics along the way.

Manage cryptographic keys and user identities.

a-Shell is a complete terminal emulator, allowing to run most Unix commands locally, on you iOS device. You can transfer files using scp and curl, edit them with vim and ed, process them using grep, awk and sed.

A syntax-highlighter for git and diff output.

A toolkit for developing high-performance HTTP reverse proxy applications. 

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is how browsers decide how web applications can communicate with other services. Restricting this is important for security, but it's hard to understand how CORS works, which means sending HTTP requests to APIs can be difficult & confusing. Tell this magic CORS machine what you want, and it'll tell you exactly what to do.

A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs.

Blitz is a Rails-like framework for monolithic, full-stack React apps — built on Next.js

A multi-platform Git client written with Qt. 

A flexible command line tool for instantly deploying user interfaces for simple commands and scripts.

Slick, declarative command line video editing.

A spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster.

Haxe is an open source high-level strictly-typed programming language with a fast optimizing cross-compiler. Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash and allows access to each platform native capabilities. Haxe has its own VMs (HashLink and NekoVM) but can also run in interpreted mode.

Auto-generate a PDF notebook from your source code.

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