Issue #423

Friday 16th June’s issue is presented by Teleport

DevOps practices have revolutionized how apps and infrastructure are managed, but access hasn't kept up. Shared secrets like passwords and keys – the #1 source of data breaches – are the norm.

Unify Access To All Of Your Infrastructure

How Google Measures And Manages Tech Debt

— Abi Noda

tl;dr: The first part describes the categories of tech debt and the second part explores how categories may be measured, providing insights on how to determine whether teams are struggling with technical debt and the types of tech debt they’re struggling with. The final part of this paper provides several tactics that may help reduce tech debt. 

Leadership Management TechDebt

An Explosion In Software Engineers Using AI Coding Tools?

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: What do AI coding tools help the most with? The survey lists the top areas mentioned by developers: (1) Learn: develop coding language skills (57%). (2) Productivity: become more productive (53%). (3) Focus: spend more time building and creating, less on repetitive tasks (51%). Gergely dives how engineers are leveraging AI tools.

Management Productivity Trend

How Passwordless Works

— Alan Parra

tl:dr: This post explains how passwordless can be implemented using modern technologies such as WebAuthn, while at the same time providing a better user experience and security than the traditional password-based approach.

Promoted by Teleport

ᐧManagement Security

The Surprising Power Of Documentation

— Vadim Kravcenko

tl;dr: “Start small, but start today. Don't wait for a grand strategy or a perfect tool. Start by documenting your code, your decisions, and your learnings. Make it a part of your daily workflow, not an end-of-the-day chore. And as you move forward, imbibe this culture of documentation into your teams, your projects, and your organization. Create systems and processes that encourage and facilitate documentation.”

Leadership Management

“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.”

— Melinda Varian

Migrating Netflix To GraphQL Safely

tl;dr: “Doing this safely for 100s of millions of customers without disruption is exceptionally challenging, especially considering the many dimensions of change involved. This blog post will share broadly-applicable techniques (beyond GraphQL) we used to perform this migration. The three strategies we will discuss today are AB Testing, Replay Testing, and Sticky Canaries.”

Scale GraphQL

Some Blogging Myths

— Julia Evans

tl;dr: (1) You need to be original. (2) You need to be an expert. (3) Posts need to be 100% correct. (4) Writing boring posts is bad. (5) You need to explain every concept. (6) Page views matter. (7) More material is always better. (8) Everyone should blog.

CareerAdvice

Pair Review: Streamlining Complex Code Reviews with Pair Programming

— Dave Gaeddert

tl;dr: The standard way to do code review is with back-and-forth, asynchronous GitHub comments. But is that always the best fit? Like with any complex discussion, there are times when it's simply better to talk face-to-face. Pair reviews can be a nice balance for orgs that don't fully embrace pair programming otherwise.

Promoted by PullApprove

CodeReview

I Booted Linux 292,612 Times

— Richard Jones

tl;dr: Richard discovered a bug in Linux where it occasionally hangs on boot. He ran guestfish in a loop, performing 10,000 boots and using a test harness with up to 8 threads. After an extensive bisection process between versions 6.0 and 6.4-rc6, he found that a regression in the printk time feature was responsible.

Linux Testing

The Modern Way Of Serving Images

— Jacob Groß

tl;dr: " the following article will guide you through responsive image techniques, and introduce a novel technique that aims to make <img> tags work (almost) like <picture> tags, making migration in existing codebases easier. With the reduced engineering effort, this hopefully helps you improve the images on your website in 2023.”

FrontEnd

Notable GitHub Repos

Fern: Generate SDKs for your API.

GPT Engineer: Generates an entire codebase based on a prompt.

Public APIs: A collective list of free APIs

Zap: Blazingly fast backends in zig.

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