• pgcat - "Enhanced postgresql logical replication" Reuses some of the low-level plumbing but adds higher-level features.
• You Can Now Download 150,000 Free Illustrations of the Natural World - Let the design experiments begin.
• Clustering RabbitMQ on ECS using EC2 autoscaling groups - Personally I'd prefer to avoid wrestling with RabbitMQ again, but this looks useful if I do.
• It’s the Boot for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1/a></strong> - Firefox is turning them off in March. As a Nightly user, I've already had this, and it's not affecting my work at all.</li>
• [Turtleocracy](https://www.notion.so/Turtleocracy-47a6df7692bf4e95a39504a73a50a295) - "Turtleocracies pivot around a particular kind of person—slow, mostly-takeless people (turtles) who are in a position to gain wisdom and discernment on a topic area."
• USB Armory - Open-source computer in a flash drive form factor. The Hacker News discussion has links to many similar projects.
• Google's second stab at preserving both privacy and ad revenue draws fire - "Google preserving privacy" is getting to be about as reasonable as "jumbo shrimp."
• shit - "An implementation of git in (almost) pure POSIX shell."
• Wearable Microphone Jamming - Sell me a briefcase with this technology built in, please.
</ul>

• Contextualise - "Contextualise is a simple and flexible tool particularly suited for organising information-heavy projects and activities consisting of unstructured and widely diverse data and information resources -- think of investigative journalism, personal and professional research projects, world building (for books, movies or computer games) and many kinds of hobbies."
• ssh-over-ssm - "Configure SSH and use AWS SSM to connect to instances."
• Alpine.js - "Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost."
• sshuttle: where transparent proxy meets VPN meets ssh - A way to forward all of your traffic via a secure connection to a remote network.
• ROCA - "A collection of simple recommendations for decent Web application frontends"
• RedisWebManager - A web UI for Redis implemented as a Rails engine.
• Performant front-end architecture - "Some techniques to make front-end apps load faster and provide a good user experience."
• Increasing application resilience with CloudEndure Disaster Recovery - Another AWS service I didn't know about: "AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery helps you maintain business as usual during a disaster by enabling rapid failover from any source infrastructure to AWS."
• TouchMemes - Perhaps the best use yet for the basically worthless MacBook touch bar.
• The Horrifically Dystopian World of Software Engineering Interviews - Yeah, pretty much.
• ActivityPub, the secret weapon of the Fediverse - Understanding the basic idea behind the Fediverse.

• Awesome Humane Tech - "Our vision is: Ubiquitous Humane Technology that Stimulates Humans to Flourish and Humanity to Thrive."
• Living Without a SIM Card - It can be done, though some things depend on the kindness of strangers.
• Polymath - "Polymath is a markup language (like Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML) and a static site generator specialized in aesthetically presenting a wide variety of information: text, mathematics, code, photos, videos, you name it."
• Post-Agile - The agile backlash continues.
• Patent Potato - A catalog of approaches to dealing with software patents when buying or selling software.
• AWS CodeDeploy now supports linear and canary deployments for Amazon ECS - AWS continues to improve support for modern best practices.
• A Quick Port Scanning Tutorial - "This tutorial demonstrates some common Nmap port scanning scenarios and explains the output."
• How we built Picture-in-Picture in Firefox Desktop with more control over video - Details and comparisons with how other browsers do it.
• Burnout Index - Check your own and get suggestions on what to do about it.
• Fake API - Rails engine to generate and provide realistic fake data.
• The science behind self-care and practising it when working remotely - Some people have more trouble with remote work than others. If you do, this is worth reading.

• Stay paranoid and trust no one. Overview of common security vulnerabilities in web applications - A look at the OWASP top 10 list through a sample Django application.
• #EthicalWebDev – guide for ethical website development and maintenance - Free ebook from European Digital Rights.
• Fixing Dark Patterns: making Google search ads visible again - Browser add-on to restyle Google search ads back the way they used to be, if you don't want to just block them.
• Database Lab - "Database Lab allows superfast cloning of large databases" assuming you're using PostgreSQL. A tool for faster development/test setups.
• THE OFFICIAL U.S. TIME - The government's NTS site got a facelift and also provides a handy way to see your own device clock's accuracy.
• What is a Lakehouse? - "A lakehouse is a new paradigm that combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses."
• Demoing Web Applications with Firefox Containers - Multiple logins via multiple container tabs. Why didn't I ever think of that?
• snopf - A build-it-yourself USB password token. "The snopf USB device creates a unique and strong password for every service from the same 128 bit secret which never leaves the token."
• Introducing Scalar: Git at scale for everyone - Microsoft is sharing their tools to make working with large repositories easier.
• Introducing Terminal V2 - "The easiest way to build, deploy, and host websites & apps on IPFS." Currently in beta by invitation./li>
• Busting the common misconceptions about working from home - One person's experience, but it will give you some things to think about.
</ul>

• GAO Report on Election Security - If you thought the Iowa caucuses were a mess, take a look at this.
• How Twitter's Default Settings Can Leak Your Phone Number - Remember, you are the product. Personally, I don't give Twitter my phone number.
• No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it? - As an interviewer, I offer feedback to every candidate when we make a decision. I wish more companies did this.
• Migrating to CockroachDB - A story of moving a real-world application from PostgreSQL.
• dns-rewrite-proxy - "A DNS proxy server that conditionally rewrites and filters A record requests. Written in Python, all code is in a single module, and there is a single dependency, aiodnsresolver."
• Baretest — An extremely minimalistic alternative to Jest - Fast and simple JS test runner that eschews features in favor of speed.
• Ruby on Rails set up on Gitlab with GitlabCI - A step-by-step tutorial.
• Setting Up Your Webcam, Lights, and Audio for Remote Work, Podcasting, Videos, and Streaming - Good AV is worth thinking about if you do lots of remote meetings.

• Canada Wins, U.S. Loses In Global Fight For High-Tech Workers - I wonder if Canada will take a 60-year-old developer?
• Announcing Fishery – a JavaScript and TypeScript Factory Library - A "library for setting up JavaScript objects for use in tests and anywhere else you need to set up data" from the makers of factory_bot.
• Can Software Leaders Use Metrics Without Damaging Culture? - An argument for "yes" (but bear in mind it comes from a metrics vendor).
• What to Know Before You Buy or Install Your Amazon Ring Camera - A rundown from EFF. Ring hardware is gonna make me move out of the suburbs as soon as I can manage.
• Codeflow - "Codeflow is the Powerpoint for code. In each slide, you highlight portions of your GitHub repo and add descriptive markdown." Looks like an interesting tool, but info is sketchy and it wants to access my GitHub account.
• Tech Hiring Managers Answer Common Behavioral Interview Questions - Some adice from leaders at FAANG companies.
• YaCy - "YaCy is a distributed Web Search Engine, based on a peer-to-peer network."
• Monitoring Mirroring - Newsletter keeping an eye on observability startups.

• Tracking the future of remote workplaces: Apps, communication, and liability - Ars tries to predict the future.
• Taking back Mondays (and Tuesdays) -Would your business fall apart if you spent two days focusing instead of meeting?
• Agile software development is dead. Deal with it - "But the more that a particular organization seeks to adhere to the fundamental tenets of Agile, the more challenges they have around scalability, diversity and, in the end, business value."
• Relational Pipes - "Relational pipes are an open data format designed for streaming structured data between two processes."
• How merge trains keep your master green - We could have used something like this at the last place I worked. Too much merge-and-rebase chaos slows development to a crawl (especially if senior people insist on trunk-only development).
• Typescript - First impressions - I'd like to be one of the cool kids who uses Typescript, but so far, it just feels like pointless ceremony to me.
• Einführung in die Web-Security - Or in English, "Introduction to Web Security". A comprehensive free e-book, provided you can read German.
• Keystone -"Keystone is an open-source project for building trusted execution environments (TEE) with secure hardware enclaves, based on the RISC-V architecture."

• The cup-of-coffee pricing fallacy - "You're not Starbucks."
• Is Catalina a good upgrade yet? - For a lot of people, no.
• Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development - Apple is not the only game in town.
• It's Not All About You: Truly Empowering Your People - Some scary advice for managers.
• How I Work From Anywhere in the World - Travel hints as well as the usual advice on hardware and software.
• cronyo - "The missing cron CLI for AWS Cloudwatch and Lambda"
• Unicode::Emoji/a></strong> - "A small Ruby library which provides Unicode Emoji data and regexes, incorporating the latest Unicode and Emoji standards."</li>
• NULL Values in SQL Queries - I'm always baffled by the "you should never have nulls or nils" attitude of some developers.
</ul>

• Writing Runbook Documentation When You’re An SRE - Hints on writing things to be read in times of emergency.
• Writing Safe Shell Scripts - Pretty much a lost art these days, but a powerful tool if you have time to learn.
• pg_ctl Tips and Tricks - You can create clusters as well as Windows or Mac services, for starters.
• World's First Classical Chinese Programming Language - It's very pretty.
• Deanonymizing Tor Circuits - Gah, there is a lot of bad shit on Tor these days.
• Powerlevel10k - "Powerlevel10k is a theme for Zsh. It emphasizes speed, flexibility and out-of-the-box experience."
• Using a Raspberry Pi as Your Development Server - I'm tempted to try this as an alternative to running Docker on the Macbook.
• Awesome Remote Job - "A curated list of awesome remote working resources."

• AWS Security Documentation - The official list of links.
• Staying ahead of vulnerabilities in your repositories - You probably can't, but you should try anyhow.
• Anatomy of a Scam - I didn't know that scam pitch decks were a thing. Fascinating.
• My 2020 Hackintosh Hardware Spec — Core i9-9900K & Aorus Master Z390 on OpenCore - I briefly thought about a Hackintosh to get away from overpriced Apple hardware, but on reflection, I'm not happy with their software either, so the heck with it. Still, this is a very nice machine.
• Cryptography Dispatches - Email newsletter. The first issue covers the broken-ness of OpenPGP.
• Deviceplane - An "open source management tool for embedded systems and edge computing. We make it easy to securely update, monitor, and access your devices."
• The tools and tricks that let Ars Technica function without a physical office - After 20 years of remote work they know a thing or two.
• Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind - Me, too.
• On Drafting an Engineering Strategy - Help for the new CTO.
• Spiderfoot - "SpiderFoot is an open source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. It integrates with just about every data source available and utilises a range of methods for data analysis, making that data easy to navigate."
• OpenSnitch - Project working to import the Little Snitch application firewall to Linux.
• TypeScript’s quirks: How inconsistencies make the language more complex - I still don't understand what people get out of TypeScript.
• The Dark Side of Microservices - More backlash.

• Lemmy - Reddit-clone meets Fediverse.
• Elixir v1.10 released - If I wasn't still writing Rails code, Elixir would likely by my next port of call.
• Amazon Employees Share Our Views on Company Business - 300+ Amazonians put their jobs on the line by speaking out. Good for them.
• Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code - A big pile of tools and workflows, loosely revolving around emacs and ripgrep.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Standup - Not all standups are created equal. It amazes me how many people have bad ones and yet don't turn to a decent agile coach to improve.
• There’s One Major Reason Remote Work Can Go Horribly Wrong - Strong management is important.
• Cloud Computing and Carbon Footprint - "How vendor lock-in can harm a company’s green business plan."
• StrongVersions - "Enforce a strict versioning policy in your Gemfile."
• The 2020 State of SaaS Product Onboarding - Report and advice from Userpilot.
• Snowflake - "Snowflake is a graphical SSH client. It has a file browser, terminal emulator, resource/process manager, disk space analyzer, text editor, log viewer and lots of other helpful tools, which makes it easy to work with remote servers."
• Why Public Wi-Fi is a Lot Safer Than You Think - EFF says you should worry about other things.
• Monoliths are the future - 2020 is shaping up to be the year of microservices backlash.
• Electron Desktop JavaScript Framework Finds a New Home - Too bad it's not the dustbin.

• Into the Personal-Website-Verse - How to leave the social media garbage fire and get back to the indie web.
• User-Agent Sniffing Only Way to Deal With Upcoming SameSite Cookie Changes - Because the web is broken.
• 2019 My year in review: inlets - "inlets is a reverse-proxy and L7 HTTP tunnel that allows users behind NAT, firewalls, and those within private networks to expose their local services to the Internet."
• Technical Debt is Soul-crushing - And here are some ideas about geting out from under it.
• Pervane - "Pervane is a bare minimum plain text file based note taking and knowledge base building tool. It doubles as simple file server to render given directories files in web browser."
• Mastodon, My Saviour - "Why the left should ditch ad-verse social media"
• Diary of an Engine Diversity Absolutist - Why multiple browser engines are A Good Thing.
• NIST releases version 1.0 of the Privacy Framework - "The Framework is a voluntary tool that can be used by organizations to manage risks in compliance with privacy legislation, including the European GDPR."
• pg_timetable: Advanced PostgreSQL scheduling - A workflow and scheduling system built in PostgreSQL.
• The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube - "One of the biggest shifts in data analytics over the past decade is the move away from building ‘data cubes’, or ‘OLAP cubes’, to running OLAP* workloads directly on columnar databases." I'm out of date again, sigh.
• ActiveState Komodo IDE Now Free - I have fond memories of using Komodo way back when I first switched to open source tools.
• Ruby Concurrency Progress Report - It's progressing.
• Sovereign - "Sovereign is a set of Ansible playbooks that you can use to build and maintain your own personal cloud based entirely on open source software, so you’re in control."

• A Template for Starting New Projects on Ruby on Rails - A guide to tweaking 'rails new' and using Rails templates.
• Codemanship’s Code Craft Road Map - An overview of things that professional developers might want to think about as they improve their skills.
• Umbra - "A ACID-compliant database built for in-memory analytics speed. For out-of-core processing it falls back gracefully to flash-based storage."
• GNU Recutils - "a set of tools and libraries to access human-editable, plain text databases called recfiles."
• Evaluating Ruby in Ruby - "It is similar to MRI’s virtual machine, but it lacks many features and it’s 100x slower." Turtles all the way down.
• planet.rb quick starter script - "(auto-) add articles & blog posts to your (jekyll & friends) static website via feeds (and planet pluto)"
• FreeTechBooks - "Database of Free / Open Access Online Computer Science Books, Textbooks, and Lecture Notes"
• Decarbonization - Personal progress report from Tim Bray. Not computers but pretty darned important.
• Meet FuryBSD: A New Desktop BSD Distribution - A preconfigured FreeBSD with plans to be more.
• Slack Sign-In for Rails - Integrate Rails with Slack apps./li>
• Rust Lang in a nutshell: 1# Introduction - Start of a series.
• Building a simple VPN with WireGuard with a Raspberry Pi as Server - A step-by-step guide.
• Dino 0.1 Release - "Dino is a secure and open-source application for decentralized messaging. It uses the XMPP (“Jabber”) protocol and is interoperable with other XMPP clients and servers."
</ul>

• Phoenix - "A lightweight macOS/OS X window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript."
• (A few) Ops Lessons We All Learn The Hard Way - Life lessons & humor.
• The 2020 State of Independent SaaS - According to MicroConf, Basecamp, and Stripe.
• Awesome LD_PRELOAD - Lots of ways to get into trouble by injecting code on Linux.
• Dhall for Kubernetes - Using a statically-typed configuration language to organize your k8s.
• HardenedBSD - A security-enhanced FreeBSD fork that appears to be under active development.
• ActiveInteractor - "Ruby interactors based on ActiveModel inspired by interactor."
• How to think about Zero Trust architectures on AWS - This stuff gets very complex very quickly.
• Distributed SQL vs. NewSQL - Comparison of various newer databases. Bear in mind it comes from a vendor of one of them.
• LInQer - "The C# Language Integrated Queries ported for Javascript for amazing performance"
• Replicache - "Replicache is a per-user cache that sits between your backend and client. Whatever you put in the server replica gets sent as deltas to the client on next sync. Any changes you make on the client replica get forwarded as requests to your service's APIs." Designed for offline-first apps, now taking early access users.
• A Guide to Research Logbooks - From the working scientist point of viewm and focused on paper. I do find keeping an electronic logbook is useful for software too.
• Remote Stash - "330 Tools for Remote Work." OK, that's enough now.

• Guides for Brand Building - A pitch for a book on the subject, but there's a bunch of free content here as well.
• Introducing Google Cloud’s Secret Manager - The chance that I would trust Google Cloud with company secrets is precisely zero. Just sayin'.
• Anybody can write good bash (with a little effort) - Some best practices for shell scripts.
• Sharing an SQLite database across containers is surprisingly brilliant - How Segment built a distributed multi-tenant data store.
• Playwright - "Playwright is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. This includes support for the new Microsoft Edge browser, which is based on Chromium."
• 15 Questions to Ask at the Start of a New Software Project - Starting at the high level before diving into code.
• CONF: PostgreSQL Configuration for Humans - A very thorough guide.
• How to Work From Home and Actually Get Stuff Done - Some basic advice on the lifestyle.
• Announcing a Beta test of Pi-hole 5.0! - I do enjoy having a Pi-hole running on my network.
• Real Time Event Sources - "A directory of high quality real-time event sources", both free and paid.
• A page to force badly-behaved WiFi login pages to appear even when you have a secure browser configuration. -

"In the year 2525..." I suspect most of you lovely readers don't remember that at all.

• Hix on Rails - Ruby on Rails project generator that lets you configure all manner of components, starting at $39.
• Launchable - "Launchable’s core technology is a machine learning engine that predicts the likelihood of a failure for each test case given a change in the source code. This allows you to run only the meaningful subset of tests, in the order that minimizes the feedback delay." Now taking beta invitation signups.
• quicktype - Generator that converts JSON to structures in a variety of coding languages.
• Duet - Use an iPad as an additional display for your Mac, even if it's not new enough for the official Sidecar solution. Worth the ten bucks.
• Design tips for developers - Learning just enough design to move your projects along.
• Pinebook Pro – My First Impressions and Setup Tips - I'm interested in open hardware, but not interested enough to take the pain yet.
• Tor Support in Magic-Wormhole - Worth knowing if you have files you'd like to ship around securely.
• Inside hundreds of surveillance experiments along the US-MX border - The good news: open source investigation brings home the bacon. The bad news: too many technical people apparently happily work on this crap.

• Qutebrowser - "qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI. It’s based on Python and PyQt5 and free software, licensed under the GPL."
• NomadBSD - "NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD®."
• KubeInvaders - "KubeInvaders is a gamified chaos engineering tool for Kubernetes. It is like Space Invaders but the aliens are PODs."
• Go's Tooling is an Undervalued Technology - Never mind the language, the toolchain is impressive.
• Effective Collaboration with Product and Design - From the developer's point of view.
• GhostBSD - "GhostBSD provides all the benefits of the FreeBSD operating system combined with a focus on simplicity for newcomers."
• Diagrams - "The missing diagram editor for Mac," available on the App Store next month.
• This is why i use ad blockers and a pi-hole server........ request map of nytimes. - Yup.

• Why build this blog - or anything - on IPFS? - An argument based on ownership, resilience, and elegance.
• SimpleLogin - Backend for an open source email forwarding service. "SimpleLogin is a privacy-focused alternative to the 'Login with Facebook/Google/Twitter' buttons."
• Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It - A deep look at one of the currently-trending note-organization tools.
• Fishbole - "With Fishbole, record high-quality video explanations alongside any PowerPoint, Google Slide, PDF, Image or Screen recording and share in minutes." Free for public content, paid for private.
• Templates - For vision, strategy, pitch, and more.
• Realworld - Fullstack Medium.com clone demo application with swappable front and backends in a variety of technologies.
• What is an Agile Environment? - Some characteristics of agile companies.
• Taco Bell Programming - An argument that "functionality is an asset, but code is a liability. This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps."

• Fedora CoreOS out of preview - Another choice for containerized workloads.
• MindForger - A MarkDown-based "thinking notebook" that provides another way to organize all the snippets of information you want.
• Autumn - "The macOS window manager for JavaScript hackers"
• Disable IPv4 now! - At least, if you'd like to see whether your ISP and favorite sites support IPv6.
• PurgeCSS - Tool for removing unused selectors from your CSS files.
• Software Architect - One architect's view of what the job entails and how to move into the field.
• Shipped - "Shipped is an issue tracking system built on top of Slack where every issue is a thread teams can discuss on and get more done faster."
• AWS Backup: EC2 Instances, EFS Single File Restore, and Cross-Region Backup - The automated cross-region backups in particular will simplify some lives (and cost more money, of course).

• Monitoring Node.js: Watch Your Event Loop Lag! - One more damned thing to worry about.
• Is TypeScript worth it? - I've tried TypeScript and it doesn't seem to help me make fewer errors. But that's anecdote, not data.
• The V Programming Language -"Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software."
• Deno - "A secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript."
• How to build your company's engineering brand. - Advice from Will Larson
• On Pair Programming - An extensive look at techniques, benefits, and challenges.
• Effectively Using Materialized Views in Ruby on Rails - This came along at just the right time for our work needs. I think.
• Exploiting the Windows CryptoAPI Vulnerability - If you're wondering what all the fuss was about, here's a good explanation.
• Application Inspector - Cross-platform open source static code inspection tool from Microsoft.
• 20 Years Since Y2K: left-pad, Heartbleed, and DevOps - IT operations just gets more fun all the time.