That's two thousand, five hundred of these things. Merry Christmas!

• Initial Commit - Learn about development by exploring the very first release of git.
• Calm Technology - A manifesto for making software less annoying.
• Designers tool stack of 2020 - One designer's overview of useful tools from leaning to implementation.
• We are giving every IPv6 address a name - Automatic DNS for all your IPV6 addresses.
• Making S3 more resilient using Lambda@Edge - Building a multi-region active-active failover structure.
• Announcing Message DB: Event Store and Message Store for PostgreSQL - You can always roll your own but this handles a lot of the details already.
• Supabase - "Supercharge PostgreSQL" with some interesting extensions including monitoring via websockets.
• Firefox Announces New Partner in Delivering Private and Secure DNS Services to Users - A step towards decoupling DNS-over-HTTP from a single provider.
• Multipass - "A mini-cloud on your Mac or Windows workstation" via quick Ubuntu VMs.
• Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful - Because, among other things, any attacker who can steal content from the wire can also inject stuff into your JS.
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Security Best Practices - I don't know much about GCP but this looks like a sensible starting point.
• The INQUIRER reaches end-of-life - And the web continues to get crappier.
• Flipper Zero - Hacker hardware gets ever more sophisticated.
• Odyssey - "Advanced multi-threaded PostgreSQL connection pooler and request router." A slide deck from Yandex engineering.

• SQL Murder Mystery - Cute exercise for practcing your SQL skills.
• Hammerspoon - "This is a tool for powerful automation of OS X. At its core, Hammerspoon is just a bridge between the operating system and a Lua scripting engine. What gives Hammerspoon its power is a set of extensions that expose specific pieces of system functionality, to the user."
• Bitbar - "Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar" with lots of available plugins.
• dockerpi - "Gives you access to a virtualised ARM based Raspberry Pi machine running the Raspian operating system" via a Docker image.
• Transaction isolation levels from the trenches - Watch out for "read committed".
• Nushell - The Cross Platform Shell - An introduction to this new Rust-powered shell.
• How clouds impact environment - Every cat picture brings us one step closer to climate change.
• Prevent Flaky UI Tests from Killing Your CI - Testing through the browser is seductive, but in my experience it's almost always a disaster area. Here's a method for using HAR tests to avoid nondeterminism issues.
• RuboCop and Git - There's no direct integration, but it's easy to build a command that checks only changed files.
• How tracking pixels work - Possibly the worst online invention ever.
• The Pros and Cons of Running Production Databases as Containers - Managing them can be tricky.
• How Shopify Manages API Versioning and Breaking Changes - What a mature versioning system for widely-used software looks like.
• The State of JavaScript 2019 - The survey results are in.
• http-decision-diagram - "An activity diagram to describe the resolution of HTTP response status codes, given various headers, implemented via semantical callbacks." Good grief this stuff has gotten complex.

• The Architecture of a Large-Scale Web Search Engine, circa 2019 - A look inside the tech stack of Cliqz.
• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API - Plenty of guidance here, and even better, it comes with explanations.
• Metrics That Matter - Things to keep an eye on from the SRE perspective.
• A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers - A tale from the sysadmin trenches. Sadly, these things are more common than one might think, perhaps because "move fast break things" piles up broken things.
• Cube.js - "Cube.js is an open source modular framework to build analytical web applications. It is primarily used to build internal business intelligence tools or to add customer-facing analytics to an existing application."
• Migrating databases using RDS PostgreSQL Transportable Databases - New faster tools to move or copy things in RDS.
• A Uniform RuboCop - Tidying up internal inconsistencies on the road to 1.0.
• Twine -"Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories." I'm considering using this for a product tour.
• Building a new Win 3.1 app in 2019 Part 1: Slack client - I'm impressed. And scared.
• Digital Design Resources - "A curated collection of resources for Digital Designers."
• Browsing git commits with fzf - Using one of the console fancy search tools.
• This Page is Designed to Last - With advice on building your own long-lasting pages as well.
• What You Probably Didn't Know About sudo - Turns out there's quite a bit to learn.
• Refined GitHub - "Browser extension that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features" for Chrome and Firefox.

• torch-rb - "Deep learning for Ruby, powered by LibTorch". Why should the Pythonistas have all the fun?
• 2020: Things You Should Read To Become A Better Human & Developer - A fiarly idiosyncratic list, but I heartily approve of the underlying message that reading things to improve yourself is Good.
• migra - Command-line schema comparison tool for PostgreSQL.
• Ruby Concurrency Progress Report - It's progressing.
• The Evolution of Management - Kate Matsudaira reflects on the changing nature of important tasks as you move up the management ladder.
• Git from the inside out - A tutorial relating git commands back to the underlying graph structure.
• Things end users care about but programmers don't - Sadly all too true.
• The nonsense called "Enterprise Agile Development" - Lucrative nonsense, though.
• How to write Javascript in Rails 6 | Webpacker, Yarn and Sprockets - I really need to buckle down and learn this stuff.
• Rails 6.0.2 has been released! - Hooray!
• Neo - "The webworkers driven UI framework (BETA version)"
• The cowardice of Brave - A somewhat rambling diatribe against Brave's business model.
• reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics - Note to self: you do not need more hardware!
• Coping with flexbox - Trying to build a mental model of this chunk of CSS is hard.

• nam (nanoArgMode) - "A fully-featured macro system for the nano editor, powered by Luajit." I'm not sure whether to be impressed or scared.
• Microfrontends - A survey of various patterns for composing frontend code.
• A quick primer on dig - It can probably do more than you think.
• Make OKRs and Forecasts come alive! - Ideas on integrating OKRs with agile ceremonies.
• Individual Performance Appraisals, Just Say No! - Perhaps they have no place in a team-focused organization.
• git push is the Process - Perhaps drafting an open source license doesn't require gatekeeping.
• Finala - "A resource cloud scanner that analyzes and reports about wasteful and unused resources to cut unwanted expenses." Currently implemented for a set of common AWS services.
• db - "Version control for databases: save, restore, and archive snapshots of your database from the command line."
• Thinking in React Hooks - New plumbing requires new patterns.
• We only hire the trendiest - Trendy hiring is stupid. Also overwhelmingly common in our industry.
• Twitter to decentralize… something - A close look at Twitter's vague plans to do something with an API. After the way they've treated developers over the years, I can't imagine ever trusting them again.
• Separation of positional and keyword arguments in Ruby 3.0 - Breaking changes are coming.
• User Agent Changes - If you're not familiar with the tire fire that is browser user agents, you're lucky.
• The Amazon Premium - An argument that AWS does not provide good value for the money. I'm not convinced but it's worth considering whether your workload might be better/cheaper elsewhere.

• Email authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC out in the wild - A look at the major email authentication standards and their prevalence.
• EFF Report Exposes, Explains Big Tech’s Personal Data Trackers Lurking on Social Media, Websites, and Apps - I just want to go live in a cave.
• Tract: a Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects - Aiming for sensible defaults and serious features with customizability.
• The Amazon Builders' Library - "How Amazon builds and operates software" via a bunch of white papers.
• Cairo - An open-source alternate Windows shell (though nothing to do with the Microsoft Cairo project, for those few of us whose memories go back that far).
• Introducing AWS Amplify for iOS and Android - If you don't mind the lock-in AWS has full custom toolchains now.
• Microfronts - "Micro-Frontends approach enables us to split our products into separate modules as any of them is built with any web technology (i.e. React/Angular/Vue/...). "
• Open Reference Architecture for Security and Privacy - A comprehensive reference with more security content than most developers can imagine. I need to finish digesting it but definitely worth a read.
• API Practices If You Hate Your Customers - All of which you will find in the wild, of course.
• Mind your Logs : How a build log from a Jenkins leaked everything - Yes, you need to pay attention to security for your development artifacts.
• The Growing Problem of Malicious Relays on the Tor Network - Sigh.
• This YAML file will self-destruct in five seconds! - By using some unsafe Python features.
• Geared Pagination in Rails Behind The Scenes - A look at the internals of the GearedPagination gem.
• Announcing Eventide v2 - A major update for this event sourcing toolkit.

• New – Provisioned Concurrency for Lambda Functions - Always-on AWS Lambda functions (which of course will cost you extra).
• A guide to distributed teams - Guidance from experienced engineering leaders at Buffer and Splice.
• Improving How We Interview - How Limejump reflected on and updated their process.
• Firefox Private Network - Firefox's own (whitelabeled) VPN is now available for subscription at $4.99 per month.
• Taylorism isn’t as far from Agile and Lean as you would think - Fred Taylor's thought is at least worth exploring, deeply creepy though some of it is.
• Thin and maintainable Rails mailers: how we refactored Rails mailers at mkdev - Noodling around with mailer code.
• How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers - Once again: just don't use Facebook.
• Properly managing your .gitignore file - Distinguishing between your personal global preferences and repo concerns.
• The Big Stellar Space Drop Update #6 - So yeah, maybe building a cryptocurrency giveaway into a secure signing product wasn't the smartest idea ever.
• Micro Frontends Architecture - "The future of frontend development". Well, maybe.
• Working as a Remote Product Designer from far far away - Similar to working as a remote developer, but certainly not the same.
• Decimating deprecated finders - Hint: there are good tools for rewriting ruby code. You just have to find them.
• A Guide to Prepare for a System Rewrite -Questions you need to answer before you throw out the baby and the bathwater to start over.
• Understand Virtual DOM - Learn the basics by looking at a tiny implementation.

• PostgreSQL at low level: stay curious! - Some experiments in profiling & tracing database operations.
• JIT and Ruby's MJIT - "If you’re running a Rails app or you don’t need better CPU performance, don’t do anything."
• Introducing Open Repos: a free product to aid open source development - An exploratory tool from the folks at GitClear.
• A Distributed Meeting Primer - Advice from Rands. If you're in software you may find a lot of this obvious, but trust me, inmany mainstream businesses remote meetings are a complete disaster area.
• Software Security is a Programming Languages Issue - Building security in, from the point of view of a programming class.
• Ruby 2.7 adds shorthand syntax for arguments forwarding - "It acts similar to calling super without any arguments."
• Squadcast - Incident management as a service, with paid and free plans. Looks like a way to avoid building a lot of plumbing if you're starting down the SRE path.
• DoH: (Anti-)Competitive and Network Neutrality aspects - Much as I like Firefox, and appreciate the increased security of DNS-over-HTTP, I've come around to the viewpoint that centralizing this on CloudFlare is problematic at best.
• Rails 6 adds ability to block writes to a database - Most useful when you're working with multiple connections.
• Escaping The Tar Pit: Introducing Skunk v0.3.2 at RubyConf 2019 - A take of using metrics to improve code.
• Working Around ActiveRecord Callbacks - A useful pattern for skipping specific callbacks in testing.
• DockerSlim - "Don't change anything in your Docker container image and minify it by up to 30x making it secure too!" I haven't tried using it yet.
• Agile project management: 4 lessons learned this year - It's always a good time to reread the manifesto.
• osxfuse is no longer open source - But you'll probably keep using it anyhow.

• An Overview of Cryptography - A thorough online introduction.
• Matestack - "As a Rails Engine, matestack deeply integrates a Vue.js based UI into Rails, offering optional prebuilt components. Use it to write dynamic Web-UIs with minimum effort and maximum dev happiness in pure Ruby."
• Rubyconf 2019 — Main takeaways from the keynote — Ruby 3.0 and the road ahead - Text summary of Matz's talk.
• Dining Preferences of the Cloud and Open Source: Who Eats Who? - A look at open source business models.
• The one-on-one meeting template for your end of the year review - This is a good time for some summing up.
• With Compute Optimizer, AWS Finds an Actual Use For AI/ML - Figuring out how to buy the right server from the splatter of EC2 options.
• Blogcop: A GitHub app that helps you manage your Jekyll blog - By automating periodic content reviews.
• Choose Your Docker Base Image Wisely - If you don't understand image versioning you might get bit.
• 9 new features in ES2019 - Part of the "Javascript Christmas" series.
• Deploy your own SAAS - A list of projects that let you spin up your own services and servers easily.
• DeepSpeech 0.6: Mozilla’s Speech-to-Text Engine Gets Fast, Lean, and Ubiquitous - I'm still not convinced I need a TTS engine in my browser.

• No Gitlab, That’s Not How Remote Works - GitLab is among the companies who "adjust" offers based on where you live. I think that's nonsense, and so does the author of this brief post.
• Discovering less-known PostgreSQL v12 features - I think I will never ever catch up with the pace of PostgreSQL development.
• Do We Really Need a Web API? - An early peek at Liaison: "The frontend can call a method in the backend without further ceremony. It is just a regular JavaScript method invocation."
• OpenFaaS Cloud - "OpenFaaS Cloud introduces an automated build and management system for your Serverless functions with native integrations into your source-control management system whether that is GitHub or GitLab."
• Vectornator Goes On Mac - Free iOS vector-graphics design tool is now available for your desktop.
• Evolving our Interview Process - The research does seem to show that structured interviews with scorecards are a superior approach.
• The Fallacy of needing a technical manager - The "manager who codes" is an antipattern, but it's a beloved one in our industry.
• Ruby Literals You May Not Know - Some syntax that comes in useful at times.
• MongoDB vs RavenDB - A longish comparison from a dev inclined toward RavenDB.
• Ruby, Where do We Go Now? - An examination of the chaos that has been Ruby 2.7 design.
• Git tips for trunk-based development - Fairly basic but useful if you're trying to set up some development standards.

• How to annotate literally everything - With a focus on open-source tools for annotating web pages, and making use of your notes.
• The 2019 State of JavaScript Survey - It's not too late to add your answers.
• Borg Text-to-Speech - Because why not?
• Advent of Code 2019 - If you're not working hard this holiday season you can learn a few things.
• patchbay.pub - Free pub/sub system with self-service channel creation. Plenty of interesting examples to jump-start your creativity here too.
• Job negotiation for programmers: the basic principles - Worth a read when you're job-hunting.
• Firefox Replay - Record and replay application execution when you're trying to debug things.
• jor1k - "Online OR1K Emulator running Linux" - in your browser, in Javascript. It actually works pretty well.
• What’s the Difference between a Project and a Product? - Quite a bit, if you're trying to move to a more agile mindset.
• Beginner JavaScript - New (commercial) course from Wes Bos that looks pretty worthwhile. If I ever decide to drag my js skills kicking and screaming into this decade I'll be signing up.
• Starting an Engineering Management Book Club - How to do it.

• A Look at PureDarwin - an OS based on the open source core of macOS - I'm glad someone is doing this, and I'm glad it's not me.
• Firefox browser will block the IAB’s DigiTrust universal ID - Good. "Anonymous audience recognition" by any other name still smells like shit.
• I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off - If you've ever worked in computer security this will resonate.
• Everything I know about Kubernetes I learned from a cluster of Raspberry Pis - There's a whole wiki full of info if you'd like to do the same.
• That hip JavaScript framework is killing your Startup - An argument that most SPAs represent premature optimization for startups.
• Rails 5.2.4 has been released! -Time to upgrade.
• Rails 6.0.2.rc1 has been released! - Or upgrade further.
• Homebrew 2.2.0 - Now with Catalina support.

• Using Bootstrap with Rails Webpacker - "Bootstrap 4 is now more Webpack-friendly"
• Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights - That's according to Amnesty International.
• Erlang is not just a language, it is a philosophy. - Which helps explain why it's so good for distributed systems.
• In Praise of Blame - I think software developers would benefit from bringing in the "Just Culture" concept from medical and other HROs.
• Coscreen - A new idea about how to organize developer screen sharing. Looks worth trying.
• Introducing our Startup Handbook - From VersionOne: "our handbook is focused on a particular stage of the startup lifecycle—post-Seed to pre-Series B."
• Inefficient Efficiency - Kent Beck on latency vs. throughput tradeoffs.
• npm fund - Now there's an official subcommand for NPM packages to push funding information.

• Add defense in depth against open firewalls, reverse proxies, and SSRF vulnerabilities with enhancements to the EC2 Instance Metadata Service - Some much-needed improvements to an old part of the AWS API.
• Scaling SVG Elements - A quick tutorial with an interactive example.
• Relentlessly simplify - Some steps to a simpler life.
• Bye Bye Microsoft Office. Hello LibreOffice - Increasingly Microsoft's business model does not seem to be aimed at individual users.
• browsh - "Browsh is a fully-modern text-based browser. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL."
• Nerd Fonts - "Nerd Fonts patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others."
• Browserless - "Fast, scalable, and reliable browser automation built for businesses and developers." Offloading the pain of headless browsers and Selenium by paying someone else to do it sounds like a good tradeoff to me.
• Advocating Against: Razor Blades - Ron Jeffries discusses backlogs and estimating.

• Stop Using Facebook. - Let us count the ways.
• Migration to AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild From GitLab - No prize for figuring out who supplied these instructions.
• Can Docker over ssh save your battery from running out? - The answer looks like a firm "maybe" depending on your connection speeds.
• Rails 6: the missing developer setup guide - A view of getting up and running.
• The epistemology of software quality - Have you gotten enough sleep lately?>
• The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy) - "So, without enough information, changing requirements, not enough knowledge to do the job, and people constantly second guessing us, we trudge into work every day."
• Refactoring Ruby with Monads - Based on a conference talk, with plenty of code.
• If you care about user privacy, do NOT use Facebook JS SDK - Even if you need to support "Login with Facebook" there are other ways.

• Ruby 2.7.0-preview3 Released - "This preview3 is mainly released to confirm the compatibility of keyword arguments." Still on track for a December final release.
• CNAME Cloaking, the dangerous disguise of third-party trackers - The online ad industry continues to spawn new techniques to abuse internet users. You can use TrackingTheTrackers to investigate your favorite sites.
• How to use docker multi-stage build to create optimal images for dev and production - You don't need to drag every bit of your development environment along to production.
• Application integration patterns for microservices: Fan-out strategies - Some architecture basics from AWS.
• Towards a unified theory of reactive UI - Looking for patterns in the thicket of front-end JS frameworks.
• FlowTrace - A light tool for monitoring remote applications.
• Can gaming become the happy-hour for remote teams? - Worth thinking about, but I'm skeptical: making "gaming" a centerpiece seems to me to be fairly exclusionary.
• git-subtrac: all your git submodules in one place - Another attempt at taming git submodules.

Posting may be a bit light next week: I'm traveling for some much-needed vacation and our annual company retreat. Enjoy the holidays!

• Similarity in Postgres and Rails using Trigrams - You can build simple "did you mean" searching using only a PostgreSQL extension.
• WebPipe - "web_pipe is a modular rack application builder through a pipe of operations on an immutable struct."
• Design challenges in interviews — how not to? - Developers aren't the only ones struggling with overly-complex interview processes.
• Risk-First - Thinking about software development through the lens of risk.
• Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers - Collaboration at Shopify's scale.
• So you want to learn Microservices? - Quick summaries and lots of links.
• An Interview on What Makes Postgres Unique (Extensions) - Chatting with one of the folks from Citus.
• EasyDB - "EasyDB is a one-click, hosted database provider." Free but ephemeral.
• Remote Work Encylopedia - Tactical advice from the team at Moonlight.
• Bits on the Wire - Tim Bray offers a survey of object encoding methods for the internet.
• Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is really terrible - Yeah, it is, if you're the sort of person who types Markdown by hand.
• Slack Disable WYSIWYG Bookmarklet - Slack users fight back.
• Developer Roadmaps - "Step by step guides and paths to learn different tools or technologies."
• Learn GraphQL + MongoDB Security Vulnerabilities - If you don't know about NoSQL injection, you probably should.
• LicenseZero Public Roadmap - An interesting effort to enable open source + commercial licensing with an easy interface for developers (think about the way LetsEncrypt certificates work as a very rough analogy).

• Sourcetrail - "Free and open-source cross-platform source explorer" supporting C, C++, Java, and Python.
• Diez - "Diez is a free & open-source developer toolkit for expressing visual styles that can be shared across codebases, native platforms, and teams."
• Ruby Next - "Ruby Next is a tool for supporting modern/edge CRuby features (APIs and syntax) in older versions and alternative implementations. For example, you can use pattern matching and Kernel#then in Ruby 2.5 or mruby."
• Let Me Schedule Tasks For You (lmstfy) - A simple task queue built on top of redis.
• Joplin - "Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks." Uses Markdown for formatting and can import from Evernote exports.
• Starter Workflows - Templates to help you get started with GitHub Actions.
• Long-Distance Relationship: How To Work With Clients You've Never Met Face-to-Face - Ebook from the folks at Toggl.
• Configuring Ansible - How to keep things secure & tidy.

• Venture Capital Shill - Calling out free software one-true-wayism.
• BrowserGap Community Edition - Avoid internet crap entirely by proxying your browser to a remote computer.
• Inca — Message Tracing and Loss Detection For Streaming Data @Netflix - More big infrastructure that I don't need but enjoy reading about.
• Understanding the useEffect hook in React - Leveraging side effects for fun and profit.
• Gatsby on Rails - Lashing together Rails, GraphQL, Gatsby, Heroku, and other things to serve fast static pages from rarely-changing content.
• The Danger of “Simplicity” - You need to make some conscious choices about what to simplify, because our business involves complexity whether you like it or not.
• How we align our goals - An interesting visual approach to keeping everyone focused on the company's overall direction.
• How containers work: overlayfs - Julia Evans explains. Well-done as usual.
• The Kranz Dictum - Effective leadership in action after the Apollo 1 disaster.
• Personal and Social information of 1.2 billion people Discovered in Massive Data Leak - To a good first approximation, all of the personal data you've ever placed on the internet is available to hackers.
• 12 Common Mistakes and Missed Optimization Opportunities in SQL - Some dos and don'ts.
• Introducing Flan Scan: Cloudflare’s Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner - Wrapping nmap for easier use and deployment on large networks.
• Rails 5.2.4.rc1 has been released! - 5.2.4 is planned to be the final 5.2 bugfix release.
• PNGR Stack - "Dockerized (postgres + nginx + golang + react) starter kit."
• Why “Always use UTC” is bad advice - Sometimes you ned a representation that includes more than just an instant.

• Podman and Buildah for Docker users - And why you might want to switch, especially if you're integrating with Kubernetes.
• An always-available, online-capable Raspberry Pi in your pocket - Leveraging the WiFi in your MacOS laptop to get a pi proxied online.
• BerryLan - Open-source tool for bootstrapping a Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth.
• Composition over inheritance applied to Docker - An interesting approach to handling build-time dependencies.
• How To Build A Blog With Gatsby and Netlify - Dabbling with a ReactJS-based static site generator.
• Working with Capistrano: Tasks, Roles, and Variables - Some past-basic techniques, and a good reminder that we haven't all moved to k8s.
• Rails 6.0.1, database connection improvements, and more - Time marches on and so do Rails versions.
• hosts-blocklists - "This repository provides a host and domainname based blocklist specifically designed for use with dnsmasq." Which is to say, a good way to get rid of the crap on the internet if you're moderately technical.
• aws-vault-alfred-workflow - "Alfred workflow to Open AWS in your browser via aws-vault," useful if you juggle multiple sets of AWS credentials.
• Design & Ethics: where two worlds collide - "If there were ever a time for Design and Ethics to come together, that time is now."
• Total Advertising Denial - A stand of which I heartily approve.
• Markers of Progress in Incident Analysis - Some ways to tell that your organization is actually learning.
• How to build a startup engineering team - "Advice for when you’re starting from scratch and designing for growth."
• Improving Coding Standards and Quality - Ways to make your standards be more than just a list of rules.
• ExploratoryTesting - Essay from Martin Fowler. "I would consider it a red flag if a team isn't doing exploratory testing at all - even if their automated testing was excellent."