• Kim Scott on why most work communication fails and how to fix it - An interview about Radical Candor (and you should read the book if you haven't already).
• Embracing context propagation - A technique to keep in mind if you're embarking on more distributed computing.
• Goodbye AWS: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes, Part 1 - If you don't know for sure that you need to colocate, you probably don't.
• Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS - Impressive & scary. "A major component of the system is 54 years old, written in COBOL, and provides retail-level business logic."
• Books that every engineering manager should read - A reasonable set of basics. One of these days I'll get my own list on the public internet.
• How we optimized Magic Pocket for cold storage - A technical tale from Dropbox.
• TypeScript is Exploding, JavaScript is the Fittest - Some analysis of RedMonk's programming language popularity ratings.
• Using Stylelint to Magically Improve Your CSS - A how-to guide.
• Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech - Worth reading, though it feels a bit straw-mannish; his examples don't sound "loosely held" to me.
• The Power of the Pause: Introducing Sabbaticals at Buffer - The next frontier in workplace benefits for developers?
• WebAssembly Micro Runtime - Yep, WASM outside of a browser.
• Why open source firmware is important for security - Because closed source firmware is a disaster already happening. Excellent roundup of what's going on by Jessie Frazelle.

Junior Engineer

Beterra Health (https://beterra.com/)

Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. How bad is it? They prematurely kill up to 400,000 people a year. Beterra Health is looking for a junior engineer to help us put a dent in that number. If you’re interested in doing work daily that helps save lives and joining a team early enough to have a huge impact, you might be that person.

We’re looking for someone who can contribute to our engineering success, while enthusiastically participating our company culture. This is an early-career opportunity for someone ready to join a growing company. You’ll be the second full-time engineer.

Requirements

• Alignment with Beterra’s Mission & Vision (https://beterra.com/about/)
• Familiarity with part of our stack
• Enthusiasm for broadening and deepening your software skills
• Desire to help build a healthy remote culture
• Temperament for full-time remote work

Not Requirements

• Familiarity with our entire stack
• X years of experience
• College degree

Our Stack

• Ruby on Rails 5/6
• Ember
• PostgreSQL on RDS
• Amazon Web Services

What kind of individual are you?

You’re kind, thoughtful, driven, and talented.

You’ll give it your all as we gather around the whiteboard to solve hard problems and as you go heads-down to implement solutions. Our style of work is high-autonomy, trust-driven, and focused on enabling deep work. You’ll have the drive to turn that freedom into great work.

And lastly, you’re sharp and getting sharper. You get excited when you think about the size your impact could be on a small team. You have a big appetite for learning and reflecting to broaden and deepen your skill set.

What is Beterra like?

We’re a privately held self-funded company in Newnan, GA aiming to facilitate world-class healthcare experiences and outcomes. The problems we’re currently solving are in the patient safety space. We help over 150 healthcare organizations across 7 countries understand and improve their safety culture, directly resulting in better outcomes for patients.

We live and breathe healthy organizations, and we spend a lot of time applying our domain learning to our own company. We believe culture is far more than an office keg—it’s the values we live out and norms we put in place that enable us to achieve our mission.

If we aren’t spending all of our afternoons around the office keg, what benefits does Beterra offer?

• Flexible PTO with a minimum of 2 weeks
• 100% medical coverage for you and your dependents
• A remote culture (though we do have an office in Newnan if you’re local)
• Whatever workspace tools you need to produce great work
• The resources you need to learn and grow

Interested?

Email our lead architect Mike Gunderloy (mgunderloy@beterra.com) and let us know what interests you about Beterra and how you think you’ll fit in with our culture and development efforts. GitHub or LinkedIn profile appreciated but not required.

• JS Monday 12 - Building a GraphQL Server - A walkthrough to get you started with the basic concepts.
• Firefighting Kata - What could we perhaps learn from actual fire-fighting?
• Angular vs. React vs. Vue - The same tutorial with three different technologies to help you make up your mind.
• Minisleep - Wiki that only depends on bash and a CGI-compatible webserver.
• Color Me FACE1E55 - Leetspeak for your CSS.
• Agile Architecture - Some thoughts on the role of an architect in an agile environment.
• Product Ethics - Some guidelines for building ethical digital products.
• Clear is better than clever - With examples from Go.
• Flipt - "A feature flag solution that runs in your existing infrastructure."
• SignPath - Code signing management as a service.
• We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business - Just another periodic reminder that trusting your money to PayPal remains a very bad idea.
• My Internet Explorer - A collection of versions going all the way back to IE1.

• A comprehensive (and honest) list of UX clichés - Alternatively, a set of squares for your next buzzword bingo card.
• Approximating “Prettier for Ruby” with RuboCop - Some new cops to help clean up the look of your code.
• The top 10 rebuttals to: “Agile is great. But it won’t work here.” - With a set of rebuttal arguments. Unfortunately I don't think they'll work if the company is already mistaking agile theater for agile.
• A Beginner’s Guide to AWS Cost Management - Some of the basics. My best tip: don't give your developers access to create All The Things without supervision.
• SirixDB - "An Evolutionary, Temporal NoSQL Document Store" designed for efficient time-travel querying (ie what was the state of my data at a particular moment).
• The Construct - A heavy-duty Rails 6 template.
• utterances - A comment widget that uses GitHub issues for data storage.
• Hyper 3 - Major release of this electron-based terminal app, focused on performance.
• Memurai - "Redis-compatible cache and datastore for Windows"
• Stalemate - GitHub PR review dashboard optimized for TV display.
• Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story - No really, pay attention.
• Fusuma - Full-featured Markdown slide generator.

• Smallest Kubernetes Cluster Installation with Rancher as Cluster Manager - A step-by-step guide.
• Local-first software - A plan for clawing our data back from the cloud.
• Don't Waste Time On User Onboarding - That spiffy javascript website tour might not be the best use of your scarce resources.
• Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote - Some companies are pulling back from remote work. Stripe isn't one of them.
• SearchFlip - "Full-Featured ElasticSearch Ruby Client with a Chainable DSL"
• Serving Vue.js apps on Github Pages - Yes, it can be done.
• How to Create a Great Team Culture (and Why It Matters) - Some basic guidelines to being a better leader.
• Instrumenting Ruby on Rails with Prometheus - How to do it.
• pre-commit - "A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks."
• Container misconceptions/a></strong> - "TL;DR: containers are not VMs; stop calling everything "Docker"; don't use Kubernetes for tiny projects, use Swarm instead; Kubernetes will only solve your org's problems if you are willing to go all-in, anything in between will fail the same way it failed before."</li> </ul>

• First Aid Git - "A searchable collection of the most frequently asked Git questions."
• Don't Do This - A list of common PostgreSQL mistakes.
• Don’t Pay the Early Adopter Tax - Amen.
• Wasmer - "Wasmer is a Ruby library for executing WebAssembly binaries."
• End-to-End Testing Web Apps: The Painless Way - Using Cypress + Docker to escape from Selenium.
• 2019 Networking Snapshot - An experience report on switching to Eero kit.
• YAMVM — Yet Another Monolith vs. Microservices - A look at the tradeoffs that convinced one group to make the shift.
• Rails 6: B-Sides and Rarities - Looking at some of the parts of the upgrade that haven't been trumpeted as much.
• Git power tools for daily use - Three shortcuts to make life simpler.
• ActiveRecord::Explainer - Automatically log a SQL EXPLAIN of every query in your application.
• So You’re Hiring a Product Manager? - Now you get to figure out why.

• Can We Measure Software Development Productivity? - Objective measurement is a mess, but it's hard to avoid subjective measurement, so why not be systematic about it?
• Jenkins is Getting Old - If you've used Jenkins for a while (or worse, if you remember using Hudson), you'll be nodding along with this one.
• The Parenting Playbook - A handbook on supporting parents in the workplace. Some of the advice is specific to Canadian legalities, but much is universal.
• Thoughts on macOS Package Managers - MacPorts vs. Homebrew, technically and politically.
• 10 Mistakes You Should Avoid During Your One on One Meetings - The folks at Fellow have collected good advice from all over.
• Collective Actions in Tech - Software is starting to take steps towards organizing at the grassroots. About damned time.
• Introducing `now dev` – Serverless, on localhost - A local stack for the Now serverless environment.
• The Many Benefits of Using a Monorepo - I still think it depends on your use case, but it's worth investigating.
• legit - "Programs written in legit are defined entirely by the graph of commits in a Git repository. The content of the repository is ignored."
• Magical Thinking in Internet Security - "We are, today, trying to secure technology we do not understand, against attackers who understand our technology better than we do." Paul Vixie makes the case that reducing complexity is an important part of securing your network.
• Less-obvious accessibility questions - Some things for organizers of meatspace events to consider.

• The RSpec Style Guide: Reloaded - Code style is one of those areas where the Ruby community's vaunted "we are nice" breaks down pretty quickly.
• Beehive - A self-hosted agent system (kinda like If This Than That).
• Uppy 1.0: Your best friend in file uploading - A full-featured JS file uploader.
• IBM Agile Thought Leader - Certification as self-parody.
• Stop using so many divs! An intro to semantic HTML - A good thing, but you'll probably pry the divs out of my cold dead hands (after a real web developer kills me for still usign br tags).
• 5 things to consider when creating your CSS style guide - Things you should think about before descending into inconsistent CSS hell.
• When Does an Investigation End? - How do you know when you're finished with an incident?
• By Default, Ship Nothing - Learning and doing high-value work is more important the just keeping people busy.
• GitLab’s journey from Azure to GCP - Why and how they made the switch.
• Paying Cold, Hard Cash for Open Source Contributions - How one company encourages its engineers.
• Announcement: Amazon S3 will no longer support path-style API requests starting September 30th, 2020 - Something to be aware of if you're a long-time S3 user.

• Mono’s Journey from monolith to microservices - Breaking up the monolith told as a fable.
• Synchronous Text - Mozilla is moving away from IRC. End of an era.
• WASM: Universal Application Runtime - I don't really want to learn WASM yet but it's getting a lot of press and it's worth keeping an eye on.
• Code Inspector - "Code Quality and Technical Debt management made easy." There's a demo and beta registration available.
• PostgreSQL Features You May Not Have Tried But Should - So many features, so little time.
• Developer Survey Results 2019 - From the Stack Overflow community.
• Piping curl to s(hell) - Still not a good idea.
• What If Your Team Wrote the Code for the 737 MCAS System? - You probably would have messed up and killed people too, that's what.
• Tracking queue metrics with Sidekiq - Some techniques for keeping track of what Sidekiq is up to.
• How Splice Builds Globally Distributed Engineering Teams - Hint: the mission is important.
• The Technical Debt Myth - "Technical debt" has become convenient but unhelpful shorthand for too many diverse issues.

• How to Make Sense of Your Impact When You're No Longer Coding - Important advice for technical contributors moving to the management track.
• A Critical View of the Agile Manifesto - It's good to question assumptions that I think this article may overstate its case.
• Principles and Techniques of Data Science - A textbook delivered via Gitbook.
• Coming Soon: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition, in beta - I remember reading the first edition when it first came out. What a long strange trip it's been...
• Don't help me say No - Some behaviors to avoid when applying for a software development job.
• Core Memory Shield for Arduino - "A retro 32-bit memory for Arduino using ferrite cores" that you can build youself. Now I want to see a mercury delay line memory shield.
• The mysterious history of the MIT License - The history of open source licenses is pretty much just a mess.
• React95 - Get that retro Windows 95 look in your modern web applications.

• Rails 6.0.0 rc1 released - This is probably ready to run in production.
• vim.wasm - Vim ported to WebAssembly, just because.
• Packets-per-second limits in EC2 - An experimental investigation.
• The Web Developer's Guide to DNS - An introduction to some of the web's basic plumbing.
• SaaS vs Open Core Software: An Introduction - Maybe the time is ripe for something past SaaS to start taking market share?
• You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should. - Because engineers are bloody well expensive.
• Just - Sort of like make but simpler.
• Tracking your progress to improve your confidence - Why you should log your work every day. I've been doing this for years and it works well for me.

• Koan - Management software focused on collaborative OKRs that feed into your strategic mission.
• A year with Spectre: a V8 perspective - Security is much harder than even most developers can imagine.
• Fighting vendor lock-in and designing testable serverless apps using hexagonal architecture - A detailed look at the what and why of testing serverless applications.
• Growing Our Team with Retrospectives - Using retros as a process and cultural learning tool, rather than strictly as part of software development.
• Cadence - A "distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine" from Uber.
• Vue.js Examples - Lots and lots of components you can use.
• A practical guide to small and easy-to-review pull requests - An argument that small PRs are more important than big ones, even if it takes a lot to fully implement a feature.
• Can’t Git no satisfaction: why we need a new-gen source control - Perhaps we can do better for the wide world of distributed software.

• Workbench - "Create and share reproducible data workflows, without code."
• 9 tips for moving code to microservices - Big project advice from HPE.
• Turns Out, 85% of the World Likes “Contact Me”. Even Though You Don’t. - Selling to enterprises is not like selling to you and me.
• Why Turning on HTTP/2 Was a Mistake - A cautionary tale from Lucidchart.
• Svelte 3: Rethinking reactivity - An approach to web components that moves more of the work to build time.
• Ruby Repository Moved to Git from Subversion - A bold leap forward.
• A security-oriented DevOps approach - An introduction to the ideas behind DevSecOps.
• haproxy - A built-from-source container image of the haproxy HTTP server.

• Unauthorized access to Docker Hub database - Kind of a big deal security alert if you use Docker Hub. Even if you didn't get an email, I'd change your password.
• Hardening SSH with 2fa - A step-by-step guide from @lizthegrey.
• Monolith to Microservices - New book from Sam Newman being published by O'Reilly this fall.
• Implementing a disaster recovery strategy with Amazon RDS - Another of the million and one things I need to do one of these days.
• Buck - Build system open-sourced by Facebook.
• Code Art - Especially have a look at "Tiny Mirror."
• Yubikey as an SSH key - A recipe using modern OpenSSH.
• Javascript debuggers are broken, and it's our fault. - Or at least, debuggers haven't kept up with the dizzying stack of abstractions in Javascript.

• Fire Fixation - "Fire fixation is the pattern of patching urgent problems as quickly as possible, and then immediately moving on to the next."
• Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations - Mozilla is upping the ante on what a good translation tool should do.
• Fellow - App to help managers run 1-on-1s, manage feedback, and otherwise be more productive, with free & paid plans.
• Tinfoil Chat - A "messaging system that relies on high assurance hardware architecture to protect users from passive eavesdropping, active MITM attacks and remote exfiltration".
• Screencast - Sublime Text Mouse-Free Development Advanced Productivity Tips - Using both default & custom shortcuts to stay productive.
• Ruby 2.6.3 Released - Come for the bugfixes, stay for the new Japanese era.
• Microservices Done Right, Part 3: Quantifying the Benefits of Microservices - And if you've done it right, hopefully those benefits actually exist.
• Writing Good Source Control Commit Messages - Some of the basics of being nice to future you.
• BotKube - A Slack bot to keep an eye on your Kubernetes infrastructure./li>
• The five types of communication problems that destroy company morale - Don't do these things.
</ul>

• 11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work - Some patterns for healthier organizations.
• When Postgres blocks: 7 tips for dealing with locks - A year old but still good advice.
• Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model - The fact that the distribution of actual time to estimated time is skewed & has a long tail has a lot to do with it.
• About Being Lonely as a Consultant - Roy Osherove reflects on some of the perils of being the hired gun.
• Ruby 2.7 — Pattern Matching — First Impressions and Ruby – Pattern Matching – Second Impressions- Brandon Weaver digs in.
• Animating URLs with Javascript and Emojis - Must we?
• What is UI design? What is UX design? UI vs UX: What’s the difference - A primer from UXPlanet.
• Nicedoc - Render any markup file hosted on Github as a pretty page.
• GraphQL Cache - "A custom caching plugin for graphql-ruby."
• Commit messages guide - Some rules for writing them well.
• Kustomize - The right way to do templating in Kubernetes - An alternative to helm.
• Mockit - Open-source Dockerized tool for mocking APIs.

• Great developers are raised, not hired - Why mentoring pays off in a tight market.
• Design Sprints: Storyboarding Tips - Part of a series from Thoughtbot about the design process.
• Experiments with Holacracy: Why we stopped doing it, and what we learned along the way. - Still sounds like a boatload of unnecessary overhead to me, but hey, it might work for some people.
• Icons: avoid temptation and start with user needs - How the NHS went from 30+ icons to 11. Nice to see a design process that doesn't just add more bells + whistles.
• Best Practices for AWS Lambda Container Reuse - Digging into some warm start optimizations.
• Comparing Kubernetes Service Mesh Tools - Looking at Linkerd, Consul, Istio, and Linkerd2.
• How We Measure Standards (and why it’s sort of a problem) - It really shouldn't be surprising that big companies use "standards" as another way to gain competitive advantage.
• Octotree - "GitHub code tree on steroids". There's also a paid Pro version.
• Want to be happier and more successful? Write about yourself every week. - Status reports don't just benefit your boss.
• Building Intersectionality Into Your Hiring Strategy - The challenges of ethically managing hiring are pretty difficult to deal with. Here are some ideas to help.
• AI is not coming for you - "No one has any idea what “artificial intelligence” even means."
• Micro-promotions and mentorship: the big impact of small actions in an engineering culture - Be good to people. It pays off.

• Better Remote Meetings - Ideas on how to equalize participation.
• Designing UI with Color Blind Users in Mind - Lots of good reminders here.
• Why we're switching to calendar versioning - I'm seeing more backlash against semantic versioning lately.
• Webiny - "Developer-friendly Serverless CMS powered by GraphQL and React."
• Saved by the Schema: Using JSON Schema to Document, Test, and Debug APIs - Advice and a case study from Heroku.
• Learn TLA+ - Online tutorial for this formal specification language.
• "An arctic, north-bluish color palette" for all your developer tools. -
• Architects – Hang Up Your Capes & Go Back To The Code - I never thought of architecture as a profession disconnected from the code, but sometimes it is.
• Introducing Mozilla WebThings - Working with IoT in your browser.
• Ikonate - "Fully customisable & accessible vector icons."
• Sorbet - Type checking is coming to Ruby, like it or not.
• Scaling Technology and Organizations Together with Randy Shoup - Some strategies for handling large-scale growth.

• VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trackers - Built from the official source for those who don't trust Microsoft.
• Why I Switched From Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm - Or perhaps you'd like to try an entirely different editor.
• Cross-Browser NoScript hits the Chrome Store - A beta at the moment but I'm pleased to see user control of JS spreading.
• The Problem with SSH Agent Forwarding - It's lower security that using your jump box to forward the connection.
• Hire People or Optimize Processes: A cost-benefit analysis for engineering leaders - Digging into some of the hidden costs to make smart decisions.
• ghacks-user.js - "An ongoing comprehensive user.js template for configuring and hardening Firefox privacy, security and anti-fingerprinting."
• CSS Sans - Yes, you can build a font entirely out of CSS.
• The Fargate Illusion - A look at all the things you still need to do even if you're not managing containers.
• Nothing Fails Like Success - How broken are the current internet business models? Very.
• Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space - It's a safety net, if nothing else.
• DevTestOps Landscape Survey Report 2019 - A survey focused on the evolving role of the tester.
• Keeping master green at scale - Just be glad you're not dealing with Uber's repo.

• Composition over configuration - In the web/JS component world.
• 339 bytes of responsive CSS - Another take on how to make simple sites look good easily.
• AWS: How to limit Lambda and API Gateway scalability - Limiting your costs to avoid unpleasant surprises.
• nact - "Nact is redux but for the server."
• Designing Better Security Warnings - An excellent look at the design process behind Firefox's certificate warning dialogs.
• The high cost of slow tests - One of the big sources of paying developers to fart around on company time.
• Markdeep - "Markdeep is a technology for writing plain text documents that will look good in any web browser, whether local or remote."
• Rails 6 drops support for PostgreSQL version less than 9.3 - Good to know if you haven't updated your database lately.
• Irbtools - Extend irb instead of using pry.
• Microservices Done Right, Part 2: More Antipatterns to Avoid - You must be this tall to successfully deploy microservices.
• The problem with ‘5 whys’ - This came out of my healthcare industry reading, but it applies to software development as well.
• The Wide World of Microsoft Windows on AWS - Yes you can host .NET code on AWS if you really want to.