• Working with distributed teams - Some basic advice with links to useful tools.
• Command-Line Lint - Automated tool to review your command line history and make suggestions.
• Lambda composition in ruby 2.6 - 2.6 introduces new operators for chaining Procs.
• On Infrastructure at Scale: A Cascading Failure of Distributed Systems - In the trenches with Target.
• CodeRunner - "A lightweight, multi-language programming editor for macOS." $14.99 to license.
• NES.css - Style your site with a retro arcade-game look.
• DBeaver - Multi-platform database tool that supports practically everything: "MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, MS Access, Teradata, Firebird, Derby."
• 10 Tips to Boost Developer Productivity in Your Team - Lots of advice on getting a higher-functioning team.

• chezmoi - "Manage your dotfiles securely across multiple machines." Architected with explicit support for templating and per-machine customizations.
• Upgrading Bash on macOS - Just in case you'd like a shell written more recently than 2007.
• AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source - Hey guess what? When you use your license to impose costs on customers, they stop using your software.
• Bash scripting cheatsheet - Getting back to basics.
• MKS: Mechanical Keyboard Simulator - Add keyswitch sounds back to your laptop butterfly keyboard.
• 189 quotes for developers - Just what it says.
• Operable Software - A longish rumination on operability, observability, mental models, architecture, and related topics.
• Introduction to TLA+ Model Checking in the Command Line - Using this tool for concurrent sanity checking without the Java wrapper.

• How Can I Help to Promote Diversity Without Relinquishing Any of My Power? - Satire, but all too sadly true.
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization - Online preview of an entire book on the subject, with lots of good guidance.
• Rentable Runner Club - "Cheap dedicated monthly Gitlab and Jenkins CI Runners". Interesting niche.
• Factors in authentication - Dirty not-so-secret: phone-based 2FA really doesn't add much security.
• Application Transformation Recipes - Pivotal's list of ways to migrate software into the cloud.
• "The Problem With Software" - Book review and reflections on ways to improve things.
• Cuprite - A pure Ruby driver for headless Chrome focused on staying useful with current versions.
• Professional Programming - A wealth of resources for full-stack developers.

• "Going Agile" - Putting agile lipstick on an underlying waterfall pig just doesn't work.
• Rails 6.0.0 beta1: Action Mailbox, Action Text, Multiple DBs, Parallel Testing, Webpacker by default - Still tracking towards a release later this year.
• Silicon Valley Syndrome - Guess what? Throwing technology at problems doesn't always solve them.
• AlaSQL - An open source JavaScript database. Eventually all software tends to JS, I think.
• Moving to a Profile per Install Architecture - A nice Firefox improvement for those of us who spend time with multiple versions.
• Data structures to name-drop when you want to sound smart in an interview - With just enough technical knowledge to make you sound smart.
• Canary analysis: Lessons learned and best practices from Google and Waze - Using Spinnaker in production - with an emphasis on getting yourself set to use it right.
• Finding the next level tech job - A detailed look at what it took to step into technical leadership, with bonus advice on figuring out what you want.

• Sail - Rails engine for live control of application settings.
• SQLer - Direct database API written in Go.
• hexyl - Simple and colorful terminal hex viewer.
• Slack Integration - From IRCCloud. Still a bit rough around the edges but if they enable use from other IRC clients I'll definitely be interested.

• Let’s talk about Story Mapping - A quick introduction to this process for visualizing and organizing a backlog of product features.
• Bash-5.0 release available - Nobody ever thinks about bash as an evolving project, but it is.
• Monorepos and the Fallacy of Scale - Maybe monorepos aren't so bad after all.
• Metasploit Framework 5.0 Released! - It gets ever easier to find online weaknesses.
• Stepping away from Sass - Thoughts from a talented UX designer.

• Why the Best Leaders Don’t Always Have a Plan - A conversation with Stanley McChrystal.
• TensorStream: Bringing Machine Learning to Ruby - A pure Ruby machine learning framework.
• Ruby 2.7 new feature: Method reference operator - Now that 2.6 is out it's time to look a bit further down the line.
• 3 ActiveRecord Mistakes That Slow Down Rails Apps: Count, Where and Present - Yes, you need to look past the abstractions and syntactic sugar.
• What is an Engineering Manager? - From the AWS Startups Blog, a concept that continues to baffle me.
• AWS DocumentDB – A NoSQL Equivalent For Aurora - DocumentDB is not in fact exactly like MongoDB.

• Skipper - "Skipper is an HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition."
• Agile Isn’t New, It’s Just Common Sense Rebranded - Looking at some non-software big projects that demonstrate some agile principles.
• The Mac Malware of 2018 - Yes, it exists. Lots of it.
• Homebrew 1.9.0 - Automatic cleanup and Linux support, yay!
• Want To End Sexual Harassment? Landmark Study Finds Ousting 'Bad Men' Isn't Enough - Yeah it's not coding. But it's important.
• @internetofshit from CES - As usual, there were many products at CES that no one should even think of.
• Patterns for Conventional API Rails Apps on Linode or Google Cloud Platform in 2019 - With no Docker or K8s in sight.
• kube-score - Static analysis tool for Kubernetes object definitions.

• It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with my Bare Hands - There are definite benefits to building sites that don't rely on a 500MB JavaScript iceberg.
• CallLogger - A method usage logger for ruby code.
• ReiKey - Monitoring tool to detect some MacOS keyloggers.
• The State Of Software Security In 2019 - A sweeping overview with lots of links.
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) - I'm not sure MongoDB did themselves any favors with a cloud-hostile license.
• Ruby Bindings and Extensions - "A practical guide to going native with C."
• Towards remote working - Some thoughts on making an established company more remote-friendly.
• Ruby Conferences ‘n’ Camps in 2019 - What’s Upcoming? - Lots.

• Autumn - "The macOS window manager for JavaScript hackers," just in case you didn't have enough toys to play with.
• Effective Mental Models for Code and Systems - An excellent essay on the importance of having a mental model and what you can do to make life easier for future developers who have to modify your code.
• Introducing Merlin — A cross-platform post-exploitation HTTP/2 Command & Control Tool - More fun for pen testers.
• Bootstrap Shuffle - Commercial tool to quickly put together Bootstrap customizations for a new site.
• Launching LiteCLI - A new cross-platform command-line SQLite client.

• The Paradox of Design Systems - Building a system that can evolve with designers using it.
• Karabiner God Mode - Using Karabiner + Keyboard Maestro + Alfred to automate all the things.
• The official release of AdGuard DNS — a new unique approach to privacy-oriented DNS - A DNS server that filters out some threats to privacy.
• How to Get Better at Pair Programming - A checklist of things to think about.
• A Pirate's take on Strategy vs. Tactics -No, not a software pirate. Captain Kidd.
• From relational DB to single DynamoDB table: a step-by-step exploration - I really need to wrap my head more around DynamoDB. Maybe this will help.

• How to Lead - An outline of some leadership (as differentiated from management) principles with general application.
• KubeDB - "Run production-grade databases easily on Kubernetes"
• SchemaCrawler - Free tool for poking around a variety of databases and generating ERDs.
• Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business - Learning from a consulting career.
• The Ruby Changes - Comprehensive changelog for Ruby 2.6 with links to key discussions and justifications.
• Flexibility is the greatest perk - Forget the free snacks, letting people choose their own working conditions is table stakes these days.
• crev - An attempt at a social code review tool to help mitigate some of the issues in gargantuan dependency trees.

• FaaStRuby 0.4 adds support for Ruby 2.6.0 and… Crystal 0.27.0! - An update from the serverless site aimed specifically at Ruby developers.
• Guesstimate - "A spreadsheet for things that aren't certain." I want to look at this as an estimating tool.
• Xtext - A language engineering framework that gives you "parser, linker, typechecker, compiler as well as editing support for Eclipse, any editor that supports the Language Server Protocol and your favorite web browser."
• Monorepos: Please don’t! - The latest iteration of "you are not Google."
• The Firecracker virtual machine monitor - A dive into some of the code Amazon released.
• Jetpack - "Jetpack wraps webpack to create a smoother developer experience."
• Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript - Personally I hope that in a few years we look back at shit like React and NPM and say "what WERE we thinking?"
• AWS App Mesh — First Take -Kicking the tires on one of Amazon's new announcements.

Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind has nothing really to do with the subject of this blog, but it hit me hard enough to be worth linking. Took me decades on the earth to find this and realize I'm substantially different from many other people in a way I never realized. Now back to your regularly-scheduled links.

• Gravitee - Open-source API gateway written in Java.
• Professional Focus Planning for the New Year - A high-level framework for getting off to a good start.
• How to use AWS Secrets Manager in Ruby on Rails - Covers both the AWS and the Rails side of the setup.
• git-cop - Set standards for git commits & enforce them.
• Learn how to use JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for Authentication - A guide to basic use along with some pitfalls & FAQs.
• Headless CMS as a Microservice - An example architecture using Vue and REST.
• Announcing Bundler 2.0 - It's out, which, if you're one of the many people whose build process it broke, you already know. 2.0.1 fixes some things.
• Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder - Exploring the options for engineers who want to stick a toe in the management waters.

• Why should you use microservices and containers? - The view from IBM.
• TLA+ is hard to learn - But potentially very useful if you're working with distributed systems.
• DevOps embedding as aiding and abetting - An argument for a separate platform engineering team.
• SSH Examples, Tips & Tunnels - Lots of useful recipes here.

• AntDesign - UI design system built in React and TypeScript.
• Rather Than a Micromanager or Absentee Manager, Be a Thought Partner - Some advice on striking a balance in management behaviors.
• The many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2 - Just in case you wanted to do such a thing.
• Ruby in AWS Lambda with PostgreSQL / Nokogiri - Somehow this feels less "serverless" all the time.
• Developer Relations: (More Than) The Art of Talking Good - A response to some recent trash-talking of devrel.

• Ruby 2.6.0 Released - The official Christmas announcement.
• pgweb - Web-based PostgreSQL browser.
• Removing auto-scrolling banners - Ublock Origin filters to get rid of some common annoyances.
• Noah - "Bash on Ubuntu on Mac OS X"
• Resilience Engineering notes - Quite a few useful-looking links here.

• Airship Modules - Terraform templates for setting up Docker infrastructure on AWS.
• Ruby 2.6 - A look at some of the new features.
• Tubby - Lightweight library for constructing HTML tags from Ruby.
• Sf — Abusing Operators and Method Missing - More fun with Ruby 2.6.
• Learning by fixing — the value of triage engineer rotations - Being a distraction shield for the rest of your team.

• Librefox - A build of Firefox with enhanced privacy settings.
• You Should Build your Next App on a Boring Stack - Because playing with exciting new toys is not your job.
• OrbitDB - Peer-to-peer distributed database that syncs over IPFS.
• Mf — Abusing Ruby’s Operator Precedence - Fun with Ruby 2.6.
• ULID - A more sortable alternative to UUIDs.

• A Quick Comment On Bryan Cantrill’s Blog On Licensing and
• A EULA in FOSS clothing? - More back and forth on the recent anti-cloud-giant trend in Open Source (or is it?) licensing.
• Browsers - A roundup of recent writing on browser engine diversity.
• 5 Signs That Reveal Your Software Development Process Is Agile Only on Paper and Solutions for Them - "Agile skin" is all too common.
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