• You might not need Kubernetes - There are in fact other orchestration solutions in town.
• What psychological safety is not - It's not about being nice, for one thing.
• Concurrency Glossary - A guide to the thicket of terms in this area.
• nnn - "The fastest terminal file manager ever written."

• Why you’re having trouble hiring - Because more and more of us aren't willing to pay the premium to live in SF or NYC.
• Want To Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code - The benefits of open source as a recruiting tool.
• Mergify - Rules-based service to automatically merge code on GitHub.
• I hate manager READMEs - Camille Fournier thinks they are a bad thing.

A nice round number today.

• Post-REST - Tim Bray makes the case for "a steady in­crease in re­liance on per­sis­tent con­nec­tion­s, or­ches­tra­tion, and message/event-based log­ic."
• Dev To Manager - "A collection of interviews with developers who moved to management."
• Don't work "remotely" - You should be thinking about "distributed" rather than "remote."
• Service Workies - Game to teach you the basics of service workers & PWAs.

• Microservices for the Desktop - Applying microservices patterns as a way of doing OOP right.
• 10 SQL tricks that you didn’t think were possible - There are times I wish that the tooling I mostly use didn't try to abstract away all of advanced SQL.
• Introspected REST: An alternative to REST and GraphQL - A manifesto for a new (and better?) way of writing HTTP APIs.
• HomelabOS - "Your very own offline-first open-source data-center!" to help break dependence on cloud services for everything.
• Enthusiasts vs. Pragmatists: two types of programmers and how they fail - Things to consider when thinking about a career in this crazy field.
• Untangle your GitHub Notifications with Octobox - Worth a look if you've ended up pitching in on many projects.
• VS Code Live Share plugin - How to get started using it.
• q - Treat tabular text files as SQL data with this query engine.
• A Quick Dive Into GraphQL, Part 1: Consuming a GraphQL API - Sometimes I feel like GraphQL is taking over the world.

Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers.

• Building Your Color Palette - Hey, things look better with more than five bright colors!
• Heatmaps Make Ops Better - Honeycomb continues to do great work in making the outliers and clusters in huge instrumentation datasets easier to find.
• Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer - A very good list of experiential learning.
• AWSweeper - Flexible tool for getting rid of junk in your AWS account.
• Regular Expressions 101 - Test tool that understands a variety of syntaxes.
• Model View Controller isn't - I always enjoy a good piece of pattern wonkery.
• As far as I'm concerned, email signing/encryption is dead - Yeah, pretty much.
• Measuring and Improving your CI/CD Pipelines - If you think shipping fast is a competitive advantage, why aren't you doing anything about it?
• Big List of Naughty Strings - I think I've linked this one before, but there are always new ways to break applications.
• Amazon Web Services in Plain English - Deciphering the endless list of cute and opaque names.

• What nobody tells you about documentation - A framework for thinking about software documentation.
• No Haunted Forests - Some guidelines on when a big rewrite really is justified.
• Enquirer - "Stylish, intuitive and user-friendly prompts" for your Node.js projects.
• Some notes on running new software in production - Thinking about risks.
• The Absolute Easiest Way to Debug Node.js — with VS Code - A detailed setup guide.
• How Passion for Programming Can Make us Worse at our Jobs - Because "passion" focuses you very narrowly sometimes.
• WebTTY - Shared terminal sessions over WebRTC.
• Datomic: Event Sourcing without the hassle - Definitely worth investigating if you're considering the event sourcing route.
• Deploying Mastodon on Digital Ocean - Running your own instance as part of the fediverse.
• How to tackle technical debt - It's also about how you communicate and prioritize.

• Port Authority - "Port Authority is an API service that delivers component based vulnerability assessments for Docker images at time of build and in run-time environments."
• Cloud Computing without Containers - Cloudflare has a different take on this than most of the competition.
• TFlat - Adding ERB templates to your Terraform with a preprocessor.
• MacBook: Dev Setup - Initial steps for a Java/JavaScript developer.
• DevOps Ouroboros - All too true.
• Agile won the war but lost the peace - Is your company "agile"? Why don't you feel good about it?
• The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck - A tool for faster negotiations.
• Open MCT - I'll never need an open framework for mission control from NASA, but it's still too cool to skip linking to.
• Slate - Customizable rich-text editing JS framework.
• “Hustle Porn” Is Making Us Sad and Suicidal - "Be OK with being happier instead of being a hustler."

• Why Great Managers Matter - Because it's darned hard to hang on to great individual contributors without them, among other things.
• Simple guide to designing pleasant web sites - Just say "no."
• Against software development - A bit of a manifesto.
• Argo - "Open source Kubernetes native workflows, events, CI and CD"
• tztail - Log tailing with automatic timezone conversion.
• htop: Here’s how to customize it - Out of the box it's a better top, but it is way more than that.
• Opunit - Unit testing tool for VMs, containers, and remote servers.
• XSStrike - Pen testing software to look for XSS vulnerabilities.
• Exploring Ruby 2.6: Enumerator, Hash, and Enumerable Changes and What’s new in Ruby 2.6? - Much goodness is on the way.
• MongoDB Mobile - Yes, there's an embeddable version of MongoDB.

• Coverband 3 - Some pretty impressive performance improvements in this run-time Ruby code coverage tool.
• Announcing Eventide 1.0: Evented, Autonomous Microservices for Everyone! - Just what it says, and a pretty impressive shared project.
• Awesome Ruby Security - Curated list of resources.
• Introducing the Apollo GraphQL Platform - GraphQL is getting to be pretty big business.
• Awesome CSS Frameworks - There are lots of them these days.
• Switching to a remote manager - Selectively using written communication to make chat time more productive.
• fizsh - A "friendly interactive frontend" for zshell.
• How we pair using AWS, tmux, vim and emacs - A system for pair programming directly on remote EC2 instances.

• Using random number generators to solve problems - A fun little exercise in Ruby code optimization.
• Generating Software Tests - Ebook in progress on test fuzzing techniques.
• Future-Proofing Backend Services with GraphQL, PostgreSQL and Docker (Part 1) - An experience in moving from NoSQL and REST to SQL and GraphQL.
• Cross-language Performance Profile Exploration with speedscope - A new tool to help analyze performance data from a variety of profilers.
• Spectre.css - A lightweight responsive CSS framework.
• No more hassle with Rails secret management/a></strong> - Work is ongoing to standardize secure credentials handling.</li>
• Everything You Need To Know About Networking On AWS - Well, maybe not everything, but a basic introduction.
• 7 Code Review Best Practices and Dynamics You Can Identify and Act On: Part 1 - Some patterns in code reviews that indicate process issues.
</ul>

• Elvish - A "friendly interactive shell and an expressive programming language."
• The Copyleft Bust Up - A long and fascinating analysis of the current state of open source/free software licensing. The corporations are winning, I think.
• Here's Why [Insert Thing Here] Is Not a Password Killer - Wisdom from Troy Hunt.
• Ask “How’s It Going?” - The power of open-ended questions.
• What is the common stumbling block when adopting Agile methodologies? - Hint: does everyone in your organization understand what "continuous" means?
• Scaling the Monolith - Things you can do before you consider leaping to microservices.
• fx - Command-line JSON tool.
• Ruby 2.x Universal RCE Deserialization Gadget Chain - Despite the opaque name this appears to be likely to be a big deal for Ruby security.

categories:

• Double Shot

• Scaling Machine Learning at Uber with Michelangelo - Learning about Machine Learning.
• List of Recommender Systems - A handy reference that might keep you from reinventing a wheel.
• CI/CD for Lambda Functions with Jenkins - A deployment process for serverless work.
• Ruby 2.6.0-preview3 Released - Complete with JIT. These are exciting times for Ruby.
• Stripe’s Will Larson on Designing a Performance Management System from Scratch - If your startup grows, you will end up needing this stuff.
• How to implement a multi-CDN strategy: everything you need to know - If you're serving video at scale, you probably need something like this.
• The Road to GraphQL [Book] - Free ebook on using GraphQL, Node, React, and Apollo together.
• Canner - "Agile Content Management System(CMS) for Firebase/FireStore, GraphQL and Restful APIs. Simple. Agile. Flexible. Efficient."

I'm starting to look at the job market again, with an eye towards senior technical leadership or engineering management. If you'd like to see what I've been up to or chat about possibilities, I'm on LinkedIn or you can email me at MikeG1(at)larkfarm.com. I'm only looking at remote-first positions, though in a leadership job I'd expect to do a reasonable amount of travel.

• Procsd - Glue between Heroku-like procfile and systemd.
• dank-selfhosted - Ansible playbook for self-hosting email (and a few other things) on OpenBSD.
• Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department - I think I'm happy I don't work somewhere with a Data Science Department.
• An introduction to medieval cities and cloud security - An analogy that works pretty well.
• Every service is an island - A pattern for dealing with the inevitable microservice failures.
• MemSQL: Now Free to Use - Adding a fairly substantil free tier to this scalable SQL database.
• Gitbase: Exploring Git repos with SQL - Large-scale analysis of git repos, and the projects that make it possible.
• Phoenix 1.4.0 released - Another big bump for the standard Elixir web framework.

• Immutable Infrastructure Using Packer, Ansible, and Terraform - A key part of making servers cattle rather than pets.
• The Architecture No One Needs and Architecture no one needs is server side templating- Point and counterpoint on SPAs.
• October 21 post-incident analysis - Even though You're Not GitHub, this is still fascinating reading.
• Ruby on Rails Security - Some of the basics.
• Vue Dark Mode - Dark is the new black these days.
• Visualizing SQL Plan Execution Time With FlameGraphs - An interesting approach.

• Micro.blog - Control your own content and federate with other microbloggers.
• To Err is Human - A taxonomy of ways to mess up.
• Testing Privacy-Preserving Telemetry with Prio - Mozilla is looking at ways to make sure telemetry is anonymized.
• Create your own dysfunctional single-page app in five easy steps - One does not simply build a SPA.
• A Safer RuboCop - Writing code that fixes code is hard, just in case you didn't know that already.
• How to Build a Great Engineering Team - Thoughts fromp the VPE of Paxos. Lots of good stuff here, especially the guidance on hiring.

• The Platform - "Web API's turned into React Hooks and Suspense-friendly React components."
• The Surprising Power of The Long Game - Slow and steady does in fact often win the race.
• VueJS Cheat Sheet Part 1 - A quick summary of some basic concepts.
• System 76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware - The new Thelio system isn't perfect, but it looks like a darned good step in the right direction. If I was in the market for a new computer this might well be the one I would buy.
• Coding as an Engineering Manager - Don't block your team.
• Moving to three-person engineering teams - An interesting way to shake things up.

• Internet-era ways of working - Some rules of thumb for the digital era.
• How to Visualize Your Rails ERD Diagram Automatically - By using the dbdiagram.io service.
• Some Envoy basics - Digging into a new network proxy server.
• A Guide to Mindful Communication in Code Reviews - A very nice set of guidelines from Kickstarter.
• Three Sales Mistakes Software Engineers Make - If you're writing software you expect people to buy, and you don't already know things like BANT, well, you should read this.
• How Drift Gets Engineers up to Speed by Day 3 - Imagine how much extra work you could get "for free" if this was true in your organization.

• Launching Your Own Ruby Gem - Part 1: Build It - A step-by-step tutorial featuring TDD.
• Why React’s new Hooks API is a game changer - Anything that makes React easier to use is fine with me.
• Dive - A tool for exploring and optimizing Docker images.
• A Tour of The Top 10 Algorithms for Machine Learning Newbies - How to get started thinking about your ML strategy.
• CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It - Well, in a word, yes.
• PostgreSQL Anonymizer - Declarative anonymization framework. A must for these days of GDPR.

• Announcing Bundler 1.17.0 - With CLI gem removal.
• Using dark mode in CSS with MacOS Mojave - Endarken all the things, at least for Safari users.
• 4 Anonymous Web Browsers That Are Completely Private - Some good choices, though I'm skeptical about the "completely" part.

• Meet Yabeda: Modular framework for instrumenting Ruby applications - A toolbox for getting your Ruby applications to cough up metrics.
• Maintainable software: why would I care and once I do, how do I know I see one? - Some high level concepts to think about if you're building software that will be around for a while.
• Don’t Make Squirrel Burgers - A classic. Unfortunately, some of my career has involved working at International House of Squirrel Burgers.