I'm going to hoist this one to the top of the list: It Takes a Village to Separate A Family - A small, and probably struggling, software company refuses to sell to a border security company. If you have any use for private Maven repositories, please sign up for a paid account there.

And if you think I shouldn't be injecting politics into Double Shot, well, you can just unsubscribe now.

• Stop “feeding” your users - We can do better than machine-learning plus feeds as a design patterh.
• Making Tests Go Faster - Sometimes you just have to do the grunt wortk.
• Blot - Blogging platform that just takes what you drop in a folder and makes it nice.

What makes "I don't want to hear from recruiters at your company" so hard for Amazon recruiters to understand?

• Paginating Ruby on Rails applications with Pagy - A simpler and lower-memory alternative.
• Polly.js - Webmock for Javascript, pretty much.
• In MySQL, never use “utf8”. Use “utf8mb4”. -Yep, stupid but true.
• Meet the GitLab Web IDE - GitLab sure isn't running out of ideas.

• Cryptojacking invades cloud. How modern containerization trend is exploited by attackers - Don't trust random Docker images in the cloud.
• Quick tips for practical Rubocop workflow - Configuration and automation are your friends.
• Introducing an Easier Way To Design Applications in Docker Desktop - At least if you're a Windows user.
• OWASP Mobile Security Testing Guide - I've seen a lot of bad corporate security work, but this is a good starting point as long as you actually think.

• How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain - Another day, another overhyped failure of technology.
• Vue Native - Vue.js for mobile applications.
• usql - A universal database CLI that works with many different SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Strawberry - CSS micro-framework designed around flexboxes.
• ShellMock - "WebMock for shell commands". Dangerous but useful.
• The Agile way: grow instead of build - Metaphors are important.

• Removing the @ Hack in Rails Controllers - Some refactoring in the service of more maintainable code.
• tor-controller - Create Onion services via Kubernetes.
• Kallithea - Free software SCM that supports both Mercurial and Git.
• WhaleTail - Reverse engineering Dockerfiles from Docker images.
• Living APIs, and the Case for GraphQL - Some exploration of why GraphQL is better than REST for the next generation of APIs.
• Architect - An organized framework for working with AWS serverless applications. Here's a usage example.
• Open-sourcing Sonar, a new extensible debugging tool - Some help for debugging mobile applications, courtesy of Facebook.
• Introducing the GraphQL Guide - A new eBook, currently in beta. with guidance based on real-world usage at Khan Academy.

• LOL Github - jwz discusses the perils of storing your data in the clown.
• Speeding up zsh and Oh-My-Zsh - A stab at making this combo faster.
• <a href=https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/performance-reviews-are-a-waste-of-time-87c88d7553b4">Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time</a> - Yeah, pretty much.
• The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018 - Survey results from JetBrains.
• Building A Developer Community - Advice for the budding community manager.
• Prioritizing “Non-Feature” Work and Continuous Improvement - There's a bunch of good stuff in here if you're wrestling with a pile of technical debt.
• An introduction to distributed systems - Outline for a high-level overview class.
• Simple shortcuts to get more out of Bundler - Some useful aliases here, including one to search for method definitions across all gems in the project.

• GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source - Striking while the iron is hot.
• Amazon EKS – Now Generally Available - Kubernetes continues to take over the world.
• So Pigs Do Fly: Microsoft Acquires GitHub - Analysis from RedMonk.
• Remote only - Beyond "remote friendly" and "remote first".
• Sketch.systems - Alpha release of an online prototyping tool with a simple Markdownish syntax.

• Principles for Agile Estimation - Some thoughts about sensible estimates in the face of uncertainty.
• Hello, GitHub - A few words from GitHub's new CEO.
• Advanced multi-stage build patterns - A look at some of the latest concepts in quicker-building Dockerfiles.
• GLWT Public License - "Good Luck With That".
• List of Free Learning Resources - There are about a bazillion and a half free programming ebooks listed here.
• Sho - "Experimental post-framework view library" based on Tilt and designed to be mixed and matched with things like ROM and Sinatra.
• How I became fully certified on AWS - Advice for those playing the cloud certification game (which I am doing myself at the moment).
• An analysis of memory bloat in Active Record 5.2 - There is a ton of potential work to do to speed up rails (and quite a few approaches you can already try if you feel brave).

• Setup ELK for NGINX logs with Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana - A tutorial that ends up with a standalone ELK server.
• The human scalability of “DevOps” - As your company gets bigger, it probably doesn't work well to make every engineer do everything.
• The Three Speeds of Collaboration: Tool Selection and Culture Fit - A consideration of tools and processes excerpted from a book on communicating with remote teams.
• Hidden jewels of Ruby stdlib - There are a bunch of things lurking in Ruby that you may know nothing about.
• Microsoft Buys GitHub: The Linux Foundation’s Reaction - Cats and dogs loving together.
• ChromeREPL - Sublime Text plugin to use Chrome as a JavaScript execution environment.

• Why is Front-End Development So Unstable? - An argument that it's because there's no good metric to choose libraries.
• Is Your Rails Team Slowing Down? Here's Why, And What You Can Do About It. - Some practices to help you along to better development, if you're not already using them.
• How to use Visual Studio Code - Some basic tutorials to get you going.
• Storing Encrypted Credentials In Git - How to do it using git-crypt.

• Odyssey - "Advanced multi-threaded PostgreSQL connection pooler and request router."
• Setting up a BDD Stack on a Rails 5 Application - Getting started, step-by-step.
• Rethink yield_self's name - Looks like Ruby's coming yiueld_self() is being renamed to then().
• The problems with Swagger - A critical evaluation of this popular API documentation tool.

• Remediating the May 2018 Git Security Vulnerability - Yeah, update git. Fortunately if you hate submodules as much as most developers do you're safe.
• Navigating to safe navigation - Timings that say &. is substantially faster than try().
• How Scrum disempowers developers (and destroyed Agile) - I am unconvinced but still enjoy a good rant.
• Ruby 2.6.0-preview2 Released - With some work towards the coming JIT compiler.

• Git Merge vs Git Rebase - What they mean and how to choose.
• Design for Humans - "14 principles of good design." A somewhat random exploration that still might provoke a few thoughts.
• UTC is enough for everyone...right? - Dealing with time sucks. Here are some of the details.
• CSS Is So Overpowered It Can Deanonymize Facebook Users - Let's face it, we've lost the privacy wars.
• Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker - There was a time when I thought strong typing was essential. Now, not so much.

• Yoshua Bengio’s Deep Thoughts on Deep Thinking - Hard problems are hard.
• Let's Encrypt tips - A medley of information on this certificate provider.
• Free Up Your Mind and Space: Delegate Your Functions - A management technique that I personally have huge problems executing.
• Reverse engineering AWS Lambda - Poking around under the hood.
• Securing macOS - A well-structured and only mildly paranoid approach.

• Mainframe on the Macbook - It's time to learn ... COBOL?
• Ten sentences with all the Scrum Master advice you’ll ever need - It's simpler & harder than some people make it out to be.
• Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL - Because of issues that they trace back to an inefficient on-disk storage format and replication strategy.

• Fun with SQL: Recursive CTEs in Postgres - Some modern SQL that you really ought to know about.
• Niceql - SQL prettyprinter for Ruby that you can load directly into irb.
• Great PMs don’t spend their time on solutions - Slowing down the rush to code.

• What Does Write Skew Look Like? - Digging into some of the hilarity that ensues when you have multiple processes writing to most commercial databases.
• Full Cycle Developers at Netflix — Operate What You Build - Balancing devops, central tooling support, and team process ownership is tricky.
• Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS - I was blogging when RSS started. Hopefully I won't still be blogging when it ends.

• Open-sourcing Katran, a scalable network load balancer - You're not Facebook. But if you were, this would be pretty cool stuff.
• MeRedis - Memory optimizer for large Redis databases. You can read a deeper dive here.

Want to work with me? We have opportunities including Engineering Manager, Director, Application Security Engineer, Architect, and more. Take a gander at the Cofense Careers page and feel free to reach out to me via Twitter, LinkedIn, or Email if you'd like to chat.

• Infection Monkey - Tool to test how readily malware can propagate inside your data center after it breaches the perimeter.
• How to Hold the Most Effective Meetings - Remember, the best meeting for your own productivity is no meeting. But if that's impractical, there are some good tips here.
• Follow the CAPEX: Separating the Clowns from the Clouds - Regardless of claims from the also-rans, there really are only three companies in the cloud business.

• How to Make Sure Agile Teams Can Work Together - There's a lot here that speaks to me.
• Nethammer: Inducing Rowhammer Faults through Network Requests - No, really. We can't have nice things.
• EFAIL, a weakness in openPGP and S\MIME - Most level-headed evaluation of the EFAIL vulnerability that I've seen go by.
• Paginating Ruby on Rails applications with Pagy - A new pagination gem coupled with the reasons why you might like to use it.
• Manage Log Messages Under Systemd Using Journalctl [Comprehensive Guide] - I wish I'd known this before I got buried under a mountain of crap.
• The Cult of the Root Cause - Just maybe "5 whys" isn't the end of the story.