• TileDB 2.0 and the Future of Data Science - "TileDB is an open-source and cloud-native storage engine for chunked, compressed, multi-dimensional arrays."
• Self-Contained Systems - Breaking up a monolith without going all the way to microservices.
• Super Bootable 64 - If you happen to have the right ROM, you can build a bootable Linux ISO of Super Mario 64.
• The Composable Architecture - "The Composable Architecture is a library for building applications in a consistent and understandable way, with composition, testing, and ergonomics in mind. It can be used in SwiftUI, UIKit, and more, and on any Apple platform (iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS)."
• Rodauth - "Rodauth is Ruby's most advanced authentication framework."
• dumbass - "Tools should be simple, because you're not smart enough to debug it." A simpler alternative to things like React.
• Keybase joins Zoom - A successful exit, but one that is worrying the Keybase community. I'm keeping a wary eye on things myself.
• EdenSCM - Open-source file system from Facebook, used as part of their giant monorepo.

• The Framing of the Developer - "Thinking in an 'Impact' frame leads to more successful company and happier developers."
• Red Teaming/Adversary Simulation Toolkit - "A collection of open source and commercial tools that aid in red team operations."
• How to debug webpack on Rails - I need to dig into this stuff, like it or not.
• Doropomo - If Pomodoro is too stressful for you these days, try Doropomo.
• Rails 6.0.3 has been released! - With Ruby 2.7 deprecation fixes, hooray!
• Codespaces - GitHub is rolling out embedded Visual Studio code. You can request early access.
• Rails Event Store 1.0 — The Past, Present and Future - A useful roadmap post.
• Beekeeper Studio - Cross-platform "Open Source SQL Editor and Database Manager."
• One Secret to Quality Software - "The golden key to excellence is: a strong mental model of how the system works in context."
• The Cost of Javascript Frameworks - Some serious statistical analysis of the effects of adopting things like React or Angular.

• brew-cask-upgrade - If you're a heavy Homebrew user, you might appreciate this as much as I did.
• Getting Familiar with Unfamiliar Codebase - A roadmap of ideas.
• Fullstaq Ruby epic 3: CI/CD (= faster updates), Ruby updates, Debian 10 support - This server-optimized Ruby version is moving along quickly.
• endpoints.dev - Single-use scratchpad for disposable endpoints.
• Derailed Benchmarks - Gem containing a bunch of support for benchmarking Rails applications.
• A Chat with Thibaut Barrère - With a little bit of history of Kiba ETL.
• Deleting data distributed throughout your microservices architecture - Another thing you'll wish you thought about in advance.
• 40+ Ruby on Rails Application Monitoring Tools [2020] - There are a boatload of 'em these days.
• Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake - A look at common patterns of dysfunction in date-driven development.
• Design sprints complete guide - Or at least a complete-enough introduction to be useful.

• The Serverless Software Development Lifecycle - "A quick look at building, testing, and deploying AWS Lambda based apps and how to set yourself up for success."
• Tips for Becoming a Better Software Developer - High-level advice that covers a lot of ground.
• Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs - And is thus now very easy to migrate your AWS S3 code to.
• Oracle vs PostgreSQL: First Glance - A set of things discovered in the process of leaving Oracle.
• Ruby Next: Make all Rubies quack alike - A run-time transpiler for Ruby, so you can use new features in old versions.
• Caddy 2 - New major release of this "fast, multi-platform web server with automatic HTTPS."
• RailsConf 2020 CE - A batch of videos in lieu of a face-to-face conference.
• Why does writing matter in remote work? - For one thing, writing well will let you avoid endless video calls.
• Semgrep - "semgrep is a tool for easily detecting and preventing bugs and anti-patterns in your codebase. It combines the convenience of grep with the correctness of syntactical and semantic search."
• Lightproxy - An open-source web debugging proxy from Alibaba.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it - Sounds like the latest Ubuntu release might be one not to hurry to.
• lit - "world's smallest responsive css framework* (395 bytes gzipped and minified)"
• Docker swarm - setup and usage - Docker does have a native orchestration technology, though I'm not sure anyone uses it.
• gitignore.io - A generator for gitignore files with many options.
• PigCI - Gem to monitor Rails performance as part of your test suite.
• Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks - I hope I never need to know this stuff.
• Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost - Your team can't do everything at once.
• systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective - I'm not taking a side in the war over systemd, but this is a detailed look at how we got to where we are today on Linux system management.
• A May of WTFs: Let's hear about all the potholes, roadblocks, and roundabouts! - The Rails team is promising to focus some attention on the parts of the framework that annoy you.
• Happiness is… a freshly organized codebase - How the Slack iOS team tackled a big reorganization of source code directories.

• Agile’s Early Evangelists Wouldn’t Mind Watching It Die - Clickbaity title hides some interesting thoughts from Mary Poppendieck.
• Flipper Cloud: Environments - This cloud-based feature flagging solution is coming soon, looks like.
• Cryptography Dispatches: OpenSSH 8.2 Just Works with U2F/FIDO2 Security Keys - It's now trivially easy to generate a new key that requires a touch of your security key to use.
• The argument against clearing the database between tests - I don't buy it, but it's good to think through your assumptions.
• Tmux for mere mortals - Remapping most of the key chords for easier use.
• What I wish I knew about React - A mixed collection of small tips.
• IPFS 0.5.0 is here! Our largest upgrade to IPFS yet - I've messed around a bit, and I'm not quite ready to start serving via IPFS yet, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on things.
• SSH Tips & Tricks - Things to know, especially if you're suddenly using more SSH.
• Domesticating Kubernetes - "Kubernetes as home server on bare metal in 150 minutes." I might have to try this.
• Questions to the Company in a Programming Job Interview - Advice for development job=seekers.
• Introducing Visual Studio Codespaces: cloud-hosted development for wherever you’re working - Rent your development environment from Microsoft.

• The 27 Unwritten Rules of Conference Calls - The no-nonsense approach.
• Shell productivity tips and tricks - Basics to know if you're a keyboard-centric user.
• Kanmail - "Kanmail is an email client that works like a kanban board."
• How to break everything by fuzz testing - Including the bug tracker where you report the bugs.
• Ruby on Rails Forum - The Rails mailing list has migrated to Discourse.
• When does React re-render components? - Knowing this will help to optimize your code.
• Implement bandwidth limiting - A big gotcha to watch out for if you're playing with IPFS.
• Redis 6.0.0 GA is out! - A huge update with lots of new features.
• Announcing the SourceHut project hub - Sourcehut is building up a nice development hosting service somewhat under the radar.
• How to SSH into a Self-driving Vehicle - I'm impressed that this can be done (and glad I'm not the one who has to do it).
• Awk in 20 Minutes - Learning enough of a classic command-line tool to be useful.

• Pipes - A reimplementation of Yahoo Pipes, which I spent way too much time with back in the day.
• git curate - A script to help clean up your local repo by giving you information on every branch in turn.
• springer_free_books - "Python script to download all Springer books released for free during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine"
• a-Shell - A terminal shell for iOS.
• keys.pub - A simpler and open source alternative to Keybase.
• Build a Twitter clone in 10 minutes with Rails, CableReady, and StimulusReflex - The Rails + WebSockets combo is definitely getting interesting.
• Golang, Gin & MongoDB – Building microservices easily - A tutorial from zero to running Docker container.
• Manager's Playbook - A collection of "heuristics for effective management."
• LayerCI - The promise of this paid service is "Build a new staging server for every commit in seconds."
• Me on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps - "Me" in this case is Bruce Schneier, and IMO he's spot on in dismissing these apps as being worthless.
• Rails 6.0.3.rc1 has been released! - Another round of incremental changes is on the way.

• Career advice for people with bad luck - Things to think about if you're not one of the top 1%.
• Preventing Software Rot - If you don't keep up to date, you'll be sorry.
• Beginners guide to gateways and proxies - Some of the basics, with examples from haproxy.
• Monorepoize - "Bash scripts for creating a monorepo out of smaller repos."
• GitQlient - A multi-platform git client.
• Porting a React Frontend to TypeScript - Techniques & justification.
• IPC via SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 using Morse code - Eek.
• Introducing Insomnia Designer - "Insomnia Designer a new open-source desktop application that provides a modern workflow for teams to design and collaborate on APIs."
• Distributed transactions are Not Micro-services - An eminently reasonable point that too many developers miss.
• Pantry - "Pantry is a free service that provides perishable data storage for small projects. Data is securely stored for as long as you and your users need it and is deleted after a period of inactivity. Simply use the restful API to post JSON objects and we'll take care of the rest. "
• Regular Expressions for Regular Folk - A visual tutorial for Regex beginners.
• Storage Systems for Cheap but Capable Bastards - Some of the tradeoffs in picking file storage services.

I'm happy to say that I'm off the job market again. I'm starting today as a Principal Engineer at Epion Health. I'm looking forward to immersing myself in a new set of challenges, and gratified to be remaining in healthcare. My deepest thanks to all the Fresh Cup readers who reached out with job leads and support.

• Upgrading PostgreSQL from version 11 to 12 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) - A helpful recipe for getting to the latest & greatest.
• Failed #SquadGoals - "The Spotify squad model failed Spotify and it will fail your company too." Written by an ex-employee.
• The defect funnel - systematically working towards high quality - A visual explanation of the benefits of shift-left testing.
• Bashtop - "Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes."
• A Critique of React Hooks - Questioning some of Facebook's design decisions.
• editly - " Slick, declarative command line video editing."
• To Microservices and Back Again - Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith - An escape from drowning in complexity.
• Suitcase - "Suitcase is a command line tool that can be "programmed" to display a SwiftUI interface that can trigger commands and scripts."
• HashiCorp Vault is Overhyped, and Mozilla SOPS with KMS and Git is Massively Underrated - A pretty deep dive into cloud secrets management.
• Git branch naming conventions - The most important thing is to actually have a convention, whether you use this one or not.
• Firefox Private Relay - Looks like Firefox is gearing up to offer a disposable-email service.
• Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better? - Nielsen Norman Group looks at the competing arguments. I've recently switched back to light mode myself; it's just easier for my old eyes to read.

• stup - "A CLI tool to easily save, access and organize daily notes."
• Build a Team that Ships - A minimal approach.
• Rails Syntax Highlighting for Visual Studio Code - Extend the keywords that VSCode recognizes.
• pattern.css - "CSS only library to fill your empty background with beautiful patterns."
• The Grumpy Developer's Guide to Meetings - Very much an opinionated point of view.
• How to customize webpack in Rails apps - Easing into configuration.
• RSpec Given/When/Then with symbols - Noodling around with syntax in feature specs.
• From Zero to Zero Trust - An emerging approach in cybersecurity.

• Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT): a wolf in sheep’s clothes. - In-depth analysis of privacy concerns (though note that the API is evolving to address some of this).
• Introduction to Stimulus Reflex - Stimulus Reflex is the Rails analog to Phoenix LiveView. I've been enjoying kicking the tires a bit.
• Using Bootstrap with Webpacker in Rails 6 - A recipe for integration.
• Democratize testing across your software development team - In the context of Mabl, a SAAS automated testing platform.
• Rules of thumb for a 1x developer - It's possible to learn enough to do good work without trying to be a superstar.
• Rails connections, pools and handlers - A quick primer.
• everysize - "Check your responsive webpage looks great in every size"
• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox - Because you can never be too rich or have too many APIs.

• If a Build Takes 4 hours, Run It Every 4 Hours - Advice on dealing with constraints in your process.
• brök - Check over a text document to find broken links.
• Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches - A high-level look from Martin Fowler.
• qrcp - "Transfer files over Wi-Fi from your computer to a mobile device by scanning a QR code without leaving the terminal."
• Guitar - Open-source cross-platform Git GUI.
• From Static to Real-time: Introducing Incremental Builds in Gatsby Cloud - "Incremental Builds feature will rebuild only what’s necessary—giving you up to 1000x faster builds."
• DB-SQL - Rails-based web database client.
• How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? - "TLDR; If your MacBook Pro runs hot or shows a high % CPU for the kernel task, try charging on the right and not on the left."

• COVID-19’s impact on Tor - Now would be a good time to donate, assuming you haven't been laid off yourself.
• errorShip - "errorShip is a python library that sends exceptions/errors generated by your application to your datadog account."
• The Remote Work Report by GitLab: The Future of Work is Remote - Results of a survey taken earlier this year.
• The Elephant in the Architecture - "Why business value should be treated as an architectural attribute"
• Engineering code quality in the Firefox browser: A look at our tools and challenges - Software at scale is hard.
• 98.css - "A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs." Warning: visiting may be traumatic.
• The Importance of Modern Web Performance Testing: Part 1 - Performance is a feature.
• Redis connection pool in Rails - "Rails is multi-threaded, but can your redis connection handle it?"

• Introducing Earthly: build automation for the container era - Build automation using containerization to help you get to easily reproducible builds.
• The Communicative Value of Using Git Well - Using small commits to tell a story is an often-overlooked skill.
• Deploy your website on IPFS: Why and How - How to dip a toe into the decentralized waters.
• Phelia - Use React to build Slack apps.
• Bridgetown - "A Webpack-aware, Ruby-powered static site generator for the modern Jamstack era."
• Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases - It's not just data piled on a big truck.
• How to add SSL to your localhost development environment using Ruby on Rails with Puma - Dealing with recent Chrome changes when sharing cookies between multiple local sites.
• What You Need to Know About Deep Reinforcement Learning - I try to keep half an eye on AI/ML, though I'm no expert.

• Leakage paths for the Apple / Google bluetooth tracing system - Some early analysis of the proposed COVID-19 tracking system. Personally, I'm skeptical that this is a problem for technology instead of human-based contact tracing.
• Ride Down Into JavaScript Dependency Hell - Understanding and visualizing the mess we're in.
• Active Storage File Upload Behind The Scenes - Digging into the code.
• Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux - A reasonably balanced look.
• Working Remotely is a Skill - And therefore you won't be instantly good at it.
• Falcon - "Falcon is a free, open-source SQL editor with inline data visualization."
• Userscripts Are Fun And Are Still Very Much Relevant - I still occasionally write userscripts, though they have a distinct "obsolete tech" feel these days.
• VPC Studio - Tool to help you design fairly complex AWS networking setups, including code generation.
• Mining for malicious Ruby gems - And finding hundreds of them, which thankfully were promptly removed.

• FreeRDP - A free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol.
• Attack matrix for Kubernetes - An example of applying the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
• emux - "3mux is a terminal multiplexer with out-of-the-box support for search, mouse-controlled scrollback, and i3-like keybindings. Imagine tmux with a smaller learning curve and more sane defaults."
• BlockBlock - Objective See's utility for monitoring persistent software installs on MacOS, now as open source.
• magicpak - "magicpak enables you to build minimal docker images without any bothersome preparation such as static linking."
• Test-Driven Development is Fundamentally Wrong - A rant that might provoke some rethinking.
• Mailvelope - Client-side PGP email encryption as a browser add-on.
• SELECT wat FROM sql - SQL parsing has all sorts of fun edge cases.
• Introducing Crank - "Write JSX-driven components with functions, promises and generators." (But without React)

• Untangling Microservices, or Balancing Complexity in Distributed Systems - Finding reasonable system boundaries to avoid building a distributed big ball of mud.
• Amazon RDS Proxy with PostgreSQL Compatibility (Preview) - Pooling, sharing, and transparent failover as an AWS service.
• Questions to ask at the end of a technical interview - Another set of things you may want to ask your interviewer.
• Ralix - "Microframework for building and organizing Rails front-ends via Webpacker." (The Reddit discussion of this, Stimulus, and Stimulus Reflex is also worth reading if this sort of architecture interests you).
• Announcing: Alloydocs - An online reference for the Alloy system analysis tool.
• What does a Director of Engineering do? - One leader's view.
• sidediff - "A simple CLI split diff viewer."
• Incident Analysis and Chaos Engineering: Complementary Practices - Techniques for learning from failure.
• Parachute - List of recently laid-off tech employees, together with some hiring tools.

• Systems that defy detailed understanding - "In these systems, detailed understanding of behaviors was either impossible, impracticable, or just a waste of time compared to other strategies for dealing with the system."
• Questions To Ask During An Interview As a Developer - Remember, interviewing is a two-way street.
• All the Ways You Can Surf the Decentralized Web Today - Getting into IPFS + ENS.
• Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform. (Or be ready to ditch your smartphone.) - I'm ready to ditch my smartphone anyhow.
• The Developer Culture Test: What Defines Places Where Developers Thrive? - "I took a step back and re-imagined what a test like a Joel-test would be in the 2020s: predictors of a workplace that has a great developer culture."
• radicle - Implementing a peer-to-peer replication layer on top of git to remove the need to use a hosting service.
• Heya - "Heya is a campaign mailer for Rails. Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences. It can also perform other actions like sending a text message."
• themer - "themer takes a set of colors and generates themes for your development environment (editors, terminals, wallpapers, and more)."
• Is BGP safe yet? - No, but it's getting safer.

• The software industry's greatest sin: hiring - Technical excellence isn't everything. Smart companies, I think, already know this.
• pixelfed.club - An aggregator for the pixelfed fediverse.
• Support of Ruby 2.4 has ended - That's all support, including security fixes. Good luck if you haven't migrated!
• Implementing The IndieWeb Into My Website - WebMentions, h-cards, and IndieAuth are still alive.
• Inkscape 1.0rc1 - Another open source project (this one is a vector graphics editor, just in case you don't know it) nears a major version milestone.
• CS Visualized: Useful Git Commands -Animated visualizations of some common git operations.
• Wekan and Kanboard - A pair of open-source kanban boards.
• Ruby Concurrency Final Report - The work isn't final (it's still tracking for Ruby 3), but the work under the Ruby Association grant is final so here's what's done so far.
• ZoomerBackgrounds - Community-uploaded collectin of backgrounds for your Zoom calls.
• Meet faasd - portable Serverless without the complexity of Kubernetes - The latest project from the OpenFaaS folks.