• Why Having A Full Post RSS Feed Is A Good Idea - I've always done this, and I hope I always will.
• Layoffs.fyi Coronavirus Tracker - Keeping track of the layoffs in startups. Also has links to list of companies who are still hiring.
• CSS Utility Classes and "Separation of Concerns" -The evolution of one designer's thinking.
• Rails has deprecated using return, break and throw to exit a transaction - Fixing some surprising edge case behavior.
• WorkDNA - "We show engineering candidates your culture, team, and engineering practices and challenges."
• Building Secure & Reliable Systems - New free SRE ebook from Google.
• Deploys at Slack - A high-level overview of their process.
• markmap-lib - Online tool to turn Markdown into mind maps.
• git-bug - A bug-tracker that's completely emdedded within your git repository.

• Gollum - "A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend." Version 5.0 is just out.
• oneinfra - "oneinfra is a Kubernetes as a Service platform." The abstractions climb ever higher.
• Getting Started with WireGuard - Setting up your own infrastructure with the new linux VPN.
• Apply for a Design Fundamentals scholarship - Design Academy is offering scholarships during the pandemic, funded by giving back some of the profit from paying students.
• Announcing the Compose Specification - "Docker is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and others in the open source community to extend the Compose Specification to more flexibly support cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) in addition to the existing Compose platforms."
• Free CS Courses - "Amazon supports free computer science during COVID-19, the growing list of resources is below."
• Why I Don’t Use A Static Site Generator - Because sometimes WordPress is plenty good enough.
• The 501 Developer Manifesto - An oldie but a goodie.
• Why you (probably) don't need PostGIS - It's overkill for most projects, even ones that need geography support.

• 6 Things Markdown Got Wrong - It's not a perfect format, though plenty good enough for a lot of things.
• Vuln Cost - "An open source security scanner for VS Code" from Snyk.
• Yarn 2 — the future of package managers for JavaScript? - I don't even really understand Yarn 1 yet.
• Announcing unverified.email - A hosted service for email testing.
• Beginner's Guide to Using Terraform with AWS - Sorting through some of the essentials.
• Why I Abandoned Business Modeling - Process is comforting, but often ineffective.
• Setting up an email server in 2020 with OpenSMTPD and Dovecot - If you don't know why you would do this, then don't.
• Simula - "Simula is a VR window manager for Linux that runs on top of Godot."
• Open Source Virtual Background - "Since I do not have a green screen I decided to simply implement my own background removal, which was obviously better than cleaning my apartment or just using my laptop all the time."

• Move Fast and Roll Your Own Crypto - A deep look at Zoom's recent issues (though note things are changing rapidly in the product).
• Single Container Docker environments - As a part of AWS Elastic Beanstalk for easy launching in the cloud.
• DNS over Wikipedia - Finding things you DNS provider would rather you didn't.
• Microservices - A video look at the lighter side.
• Introducing OnMail, the first Permission-Based Email Service - An attempt to stop spam dead in its tracks.
• Mosh - Report on experience with some software I keep meaning to try.
• Zappy - "The fastest, all-in-one way to share screenshots, GIFs, and recordings with your teammates." Free from Zapier.
• Blogged Answers: Redux - Not Dead Yet! - Clearing up rumors and misinformation.
• AinD: Android (Anbox) in Docker - "AinD launches Android apps in Docker, by nesting Anbox containers inside Docker."

• Supporting Multiple SSH Keys on macOS - What to do if you need different identities for different remotes.
• The Svelte Compiler Handbook - A guide to svelte internals. I wish more projects did this.
• Security Engineering - Book that you can read for free online until it goes to press.
• Optimised Docker builds for Rails apps - A detailed walkthrough including gem & asset caching.
• How We Work - Fournova shares what they've learned from 5 years of being a fully-remote company.
• Knowledge Sharing in Dev Teams — a Problem that Needs Fixing - In my experience good teams have fixed this, but there aren't enough good teams.
• The Ten Rules for Data Modeling with DynamoDB - Getting started with NoSQL on AWS.
• Hours - A productivity technique of mutual accountability.
• Take-home vs whiteboard coding: The problem is bad interviews - As a hiring manager, I think they both stink, but I'm in the minority.

• The Science Behind Making Software Engineering Interviews Truly Predictive of Job Performance - An argument for aptitude tests and work samples.
• Certs to go: All AWS exams now available online - Covid-19 has Amazon offering online proctoring across the board.
• Adhosts - "This minimal tool builds a composite host file, containing entries mapping domain names to IP addresses, from multiple sources, such as ad-blocking, anti-tracking and other lists."
• Open-sourcing Vessel: a high-level Ruby web crawling framework - "built on top of Ferrum — a minimal-dependency pure-Ruby driver for running headless Google Chrome instances."
• Ruby 2.7.1 Released - Time for another round of security fixes (there are updates for everything from 2.4 forwards).
• The 'S' in Zoom, Stands for Security - A deep dive into some of Zoom's issues.
• CloudWright - "High-powered automation in simple Python" running in the cloud.
• When debugging, your attitude matters - Yes, indeed it does.

• Talkyard - New knowledge sharing platform trying to combine features from Slack and Stack Overflow.
• Thoughts on Recruiting - Tweet-sized thoughts on how to recruit well (or maybe how to be recruited well).
• CSS Visual Editor - Use sliders to set various CSS properties and then get the corresponding CSS.
• CRDT.tech - Lots of info about Conflict-free Replicated Data Types.
• How to blog anonymously - It's possible, but there are many pitfalls.
• Remote Work Can (And Does) Boost Employee Productivity - Some reasons besides pandemics to encourage remote work.
• 70+ Ruby on Rails Security Best Practices & Vulnerabilities - A long list of things to worry about.
• 10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL - Not everyone is a fan.

• Seven Stages of Open Software - A framework for thinking about how open a software project is.
• dte - "A small and easy to use console text editor."
• Going through changes with TypeScript - A case where TypeScript is worth the nuisance.
• Automatic backup of Trello boards to S3 using the AWS CDK - Some plumbing with AWS Lambda functions.
• The Books That Every Programmer Should Read - I've only read perhaps a third of these, but I do endorse the notion that reading is good.
• Minecraft on Raspberry Pi cluster with metrics - Deployed via Kibernetes of course.
• Pay - Rails subscription engine supporting both Stripe and Braintree.
• PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database - Or at least some people think it's pretty nifty.

If you're among the many software developers who've been laid off recently, you might find some of the links collected on my Engineering Hiring page useful, particularly in the "How to Get Hired" section. And if you're a newly-remote worker or manager, you might want to browse the "Remote Teams" section on the Manager Track page.

• Filelight is an open source disk space analyzer for Linux and Windows - Reminiscent of DaisyDisk (which I like and use) but not limited to MacOS.
• On the tyranny of autoincrementing integer primary keys - An argument for natural keys. On the whole though I think I've seen more issues with people assuming something was a good natural key and finding out later that it isn't.
• Tech Debt and the Pragmatic Middle Ground - An approach to managing the tradeoffs in typical software projects.
• Auto Rubocop - "Automatically applies rubocop safe auto correct to modified ruby files in your project, thus increases your code Karma."
• The 3 Frontend Code Quality Musketeers - ESLint, Husky And Lint-Staged - Configuring the three to work together.
• RailsConf 2020.2 Couch Edition - Even with RailsConf cancelled, you can catch some of the keynotes.
• Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience - Red Hat's big annual event is online & free this year.
• Tailscale has reached general availability - "Tailscale is a fully functional mesh VPN that can be deployed in minutes on top of your existing infrastructure.

Thanks again to those who have passed me job openings, or who have actually interviewed me. I'm still hunting for my next position as I write this, but with luck that will change soon.

• Darling - "Darling is a translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux." I wonder if it's mature enough to help as I transitiou out of the Apple ecosystem.
• Lightweight Linux VMs on NixOS - You can run anything on anything these days, I guess.
• PostgreSQL Schema Design - There are quite a few things that you may not know about.
• dry-rails - "dry-rails provides the official integration of dry-rb gems with Ruby on Rails framework."
• lazyhub - "Terminal UI Client for GitHub using gocui."
• Prisma 2.0 is Now in Beta: Type-safe Database Access with Prisma Client - "The new version of Prisma Client is a modern database access library for Node.js and TypeScript. It can be used as an alternative to traditional ORMs and SQL query builders to read and write data in your database."
• How to SSH Properly - Using certificates, bastion hosts, and 2FA.
• CodeJar - A tiny cross-browser embeddable code editor.

It's time to share my current side project with my faithful readers: GreenAndRed. This is a little something I've been noodling around for two reasons. First, I got tired of dealing with other people's legacy Rails code. Second, I needed a better way to maintain our company risk matrix than a Markdown document.

So, this is a site that will let you track and organize the risks to your projects and what you're doing about them. I don't honestly know what its future is: it could be anything from shutting down to turning into an actual paid SAAS. I make no guarantees at this point, other than that your data is exportable as CSV so you can always get it back out.

Signups are free at the moment, and likely for some time to come, though I'm running new accounts through an approval process (mostly to make sure I don't get overwhelmed). If you're interested, feel free to sign up and then watch your email for an approval.

• Green Tunnel - "GreenTunnel bypasses DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) systems found in many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) which block access to certain websites."
• Secure by Design - Review of a book (and an idea) that more people should pay attention to.
• Svelte is unappealing - A critical view of one of the new JS options.
• 28 Moves to Survive (& Thrive) in a Downturn - Aimed at those trying to keep startups afloat.
• pgsync - Synchronize PostgreSQL databases with this project from Instacart.
• Git Command Explorer - Tell it what you want to do and get the appropriate CLI commands back.
• Webpacker 5.0 released - A drop-in upgrade to use with recent Rails.
• 3 steps to add tests on existing code when you have short deadlines - A plan to help out messy legacy code.

• Fork - I've been happily using this graphical Mac/Windows git client, and it's adding new features at a rapid clip. Worth a look if you need more than the git command line.
• Operations Runbooks: Putting the Ops in DevOps - An overview of the idea plus a pitch for using Octopus Deploy for them.
• Setting Up Git Identities - How to manage things if you need to contribute from multiple accounts on the same machine.
• Posce - "Posce (pronounced posh·ee) is a note-taking toolkit for your command line. It takes a single directory of plaintext note files and lets you create, edit, manipulate, and organise them to your heart's content; all in a single unified interface."
• Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation - Pushing back against the anti-Markdown screeds.
• An SRE's guide to Memcached for building scalable applications - Some of the basics.
• GraphQL Mesh - "The goal of GraphQL Mesh is to let developers easily access services that are written in other APIs specs (such as gRPC, OpenAPI, Swagger, oData, SOAP, and also GraphQL) with GraphQL queries and mutations."
• Our Essential List of Free Software for Remote Work - Purism rounds up open source and other free tools.

• iTomate - "Automate your iTerm layouts and session setup"
• Ignoring bulk change commits with git blame - Another "I didn't know you could do that with git" thing.
• Bashible - "Bashible is a deployment/automation tool written in Bash (DSL). Inspired by Ansible. Simplifies things and prevents usual mistakes."
• Resilience - Ad blocking via HTTP(S) proxy, now in alpha. Doesn't look to be under active development though.
• Rails API template - Scaffolding for new Rails 6 API projects.
• Touch Bar System Monitor - Another attempt to find something useful to do with Apple's idiot touchbar.
• Creating Your Own Git Server - How to escape the corporate git overlords.
• Our Guide for Unmaintained Open Source Projects - Thinking through when to fork.

• Prettier 2.0 “2020” - A big new release of this opinionated code formatter that handles many frontend languages.
• zoom-redirector -"When joining a Zoom meeting, the "join from your browser" link is intentionally hidden. This browser extension solves this problem by transparently redirecting any meeting links to use Zoom's browser based web client."
• The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things - "The consequences of moving too fast and not being able to fix things when they break are high."
• GodQL - God's Query Language - Speculation on what an omnipotent query language might look like.
• Screen - Screen-sharing from the co-founder of ScreenHero (which Slack acquired a couple of years ago and promptly screwed up).
• Cronopete - "Cronopete is a Linux clone of Time Machine, the backup utility for Mac from Apple. It aims to mimic it as closely as possible."
• Panther - Open source "Cloud-Native SIEM for the Modern Security Team."
• Adjusting RuboCop's Defaults - A survey to determine some things for the upcoming 1.0 release.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank those readers who, despite all the chaos in the world at the moment, took time last week to reach out to me about potential job openings. I've had some promising conversations, though as I write this I am still hunting for my next position.

• Technical Writing Courses - From Google. If you've got time on your hands this is a worthwhile skill to improve.
• Converting an Old MacBook Into an Always-On Personal Kubernetes Cluster - Because why not?
• OpenRefine - "OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data."
• A Basic Git Workflow for Small Projects - Keeping it simple works very well in my experience.
• Working remotely: I want my shared whiteboard! - Exploring some options, including Zoom.
• Turing Pi - $189 backplane to build 7 Raspberry Pis into a k8x cluster.
• Tool tips: How our design team switched to Figma - A thoughtful exploration of a tooling choice.
• Web Skills - "A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer."

• Illustrated jq tutorial - Pipes and json playing together.
• CVE-2020-10663: Unsafe Object Creation Vulnerability in JSON (Additional fix) - Time to update the JSON gem. And to have a strategy for checking for this sort of thing in the future.
• Rails 6.0.2.2 and 5.2.4.2 have been released! - Speaking of security patches...
• Things you can do with a browser in 2020 - There are a stupid number of obscure browser APIs these days.
• What the heck is Backstage anyway? - Spotify explains the thinking behind their developer portal.
• n - Version manager for node.js.
• Full automation of release to NPM and Docker Hub with GitHub Actions and Conventional Commits - How to up your devops game a bit.
• How Tailscale Works - Just in case you wanted to know.

• WorkOS - Enterpriseyness as a service. You can get the SSO part for free.
• Codeberg - EU-hosted "collaboration platform and git hosting for free and open source software, content, projects."
• The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers - Standards have run amok.
• Fallacies of distributed computing for Ruby developers - Looking at some of the classic issues from a Ruby microservice point of view.
• Workplace Design: A Parallel Universe to Software Development - An introduction to the notion of Workplace Experience (WX).
• Software Development Trends 2020: Latest Research and Data - Survey results from the folks at Coding Sans.
• Building a more accurate time service at Facebook scale - It might be easier if you can afford to buy your own atomic clock.
• Okteto Push - Your Code to Kubernetes in Seconds - "Our objective with okteto push is to eliminate every action a developer needs to when developing an application. Code, push and see your changes live."

My collected topical pages have moved to Topics. The conversion from dokuwiki to markdown is still a little rough, but the content is there. The source is at GitHub so feel free to offer PRs if you see something that needs fixing. Hat tip to Noval Agung Prayogo whose instructions worked perfectly for this.

• Phyphox - Use the sensors in your phone to perform physics experiments.
• Toucaan–Rethinking CSS frameworks. - A "tropical new CSS framework for the web, with fewer defaults, newer patterns and a much simpler cascade."
• CI/CD - Serverless Ebook using Gitbook CLI, Github Pages, Github Actions CI/CD, and Calibre - Pretty cool what you can build just by lashing pieces together.
• Jumpstart -A heavy-duty Rails application builder that takes care of payments, CSS, impersonation, invoicing, social logins and all sorts of other things. $149 per site.
• Userlist - Customer messaging tool for SAAS companies to help with onboarding and engagement. 14-day trial, pricing from $49/month.
• Rewriting the heart of our sync engine - Dropbox has moved to Rust, but the interesting part here is their checklist of things to think about when you're considering a crucial rewrite.
• GitHub for mobile is now available - Personally I want fewer things on my phone rather than more, but it might work for you.
• The Troublesome Active Record Pattern - I dunno, it's never troubled me much. Maybe I live a sheltered life.

• Recursive SQL Queries with PostgreSQL - Exploring CTEs.
• Our Experience with Stripe Atlas - And it was a positive one.
• DefaultApp - A starting point for new Swift projects.
• npm is joining GitHub - Probably the best way to prevent npm from vanishing and throwing the entire JS ecosystem into turmoil, but ick.
• AWS Session Manager: less infrastructure, more features - A quick how-to on managing SSH access via IAM.
• Backstage - "Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals" from Spotify.
• Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) - A modern reimplementation of one of the classic Unix looks.
• Why Not WireGuard - An argument that the new hotness is not all that hot.