Issue 298 - The top developer stories and tools of 2020 (20)

Conversational AI as a Service - A New Tool in Your Developer Toolkit — By the end of the 2020's, over 80% of all business communications will be automated on a human-level.

How the Famous 'Fast Inverse Square Root' Code Works — Quake 3’s source code famously included a clever, but rather opaque, function for rapidly calculating inverse square roots.. how does it work? Tim digs about. This is a level of ingenuity many of us may aspire to.

Managing Technical Quality in a Codebase — Wise insights that clearly come from extensive experience in running software teams.

Waypoint: A Build and Deploy Workflow System from Hashicorp — HashiCorp began with Vagrant, a still popular open source tool for (originally) creating VMs. Waypoint is their latest open source project which aims to provide a Heroku-esque build and deploy experience on a wide array of platforms.

JuliaMono: A New Typeface for Developers — There’s a lot to enjoy in this font originally created to be revealed at JuliaCon 2020 but now freely available for us to use and enjoy. It’s packed with useful mathematical symbols, alphabets, alternate characters, etc.

'Why Senior Engineers Get Nothing Done' — This is one of those insightful but slightly flippant opinion posts where you might find things hit a little close to home. However you feel about it, being a senior software engineer in an organization is not necessarily what you think it might be at first glance and may not be the actual job you want.

htop 3.0 Released: The Interactive Process Viewer — htop is a long standing tool that provides a better process viewing experience than standard top. v3.0 has just been released. Changelog here, but mostly this is an evolutionary step. You might also enjoy these comments by the main creator on what it’s been like to work on the project for fifteen years so far.

An Illustrated Guide to How NAT Traversal Works — Just how can peer-to-peer connections be established between two machines in spite of all the obstacles in the way? This is a thorough look at a complex problem and solution.

Things You Want to Do in Git and How to Do Them — If you don’t get much further with git than clone, commit, push, and pull, this might help you take some extra steps into its full power.

Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA — A neat article with a variety of non-trivial tips for database development. If you ever touch SQL, you should find something useful here or at least enjoy the exploration.

A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack — While I don’t think you can take pleasure in someone else’s outage, the story behind an outage can make for good reading indeed. So it goes here with a significant outage Slack had in May and it came down to how they were using HAProxy, one of my favorite bits of infrastructure software ever.

Windows Gets a Package Manager, a Terminal, Linux GUI Apps, and.. and.. — The flurry of news from this week’s Microsoft Build event (taking place online this year, of course) is thick and fast, but we’re going to lead with Windows now having a new package manager ready for you to try: Windows Package Manager.In other news, MS is close to having Linux GUI...

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases — A Google engineer shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — This is not a technical article but is an important one nonetheless. Lee Holloway essentially programmed Cloudflare into being. But then he became distant and unpredictable, and what happened to him is something that could affect any of us 😔

GitExplorer: Find the Right git Commands To Use — It’s not unusual to have only mastered a handful of commands with tools like git, but what if you want to go a little off piste? Rather than Googling for an answer, this could help you hone in on the command you need.

Why Discord Is Switching From Go to Rust — An engineer at Discord (the popular gaming oriented chat system) talks about how they dramatically improved the performance of a backend service by switching from Go to Rust. The comparison is against an older version of Go (1.9.2) vs a nightly build of Rust, though, so it’s a bit apples to oranges as Go has...

The 'Year 2038 Problem' Is Already Causing Issues — In 2038, the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 (commonly used as an ‘epoch’ point) will exceed what can be stored in a signed 32 bit integer and this is A Problem™. Not only that, but it can be a problem now as seen in this Twitter thread.

Do You Need Golang or Kubernetes Training? — On-site corporate training. Having trained over 4,000 engineers since 2013, we've crafted classes for students to get as much as possible.

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