If we’ll talk about April 2020 computer posts/papers we need to talk about ACM Digital Library it’s free until June 30, 2020, I’m already panning the library searching for things related to compilers and distributed systems.

This previous month we have an interesting question on r/AskComputerSciente about free research papers and we’ve nice responses about free resources.

The first modern pandemic – This is a long post (20 min read) by Gates talking about COVID-19 pandemic, it has a great introduction talking about growth, the difference between countries, and people’s behavior. But the focus of the post is the innovation needed to beat pandemic, it separates the innovation needed into five categories, treatments, vaccines, testing, contact tracing, and policies for opening up. If you want to read something non-tech I pretty recommend it. This post has a short version too if you want something short.

Featured

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases – So far the best post that I read this month, a lot of interesting things about databases.

GitHub is now free for teams – GitHub is now free for teams with unlimited private repos and collaborators.

Comparing HTTP/3 vs. HTTP/2 Performance – HTTP/3 is coming, let’s analyze it’s difference and improvements.

Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer? – You can find answers with a lot of interesting tools to make your life easier, automatic admins, internal tools, easy apps, and much more. For people that love a prototype and an MVC, it can be valuable.

Free SRE Books – Three free books about SRE by google, including the famous “Site Reliability Engineering” book.

Tech

Untangling Microservices, or Balancing Complexity in Distributed Systems – A good post talking about microservices and its meaning.

Crafting “Crafting Interpreters” – Bob Nystrom finished his “Crafting Interpreters” books, for those who don’t know he was writing a book about interpreters for the last three years, and completely free. I’m reading this book for the last months and it’s fascinating, it’s simple! I pretty recommend it to everyone that wants to read more about compilers.

Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart – Have you noticed that a lot of critical systems are written in COBOL? This post talks about it.

CODE IS ENGINEERING, TYPES ARE SCIENCE – This posts discuss how software engineering is related to the three ways of reasoning, deduction, abduction, and induction.

History of Erlang and Elixir – Great post with a resumed history of Erlang, it doesn’t take a long time to read and it’s worth reading.

An Exploratory Guide to the Service Mesh Platforms – An overview of the main service mesh technologies that we have today.

Graphs – This is not a new post but can be useful for whose don’t know graphs very well, graphs are core on computation and know it can be useful.

Refactoring a Function in Elixir – A simple step-by-step refactoring post, showing how to refactor a function in Elixir, applying good concepts.

Books I recommend to my software engineering students – This post recommends six books that can help you became a better software engineering, and no one is about programming.

Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming – This post was trending on hacker news and gained my attention, it can be interesting even for those who don’t know functional programming.

A Possible New Backend for Rust – Nice and technical post discussing a new back-end for Rust Lang based on Cranelift that is under development. It can improve the build time of Rust when you’re developing.

Ruby Concurrency Final Report – Thread scheduler for lightweight concurrency and a brief about concurrency in Ruby ecosystem.

Microservices Tradeoffs – I love microservices and I advocate it, but for a one people project it’s worth? Let’s see some tradeoffs.

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories – Donald Knuth is a computer science legend if with his famous work on The Art of Computer Programming, this interview with him is interesting, and I recommend it.

Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? – Are you tired of programming? Let’s discuss it.

Tutorials / Courses

CS 241 – System Programming – Great material about system programming, if you love low-level programming it can be useful.

The Power Of Prolog – Prolog is a interesting language (I have an excellent post about it on my blog), this online book sounds goo for those who wants to learn more about it.

Build an operating system in Rust programming language – Build an operating system using Rust lang, it sounds interesting to learn how SO works behind the scenes

Using Broadway and RabbitMQ to Create a Data Pipeline in Elixir – Broadway has gained my attention on the past months, its a good way to build pipelines and workers on top on Elixir’s GenServer.

Understanding bytes in Go by building a TCP protocol – I always think that someday I’ll try to re-implement a protocol based on its RFC. This tutorial leads you to build a TCP protocol in Go, very interesting!

Releases / News

The final Python 2 release marks the end of an era – python.org has released the last official version of Python 2, python 2.7.18. Let’s talk a little about everything around python 2 and 3.

Rust 1.43.0 – Rust 1.43.0 released.

Ubuntu 20.04 – The new LTS version of Ubuntu is ready.