Newsletter 20 – 10/2021

Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints – Interesting case study about adding type hints in a large open-source project (urllib3).

Using Rust for kernel development – Summary about the state of Rust in Linux kernel development, this post brings a nice overview about how it’s going.

Tools to explore BGP – BGP is in the spotlight this month, due to the Facebook outage, and this post brings nice tools to learn and explore BGP. For people that don’t understand it very well, could be useful.

What’s great about Python 3.10? – Better error messages, type annotations, and the most hyped new feature, structural pattern matching. Check what’s new in Python 3.10.

YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler for CRuby – Ruby’s new JIT compiler (YJIT) is coming and its primary goal is to improve the performance of Rails applications. In this post, the author shows benchmarks of rails applications using it and shares its thoughts about the future.

MISC

Trigger a Kubernetes HPA with Prometheus metrics – HPA is a fantastic tool provided by Kubernetes, this post explains how can you trig your HPA using Prometheus metrics.

VictoriaMetrics: PromQL compliance – VictoriaMetrics has gained attention from people involved with SRE in the last few months, this post takes a look at compliance between MetricsQL (Used by VictoriaMetrics) and the well-known PromQL.

Best practices for REST API security: Authentication and authorization – Authentication and Authorization are always a great challenge when dealing with APIs, this post brings the most common ways of dealing with it.

Best practices for writing incident postmortems – Comercial and biased post, but also worth seeing good things to have in your postmortem document that will make it worth reading and learning from it.

Golden Signals – Monitoring from first principles – The “SRE golden signals” was first introduced in the famous Google SRE book, and it defines four key metrics that you should monitor in your systems. This post gives an overview of each of the four metrics and it’s meanings.

To Learn a New Language, Read Its Standard Library – The author gives a nice idea, why not read the standard library of a language that you are learning to learn about it?

Newsletter 19 – 09/2021

Featured

Towards a psychologically safe environment – Psychologically safe environment is a key to your team and companies success, not only in blameless culture but in all kinds of daily tasks and conversations with other people.

Best books on modern distributed systems – Excellent hacker news thread about modern distributed systems books.

The Case for ‘Developer Experience’ – As the technical complexity and the number of developers growing, developer experience raises as an important topic to discuss.

How I patched Python to include this great Ruby feature – Incredible post, the author described how patched Python to include a Ruby feature! Great post to learn about Python internals and how you can patch it to add new small features like that.

Python behind the scenes #13: the GIL and its effects on Python multithreading – This series of posts is awesome! I already recommended previous posts of this series, and I’ll keep recommending them! Check this new post, this time talking about GIL and its effects on Python.

Understanding AWK  – AWK is a useful tool to know, this post is a nice place to get started.

MISC

Ruby is Still a Diamond – Ruby is stills a diamond, and this post brings everything nice that it has 🙂

Sidecar Pattern – Good introduction to sidecar Pattern.

Monitoring Alerts That Don’t Suck – A simple guide about how to build and maintains a simple alert system, it’s not heavy technical but brings meaningful concepts.

Rails 7.0 Alpha 1: New JavaScript Answers, At-Work Encryption, Query Origin Logging, Zeitwerk Exclusively – Rails 7 alpha version released.

Secure integrations with Circuit Breaker in Go – Circuit breaker is a must-have when dealing with distributed service, not only in Go but in all languages.

Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization” – Interesting text about the famous game “Civilization” and the history of its creator, Sid Meier. It’s not interesting only for his game fans but for every fan of games and the read about the history of computation.