I’m about to disappear for a week of surfing, which means here is a massive dump of links to last you this week and next. This week has involved putting the finishing touches to a load of projects and getting them out the door before I leave. Gone are the days of expecting multiple calls to get server details, we’re to the point now I know the rest of the team can handle whatever may come. Launching to tens of millions of users across the continental US is still a little nerve wracking though.
The end of the NASA window – First up is some bad news about NASA. I doubt there’s another organisation that has done more for the human race than NASA.
Our Team Won Startup Weekend And All We Got Was A Shitty New Boss – Now, both sides come out of this looking like dicks, but the constant is how the devs are treated. If people see you as cheap, replaceable labour, they’re not the kind of person you want to work with.
iPhone 6S Launch Reservation Stock – My 6S 64 GB Space Grey is on it’s way, but this is a quick breakdown of what sold out when.
Just doesn’t feel good – I have no qualms with ad blockers. Links for things I want I can understand. But tracking me across sites, jumping to app stores or bogging down my browser are a step too far.
The New Kingmakers [pdf] – As part of the startup weekend article earlier, this is a great read. While I think there’s an undercurrent of arrogance across all this, it is true that everything nowadays is moving towards automation.
Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code and It’s All in One Place – I love the rationale behind these set-ups. A Facebook engineer can tweak a kernel setting, underlying thrift result and front-end handler in one repo to get changes synced throughout.
Launching a product, in just 3652 days – The slow burn, the people working away on the problems they have, they’re the ones making the next big thing.
Nine of the World’s Biggest Banks Form Blockchain Partnership – With Mt. Gox in handcuffs, my faith in bitcoin is a bit shaky. But the principle of the blockchain is genius and if it can combat fraud *ahem HSBC* it’s welcome.
The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project – Bulk Buffer has always been a side project; for better or worse. I can make a go of it, turn it into a real thing, but a paying customer is a very different thing to a freebie.
Candy Japan hit with credit card fraud – And speaking of paying customers, handling payments is a lot more difficult than just slapping Stripe on a page.
GraphQL: A data query language – A lot of recent apps I’ve made have hit this issue; you request a load of data across multiple calls and wait, wait, wait. Naturally this suits something concurrent like Node.
New API for directory picking and drag-and-drop – While the details may be boring, to see the logic that must go into each and every decision is pretty interesting.
Microsoft showcases the Azure Cloud Switch – Microsoft releasing a Linux distro in 2015. Tell anyone that 20, ten or even five years ago and they’d laugh at you.
Hello, declarative world – React has really jumpstarted the declarative world and it’ll be interesting to see it spread (and eventually shrink when people realise it doesn’t fit every situation).
A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: Let’s talk about iMessage – We’re all just reliant on the vendors to keep their word and as has been shown over and over, they don’t.
How We Extended CloudFlare’s Performance and Security Into Mainland China – China brings it’s own set of unique problems and, seeing as how we’ll be expanding into the region at some point, it’s helpful to see how others have managed it. The careful wording around the politics of it all make the hairs on my neck stand up though.
Needing an IDE should be considered a language smell – Lightweight editors like Vim or even Sublime can replicate huge swaths of functionality that were typically the sole domain of IDEs and they consume a tenth the RAM doing so.
js-sequence-diagrams – A nice little package Josh found this week while walking the UML tightrope between useful and insane.
How To Write Unmaintainable Code – Laugh it up, but we’ve all committed at least a few of these sins in our careers.
400 days of Go – Go got off to a bang, died a little as people coming from dynamic languages realised it wasn’t another Ruby, and is now seeing a second wave. My biggest takeaway from writing in Go? The beauty of single-file deployments.
Warming up to Go – And speaking of devs starting to use Go again, here’s some more anecdotal notes.
Making thumbnails fast – Not just an article on tweaking optimization settings, but some real math behind it.
The Case Against Third Party Libraries – Dependencies suck. Say what you will about WordPress, but an eight year old site can be upgraded without worry. Laravel 4 is 12 months old and now obsolete. Be very careful choosing who and what you import into your project. (And yes, a framework is a dependency if you write code that can be mapped between them.)
Subresource Integrity at GitHub – Security as a small 2-man team meant changing passwords and removing phpinfo’s. Now our clients need pen tests, intrusion detection systems and more. This is definitely welcome.
How does a relational database work – Everything you could possibly want to know (mainly about indexes) from the ground up.
Exploiting CSRF against search with Lucene – An oracle attack using error response times against a search index. It’s the stuff that keeps you up at night.
HTTP/2 implementation lands in nginx – A big patch, but what it signifies is the web is about to get faster again. Bye bye Apache.
Twitter’s high-performance replicated log service – I just don’t get it, if you want consistency, use a consistent DB. Don’t write a DB and then polyfill the gap with another tool.
