News and podcasts for developers

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store.

Imagine this: you’ve been paged to investigate a production incident, and after some digging, you identify the commit with the breaking code. You decide to revert the change:

git revert 1a2b3c

Unfortunately, in doing so, a new bug is introduced! As it turns out, hidden in that old “broken” commit was some code that another part of the app depended upon, and when you reverted those lines, it left the site once again in a broken state. 🙃 Oh dear.

How can situations like this be avoided? To answer this question, we first need to examine how these types of commits come to be.

If you’ve never heard of or used git reset… this article is a must-read.

Arnold Galovics’ follow-up to his excellent monoliths are your friend post from late last year.

Starting a greenfield project with microservices is easy. The promises are wonderful but often they are far from reality. This time I’ll share my experience on the truth about microservices when starting a project from scratch.

Jakob Greenfeld:

I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.

It costs $0 and no, it’s not some note-taking or to-do list system.

The steps are:

1. develop meta-awareness of your state of mind.
2. pattern-match to identify your mind’s most common modes.
3. learn to pick activities that match each mode.

But that probably won’t hit home until you read through his explanation of each step.

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.

This is an excellent explanation of the difference between these styles of programming and why declarative is all the rage these days.

This post by Shayon Mukherjee is in response to the recently logged post by Mike Coutermarsh in praise of MySQL for infra folks:

This is not a MySQL vs PostgreSQL post. This is just a small summary of what I have come to appreciate about PostgreSQL as an Infrastructure Engineer.

Always good to keep in mind whenever comparing technologies: trade-offs abound and certain people in certain situations will value certain things about different technologies differently. That’s for certain. 😉

If you’re using GitHub as your version control system of choice then GitHub Apps can be incredibly useful for many tasks including building CI/CD, managing repositories, querying statistical data and much more. In this article we will walk through the process of building such an app in Go including setting up the GitHub integration, authenticating with GitHub, listening to webhooks, querying GitHub API and more.

From Mike Coutermarsh:

For years I’ve been noticing this pattern of infrastructure engineers I really respect preferring MySQL and product engineers preferring Postgres. It took quite a while for me to understand it. Especially coming from my background as a product engineer. Infrastructure engineers generally…

Read on to hear why (from Mike’s perspective).

Daniel Stenberg lays out how he thinks we can view the world of software and open source in light of supply chain security, maintainer sustainability, and the like:

Inside the pyramid there is a hierarchy where things using software are build on top of others, in layers. The higher up you go, the more you stand on the shoulders of open source components below you.

At the very bottom of the pyramid are the foundational components. Operating systems and libraries. The stuff virtually everything runs or depends upon. The components you really don’t want to have serious security vulnerabilities.

Jim Hall used grep and some fancy regular expressions to get a leg up on Wordle, the word game that keeps you guessing… but only once per day. Some people may think of Jim’s technique as cheating. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.

But it’s a lot better than View Source-ing to get at the answer, which you can also do in a pinch. 😉

(Also there’s zero point to Wordle other than having fun, so it’s really only cheating if your answer-finding-method is less fun than you’d have otherwise. Even then, you’re only cheating yourself.)

This is an excellent machine learning primer where you scroll the page and the author(s) walk you through the process of creating a model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

Eight people have stepped up to take over maintenance of the suddenly abandoned JS library that generates fake data. These transitions are tricky to make smoothly. Props to the new team on being very careful and thoughtful each step along the way, especially when it comes to funding the project. Here’s a nice note from the new team:

We’re excited to give new life to this idea and project.

This project can have a fresh start and it will become even cooler.

We felt we needed to do a public announcement because of all of the attention the project received in the media and from the community.

We believe that we have acted in the way that is best for the community.

This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come.

Funny how stuff like this plays out sometimes:

My cog tool has been having a resurgence of late: a number of people are discovering it’s useful to run a little bit of Python code inside otherwise static files.

He goes on to list out a bunch of tweets from people finding it useful for various tasks and even got to talk about the project on podcast.__init__. Cool tool, cool story.

Swyx is known for learning in public, and he joins the party to teach Ali and Nick about what he’s been working on with Temporal IO, what it is, and why he’s excited about it. We also talk about his role as Director of Developer Experience, including what developer experience is, how to do it, and what goals to set.

This post covers 5 cases where the author uses the JSON data type for column definitions:

• Dumping request data for later processing
• Supporting extra fields
• Some one-to-many relationships
• Key-value use cases
• Simpler EAV design

Craig Kerstiens has also weighed in on this topic for us.

Edit the font in your browser and download the result. Cool! Made possible by SVG and OpenType.js.

System76’s COSMIC desktop environment is still in early development, but here’s an early preview that might pique your interest. Love that launcher. 🤩

Today Gerhard shares the entire story behind his lost packets. He is talking with Drew Marshall, director at Trunk Networks and No One Internet, a Cloud Services Provider & ISP based in Sussex, UK.

Gerhard’s Vodafone ISP gateway was losing packets, and recording some of the previous episodes used to be challenging as his internet connection would cut out up to 10 seconds at a time, multiple times per recording session. He was convinced that his Unifi Dream Machine Pro was not the issue. Drew helped Gerhard realise that it actually was. Not only has Gerhard’s DNS latency improved by 3x, but he can now fail-over between two WAN connections. And because nothing beats a real-world experiment, you can guess what is coming in this episode 😉

You will find latency & packet loss graphs, speed test runs, and a few other interestings in the show notes. We hope that they inspire you to setup a better home network. Most importantly, may you find your humble & brilliant Drew.

It’s like having Alfred all up in your browser.

Manage tabs, bookmarks, your browser history, perform all sorts of actions with a simple command interface.