Copy
Semi regular newsletter featuring interesting links and articles
View this email in your browser
Random Interesting Things
A semi regular newsletter by R.I.Pienaar
Welcome to the next issue of my newsletter, expect when-its-good-and-ready frequency issues full of interesting things I come across online.

This one rather quickly after the previous one, have a bit of a backlog to get through!
- [ Development ] -
Some time ago AirBNB released a tool called Superset, it's a web based data analyser/business intelligence tool.  Not my usual thing but it looks quite nice and it's now an Apache incubator project.

Julia Evans gathered up a number of nice Statistics for Programmers resources.

When doing product development Personas are a great tool.  They help you understand and empathise with your target user.  There's a good few Engineering Personas that's handy if you're building tools in that space. Would love to see more colab around coming up with a industry agreed view on these.

Atomist is a Slack bot that manages Git repositories.  Basically it brings the entire Issue and PR life cycle into Slack.  I've been using a bit and it's really well done.  Even if you don't think you'll use it its worth a look at how a really great Slack bot looks.  Uses threads really well etc.

I find it hard to come up with a reason for using Go other than the nice output binaries and speed - important aspects for sure. Compared to such books as The Ruby Way there does not seem a lot written about Go in this manner.  Go, Mental Models and Side Effects is a nice article.

There's some big changes coming to Gemfiles soon, best be prepared.

- [ DevOps ] -
Webhooks are great but it can be a pain to host them, Webhook makes this easy, it's written in Go and a easy config file lets you make new Webhooks.  Works with Slack and so forth.

Secrets in code is bad, especially if it's open source code but true in general.  Auth0 released a automated code scanner with GitHub and Slack integration that can help detect these automatically.

Current guidelines suggest you shall not allow compromised passwords to be used, great but where do you get such a list? Troy Hunt has released a giant cache of 320M passwords from his work with haveibeenpwned.com

Service Meshes are all the rage but really grokking what they are about can be hard.  There's a excellent deep dive exploring this pattern that I found useful.

Good Architecture Diagrams are really hard to make, a nice article at InfoQ about this.

- [ Security ] -
Quite a nice deep dive into stealing files from Macs with a single HTML download. It's quite scary especially as Apple does not seem keen on fixing it, but also great as a look at the process to get from zero to 0wned.

The Boston Red Sox used Apple Watches in a clever way to get one up on their opponents. Lol.

System Time sources are a nightmare, there are no good choices.  This article looks at the options and why they might not work for everyone.

- [ /dev/random ] -
Google Scholar made a collection of Classic Papers, these are scientific papers that have been very widely cited and represents research into some of our most significant scientific areas.

Firefox released a handy binary file sharing service with auto expiry and SSL encryption, nice.

For some reason I researched VPN providers.  Express VPN is the business, even supports OpenVPN.  Really nice.

Regex, ugh.  Learn Regex The Easy Way might help.

An interesting look at Divorce by Occupation. tl;dr Geeks! you want to marry Geeks!
Copyright © 2017 R.I. Pienaar, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp