Read it or Throw it #215

1. 2019 Summary
   My post summarizing my 2019 professional year.
   I’ve also added a Subscribe page to my blog!
2. Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly
   This is a long read but a good one. The post starts with an announcement of a joint effort between leading companies that rely on WebAssembly to build the future of the internet and outside-the-browser infrastructure (Mozilla, Fastly, etc).
   Then the post proceeds with explanations on how using WebAssembly while employing a capabilities-based security model built-in will serve as a foundation to avoid much of the security vulnerabilities lurking almost any application nowadays.
3. Join the beta: our new serverless compute environment gives you more power at the edge
   Fastly releases in Beta its new serverless platform named Compute@Edge based on Lucet, their in-house developed WebAssembly Runtime. We can start seeing right now the future of the internet. A CDN provider will cease to be merely a dumb provider of cached content, but it will transform to hosting full-blown applications. This is only the beginning, rest assured that more companies will enter this field. Not only traditional CDNs providers such as Akamai but also Cloud providers like Amazon.
   
   The boundaries between a Cloud to a CDN provider will become blurry. They will all run WebAssembly code and compete with one another for those who will get the chance to run our code. I predict that many databases, storage solutions, and other services will be available on the Edge too.
   
   Add to above the new emerging QUIC protocol as the next TCP and the Internet speed future seems bright.
4. GitHub Universe 2019 TL;DR
   A very good summary of the annual event of GitHub Universe. The biggest announcement is that GitHub Actions is now publicly available for everyone!
5. Visual Studio Online - Cloud-powered dev environments accessible from anywhere
   Microsoft Release VSCode as a Service product for public preview.
   It’s hard to predict whether it’ll catch or not but only time will tell.
   See also: Gitpod
6. Execute Program: Learn programming tools fast. Then remember them.
   A new Spaced repetition based training for developers. The training is organized by courses. The platform has been created by Gary Bernhardt who is a very famous developer known for being innovative. It’s only the first footsteps and new courses will be added. I’m curious to see how this will evolve.
7. Conventional Commits
   Did you notice people who use commit messages having patterns like:
   feat(...): new feature or fix: fixed the failed test...
   This is more than a phenomenon, but a well-defined git commit messages conventions. I think it adds more hygiene to the code, and I’ll consider using that too.
8. Fourteen years after launching, 1Password takes a $200M Series A
   I’ve been using 1Password for a couple of years and I really think it’s a good product. The company refines and makes the product better consistently. It’s a truly remarkable story of a self-funded company that raises such a great amount of money for Series A - 14 years after having been founded!
   
   BTW, the 1Password team has rewritten part of their browser extension code in Rust! (compiled to WebAssembly that runs as part of the browser-extension).
9. Recommended Talk: Rust’s Journey to Async/Await
   As always, Steve Klabnik condenses a lot of info (and history) elegantly and clearly into a great talk. This time, the talk outlines the evolution of Rust Async until today. Steve explains the trade-offs taken in Rust in order to reach the holy grail of having zero-cost abstractions futures.
   Rust async/await syntax became stable recently at the 1.39.0 release.
10. Recommended Book: The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
    Pragmatic Programmer is a classic. One of the most cited as “Must Read for every Programmer book”. I’ve never read this book. A few months ago, the 2nd edition has been published and I thought it’s about time I’ll read the book. Overall, I wish I’d read this book when I was at the start of my career. I think it would have helped me understand a lot of things faster, as opposed to learning them by nature. I believe that experienced programmers could also benefit from reading this book as it’s a centralized piece covering many aspects of a professional developer craft.

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
Henry David Thoreau

Read it or Throw it #214

1. Relearning to Type
   My new post describing my journey to relearn to type. I won’t elaborate and just hope it will make you curious enough to go and read the article…
2. SVM - Spacemesh Virtual Machine
   Another post of mine, but this time, a work official one.
   This post describes the first milestone of SVM (Spacemesh Virtual Machine).
   I’ve worked on the SVM project (first milestone) for the past 3 months.
   
   Here’s a link to the GitHub repository:
   https://github.com/spacemeshos/svm
   
   If you know Rust or if you’re into Compilers and looking for a very challenging job and super fun! please email me at: yaron.wittenstein@gmail.com
3. Big Benefits when Your Product is Bootstrapped
   Oren Eini, one of the greatest developers on earth tells his remarkable story of bootstrapping his company creating RavenDB. A must-read article for entrepreneurs!
4. Kubernetes and the Erlang VM: orchestration on the large and the small
   A great article by José Valim, the creator of Elixir about the similarities between KS8 and the Erlang VM. While KS8 orchestrates nodes, the Erlang VM does that same at the instance level. José also writes about how KS8 and the Erlang VM can complement each other in cases like Service Discovery.
5. Tuple: A remote pair programming tool for discerning developers
   A new remote screen sharing product designed in particular for developers.
   The video on the site looks really cool.
   The tool is only for Mac users.
6. How Many Words Does the Average Person Know?
   In the last couple of months I’ve worked almost daily on my English vocabulary.
   English is a gigantic language and I was asking myself how many words a fluent English speaker really knows. If you’re curious too, then read the article.
7. gitmoji
   A cheat sheet to GitHub emojis.
8. emacs or vim
   That’s funny. I will have my take about the endless war of emacs vs vim on a future post under my blog.
9. Recommendation Talk: Rust, WebAssembly, and the future of Serverless
   A comprehensive summary by Steve Klabnik about Rust, the evolution of WebAssembly starting from asm.js to this day and the next generation of Serverless executing WebAssembly programs.
10. Book Recommendation: Ultralearning
    A great book about applying innovative learning techniques by Scott H Young. This book will give you undoubtedly some food for thought. I know it made me think and reflect on the way I learn things. Highly recommended book!

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.“

– Alan Perlis

Read it or Throw it #213

1. Top 8 Productivity Principles for Any Developer

The second article of my new blog. This time a condensed post full of goodness about productivity principles with specific recommendations to Mac users.

Please forward it to colleagues if you liked it

Thank you!

2. Microsoft to explore using Rust

Even though the article talks about exploring Rust only at Microsoft Security Response Center and not in more places within the company, for now, it's nonetheless a big accomplishment to Rust as the new alternative to the traditional system programming language like C/C++.

Microsoft won't be the first gigantic company to use Rust. 

Amazon relies on Rust for their Firecracker.

This is another positive sign that Rust has a bright future. 

3. Client side caching in Redis 6 - <antirez>

In this blog post, Salvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a antirez) goes low-level about the big forthcoming feature of Redis 6: Client-side caching.

The prerequisite for this will feature will be a breaking change on the redis protocol called: RESP3.

Existing redis client will have to go major changes in order to support these changes but I'm sure it'll worth it.

The new client-side caching will help applications gain better performance and be more real-time.

For some apps, it'll be a game-changer.

4. Vector: A High-Performance Logs, Events, & Metrics Router

The Timber (check out this tool!) logging company released a new general-purpose logging collector agent likes Logstash//Filebeat/others.

Vector is written in Rust, and according to the site benchmarks it outperforms its competitors.

This tool comes with programmability for doing transformations of logged events using Lua.

Moreover, this tool has a detailed Roadmap filled with tons of goods.

5. How to Build Good Software

A superb article about the nature of software development.

The article brings into the surface a lot of points that we see happening throughout our career.

This is a kind of article that should be re-read at least once a year.

The article is a long one but definitely worth reading!!

6. Cockroach Labs announces $55M Series C to battle industry giants

The open-source alternative to Google Spanner continues its growth.

7. Artichoke - A Ruby made with Rust

Artichoke is an implementation of Ruby in Rust.

This is very cool!
BTW, there is also a more mature project of Python implementation in Rust called RustPython

8. nushell - A modern shell written in Rust

Another new cool projejct is nushell. It's a shell (like bash/zsh/fish) but written in Rust :)

9. loc - Count lines of code quickly

A Rust re-implementation of cloc that claims to be x100 faster.
loc will tell you how many lines of code has been written in your projects.

It will output stats per each programming language used.

There are usage flags like: "show LOC for each file" or "show LOC for by files regex"

10. Blinkist: Serving curious minds

I'm sure you're familiar with all these self-growing books.

The major problem with these books is that these books usually spread over way too many pages for providing a couple key messages.

Here comes Blinkisit to save us. It's a big archive of very short versions of most of these books.

Each book summary takes a couple of minutes to read. Most of the books also come as Audiobooks.'

I've already read about 30 short books like that in its Android mobile app.

This service costs mone, so you need to decide if it worth it for you.

Tip: look for a coupon on the internet.

"Good software, like wine, takes time"
Joel Spolsky

Read it or Throw it #212

1. Spacemesh smart contracts research

My talk about the research so far at Spacemesh regarding Smart Contracts leveraging WebAssembly.

And here is a link to all the talks given at the Wasm on the blockchain workshop Berlin 2019

2. The importance of unlearning

I'm thinking about starting my own blog...
So this is my very first blog post about why I think it's important to stay open-minded for new technological opportunities.

Many thanks for Omer Hamerman and Yuval Zalmenson for the feedback!

3. Waxosuit - The Cloud-Native Exosuit for WebAssembly

On the last issue, we had Fastly's announcement article about Lucet:

Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime 

The wasm out of the browser explodes and now a new (still in its infancy) project called Waxosuit has been born.

Waxosuit is a WebAssembly runtime (build on top of wasmer) for running in the cloud wasm code. 

If I understand right, the vision is to equip the Waxosuit runtime with many capabilities (plugins) that could be used by the hosted wasm programs.

The big vision is to make the developer more productive since he/she will have a rich set of capabilities out of the box in the wasm runtime.

(for example, logging, monitoring, database integrations...)

It means a developer can write less code and rely on the set of these capabilities (high-level "system-calls like") 

This could have the potential to be the next generation of Heroku or next generation of serverless computing

Here is a medium post, Introducing Waxosuit by @Kevin Hoffman the creator of waxosuit

4. The Future of Programming is Dependent Types

A very interesting article about the future of programming using dependent types

I hope that Rust will have some form of this in the future 

5. The Complete Guide to Memory (Scott H Young)

This is more like a mini-book about long-term memory.

It's a joyful read full with illustrations and simple explanations.

One of the topics covered for better long-term memory is by practicing using

the spaced-repetition technique. A few years ago I've given a lightning talk about this technique, here is a link (the talk is in Hebrew)

6. Working Memory: A Complete Guide to How Your Brain Processes Information, Thinks and Learns (Scott H Young)

This is another mini-book about memory but this time on working memory.

If you liked the content of the above item about long-term memory, you'll surely love this one as well.

7. Dual N-back Cognitive Training Improves Working Memory

An article that reviews the positive effects of practicing the Dual N-back game on working memory (according to a conducted research)

8. Former npm, Inc. CTO Announces Entropic, a Decentralized Package Registry

Last time we had GitHub Package registry and now the former CTO of npm releases a Decentralized Package Registry called Entropic. 

This declaration is of high importance since it's a decentralized package registry.

Did it ever happen to you that the deployment of your service failed since your centralized package manager has been down? 

9. Navigating code on GitHub

In the previous newsletter issue, I've added an item for Sourcegraph and GitHub has just released (still in Beta) its own Sourcegraph competitor (if to be delicate) and it'll be probably given the company another boost against the competition with GitLab.

Another product that should be worried for its future is Octotree (browser extension on top of GitHub)

GitHub also acquired another company called Pull Panda for streamlining the code reviews process

10. John Fremlin's blog: How B players hire C players

An eye-opening article about the nature of hiring people claiming that A Players will hire A Players, but B players will hire C players and so on.

I tend to agree with this. Usually, strong people will want to work with other strong people, since they understand they have something new to learn from them

(since no one knows everything).

This term has been coined by late Steve Jobs and here is the link to the original video of him talking about this.

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Read it or Throw it #211

1. GitHub Package Registry: Your packages, at home with their code

This is a big deal since GitHub continues to expand its services after the GitHub Actions.

That's one of the reasons that private repositories are free since GitHub wants to attract customers and make them pay for the ecosystem services

2. Announcing WAPM: The WebAssembly Package Manager (Wasmer)

This also a big deal since Web Assembly is the future universal bytecode not only of the internet

but probably of Desktop-apps / smartphones apps/god knows

Even though Web Assembly is still considered in an early stage, it's spec (see next item), browsers adoption, out of the browser Runtimes is getting a lot of momentum. 

3. Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web (Mozilla)

Continuing the previous item, Mozilla announced WASI, a specification for running web assembly programs outside of the browser.

Imagine having a C++/Rust/Go/another language that is being compiled to Web-Assembly

(LLVM already supports that).

Then the Runtimes hosting the WebAssembly file will come out of the box with implementation

for the system-calls interface. 

It means that we could not only run our programs but also switch between WASM runtimes as long as they implement the WASI interface.

4. Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime

One day after Mozilla announcing the WASI standard Fastly announces its WASM runtime that implements WASI. (they have been working closely with Mozilla for months before going public). 

The future of CDNs is executing code on the edge, and what could be more suitable for the mission then running a WASM file on the edge? 

We'll be able to develop our code in a lot of programming languages and run execute WASM files.

Current Serverless seems like old tech already 

5. Ruby 3 progress update: types will be part of Ruby 3 stdlib source! 

Stripe owns a very big Ruby codebase and they internally developed type-checking extensions in order to increase the code quality. (like TypeScript did for Java-Script). 

This project will become an official part of Ruby 3 

This is very cool, I love that Ruby is getting better doesn't stand still.
I also think it'll hurt badly the Crystal Programming Language adoption

6. My Key Learnings after 30,000 LOC in Rust (Dotan Nahum)

A fantastic article about what it feels like getting into Rust when coming from any other programming language.

It talks about overcoming obstacles and frustration, learning new thinking paradigms and the benefits of knowing Rust

7. awesome 

There are many awesome-XXXX repositories in Github,
but this one is a list of all the awesome-XXXX

8. sourcegraph - Search, navigate, and review code

Recently I've started using this tool a lot (I was aware of it but never gave it a serious chance).

I find it much better than reading code via GitHub. 

(most of the times, I don't want to clone locally code and read it on my computer)

9. Is Mastery More Like a Wedge or a Knife? (Scott H Young)

I'm a long-time reader of Scott-H-Young blog and I appreciate much his work. 

This article worth your read

10. IPFS - Simply Explained (YouTube)

Less than 10 minutes short video explaining what's IPFS for dummies.

You can think about it like Bittorent next generation.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. 

John Gall

Read it or Throw it #210

1. No, the problem isn’t “bad coders”

A well-written article talking about the importance of having programming languages that will guard us the developers from as many mistakes as possible.

After all, we're humans and humans make mistakes.

Also, projects assumptions change over time.

Good tools and good programming languages can assist much. Give Rust a try!

2. Compounding Knowledge

A short summary for The Snowball book talking about Warren Buffett knowledge consumption and prioritization methods and how his life-long learning helped him in business

3. Solving git merge conflicts with VIM

A very cool technique to resolve git merge conflicts in vim using vim-fugitive and good shortcuts

4. A brief history of Erlang and Elixir

I think this is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of Software.

Who would think that Erlang, developed in the '80s for the telecommunication industry in Ericsson

will serve so well high-scale internet systems 30 years after?

5. WebAssembly: How and why (LogRocket)

An introductory article covering the basics of WebAssembly with nice illustrations

6. 74 Best OS X (Mac OS) Apps You Need

If you're a Mac user, go over the list. You'll probably find something useful

7. Git History

A cool extension for traversing a file evolution in a GitHub/GitLab

8. How Does Mozilla Firefox Make Money?

This article goes over different businesses models of Mozzila over time.

It's unintuitive that Mozilla makes money thanks to other browsers

9. Funny: Windows 95 Launch

Just watch these 24 seconds

10. Recommended Book: Programming Rust

If you want to learn Rust, then I highly recommend this book.

It's a more advanced book than the official The Rust Programming Language book

so you may want to that first

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Tony Hoare

Read it or Throw it #209

1. Ruby 2.6.0 Released

A very big milestone towards the anticipated future of Ruby 3.

Ruby 2.6 brings a JIT-compilation to its front and it'll continue to evolve in future versions

2. Confluent Raises a $125M Series D Funding Round

Confluent - founded by the original authors of Kafka are having hyper growth.

I hope that using their service will become a commodity 

3. InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha Release and the Road Ahead

The company behind InfluxDB don't stop delivering new goods.

I didn't take the time yet to examine the new flux language they are building,

but I'm sure they know what they are doing and that it'll become popular

4. Kite raises $17M for its AI-driven code completion tool

Machine Learning on Code has a huge potential and this tool is just one example for that.

I'm very curious to see how it'll work on other programming languages besides Python 

5. New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repos

GitHub, now backed by Microsoft breaks their rules in order to attract more users interest 

as part of the competition against GitLab, Bitbucket, and others

6. Microsoft acquires Citus Data, re-affirming its commitment to Open Source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale

A very big move of Microsoft which puts her in the top of the game of Distributed Relational Database offered as SaaS

7. Enjoy a slice of QUIC, and Rust!

Cloudflare has early support for QUIC (a.k.a HTTP3) and it's in Rust! (and Open-Source)

8. Ultralearning Environments: Why Where You Learn Determines How Much You Learn - Scott H Young

A fascinating article about the importance of witnessing others in order to up our game.

Thanks to the internet and platforms like YouTube, Twitch, this technique is approachable to anyone

9. What are Binaural Beats and how they work?

A simple explanation of the idea behind Binaural Beats

10. Kantega - The Mysterious Life of Developers (YouTube)

A very short (less than 3 minutes) National Geographic-like screencast about an animal called The Developer :)

The more you know, the more you know you don't know

Aristotle