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