January 2023

I am aggregating here some more or less interesting stuff of various IT related materials which I came across this month. Some of them are strictly related to the things I did or am currently doing.

Articles

How We Use Terraform At Slack

A Look Into Ways We Use Terraform to Build Our Infrastructure

You Want Modules, Not Microservices

tl;dr Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream "way to do it" without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it's time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what's going on.

What I learned from pairing by default

If you have the opportunity to give pairing-by-default a try, I highly recommend going for it. With this experience, I’m far, far more likely to jump into a call for something mundane “just because.” And that “just because” might even be because I’m feeling more social and have nothing to do with code.

Anki SRS AlgorithmSpaced Repetition Explained with Code

Forgetting is key to learning. Forgetting is what separates what is useful and what is not. Sometimes, we want to make a piece of knowledge stick in memory despite what our memory thinks. Spaced Repetition is an effective solution to this problem and Anki is the most popular OSS tool to help you.

Cloudflare: The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached.

How to choose the right API Gateway

Nowadays an API Gateway is an essential component in designing a distributed system’s architecture with multiple API services or microservices. This post helps you understand what’s the API Gateway, when, and why to use it, and guides you on how to choose the best API Gateway solution for your applications.

Meetings for an effective eng organization.

Good meetings are the heartbeat for your organization.

Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency

Meetings are a critical tool for building a diverse, high-performance team with shared values

YouTube Addiction

Hi, my name is JT. I'm a YouTube addict.

I know what you're thinking. That sounds like a joke. That you want a funny punchline to go with it. Me too.

The Art of Writing Amazing REST APIs

There are some things that many companies get right and a lot that many get wrong. So how do I think about designing APIs? What makes a good API?

In the long run

Software design decisions should be time-aware.

GPT-3 Is the Best Journal I’ve Ever Used

I’ve been journaling for 10 years, and I can attest that using AI is journaling on steroids.

Death of a Craftsman

Hi! My name is Einar. I design and write software for a living, presumably like you. You could call me a software developer, a coder, a programmer, and also a software designer, I guess. Those are all things I do and labels that I’m comfortable with. I am not, however, a software craftsman. This blog post is about why.

Productivity

How to annotate literally everything

Comprehensive overview of existing tools, strategies and thoughts on interacting with your data.

Hypothesis

Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere.

Priorytetyzacja i estymacja zadań

W tym artykule poznasz kilka technik, z których korzystam lub miałem okazję k korzystać w przeszłości. Wpis opiera się na moich osobistych doświadczeniach więc niektóre techniki mogą nie sprawdzić się u Ciebie lub te, które u mnie nie sprawdziły się, u Ciebie mogą działać. W artykule zestawiłem techniki, które wykorzystuję zarówno w życiu zawodowym jak i prywatnym.

Why working on Sundays feels different

There’s this unique state of ultra-calm and curious mind that I enter on Sundays that I just can’t access on other days.

Jak efektywnie czytać i zarządzać treściami z różnych źródeł?

Sposobem na zwiększenie wygody czytania jest scentralizowanie treści z różnych serwisów, czyli zebranie ich w jednym, wspólnym miejscu. Możemy wtedy konsumować je w sposób komfortowy, przeglądając jeden kanał (feed), w którym wszystkie będą widoczne.

Python

The Python Graph Gallery

Welcome to the Python Graph Gallery, a collection of hundreds of charts made with Python. Charts are organized in about 40 sections and always come with their associated reproducible code.

Boring Python: code quality

This is the second in a series of posts I intend to write about how to build, deploy, and manage Python applications in as boring a way as possible.

Logging practices I follow

Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system.

Structured Logging with Structlog

An introduction to structured logging and its advantages using the structlog package for Python.

Python Docs - Logging Cookbook -Implementing structured logging

Although most logging messages are intended for reading by humans, and thus not readily machine-parseable, there might be circumstances where you want to output messages in a structured format which is capable of being parsed by a program (without needing complex regular expressions to parse the log message).

Same words, different meanings

One of the difficulties when comparing programming languages is that they sometimes use the same words to describe similar things, but always with differences. Sometimes the differences are large enough that we want to use different words, but often they are not.

Django

BookWyrm

BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.

Questions to ask a Django company

If you’re looking for questions to ask a software company, then here are a few to get you started. Keep in mind, these are not meant as “gotcha” questions. The point of them is to understand the company you would be joining, so you can make the best decision possible.

How to Log Users In With Their Email

Learn how to use Django's authentication system to log users in with an email instead of a username.

Go

The Best Go framework: no framework?

While writing this blog and leading Go teams for a couple of years, the most common question I heard from beginners was “What framework should I use?”. One of the worst things you can do in Go is follow an approach from other programming languages.

Wild Workouts

Go DDD example application. Complete project to show how to apply DDD, Clean Architecture, and CQRS by practical refactoring.

Tools

HandleFinder

HandleFinder is a powerful tool that can be used to find usernames across many social networks. This project is a wrapper around the Sherlock Project.

Feeder

Feeder is a fully free/libre feed reader. It supports all common feed formats, including JSONFeed. It doesn't track you. It doesn't require any setup. It doesn't even need you to create an account! Just setup your feeds, or import them from your old reader via OPML, then get on with syncing and reading.

Other stuff

RealWorld Example apps

See how the exact same Medium.com clone (called Conduit) is built using different frontends and backends. Yes, you can mix and match them, because they all adhere to the same API spec 😮😎

While most "todo" demos provide an excellent cursory glance at a framework's capabilities, they typically don't convey the knowledge & perspective required to actually build real applications with it.

Discover the best graduation speeches

One and only place to find a curated list of best commencement speeches.

Videos

Stamps Back the 5th Moleman documentary. From Commodore 64s smuggled across the Iron Curtain to cracked games on cassette tapes sold at flea markets, floppy disk swapping via postal mail, hacked phone booths connected to US BBSes, and copy parties packed to capacity, Stamps Back tells the story of how teenagers in Hungary ignited a computing revolution in the 1980s with illegally copied video games from the West, and began the Hungarian demoscene. More info at stampsback.com