April 2024
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
503 days working full-time on FOSS: lessons learned
This article shares some of the lessons I learned from working full-time on a FOSS project for 503 days.
Verified curl
Here follows a brief description on how you can detect if the curl package would ever make an xz.
Pi Reliability: Reduce writes to your SD card
If you aren’t using a read-only filesystem on your Raspberry Pi, you should reduce the amount of stuff that gets written to its SD card. This will help increase the card’s lifespan and keep your Pi running smoothly.
How Levels.fyi Built Scalable Search with PostgreSQL
Our philosophy to scaling is simple, avoid premature optimization.
Leveraging Side Projects for Career Growth in Engineering
My Simple Framework to Turn Side Projects into Career Boosters
Productivity
Mental Health in Software Engineering
I want to talk about something we don't discuss enough in our field: the mental health of software engineers, especially those of us who've taken on the challenge of leadership.
How to work from home: Strategies to optimize remote work
Learning how to build beautiful products without burning myself out (again). Writing about what I discovered along the way.
Jak nie wpaść w pułapki nauki?
Tutorial hell
Security
Afera wokół XZ. Próba zaminowania cyfrowego świata
Jedno źródło wszystkich rzek. Może by tu czegoś dolać?
gynvael: xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
While admittedly most juicy and interesting part is the obfuscated binary with the backdoor, the part that caught my attention – and what this blogpost is about – is the initial part in bash and the simple-but-clever obfuscation methods used there.
Python
Python F-String Codes I Use Every Day
A few examples that will save the day probably* 95% of time.
Django
10 reasons I stick to Django rather than FastAPI
Choosing where to invest one's time in learning new technologies is a personal decision, shaped by individual preferences, project requirements, and long-term goals.
How to optimize PostgreSQL queries from Django using pgMustard
Slow queries happen, and when they do, it can be tough to dissect why they’re slow. This difficulty is compounded by using Django’s ORM, since it generates the SQL for you, so you may have little idea of the actual queries “under the hood”.
Django Developers Survey 2023
This report is based on the third annual Django Developers Survey, conducted in September – October 2023 as a collaborative effort between the Django Software Foundation and PyCharm. To help us get a better idea of the current state of the framework and the ecosystem around it, around 4,000 Django users and enthusiasts from around the world took the survey.
Learn to use Websockets with Django by building your own ChatGPT
Everything you need to know about websockets to use them in your applications, with Django, channels, and HTMX.
Sending email in Django using GMail
Another day, another beginner wanting to use GMail for free email sending, while this is entirely valid for a small project, please don't do this for your next startup.
Cloud
Google Cloud: How Commerzbank safeguards its data with VPC Service Controls
With VPC Service Controls, the Cyber Center of Excellence at Commerzbank set the standard for controlling data flow.
Other stuff
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
A biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, and global politics at the internet's core.