Abstraction is Expensive

As you build a computer system, little things start to show up: maybe that database query is awkward for the feature you are building, or you find your server getting bogged down transferring gigabytes of data in hexadecimal ASCII, or your app translates itself to Japanese on the fly for hundreds of thousands of separate users.

Find and fix flaky tests (sponsor)

Buildkite Test Analytics integrates with your test framework to track, monitor, and identify areas for improving the reliability of your test suite. Use it with popular frameworks like RSpec, Pytest, Jest, Minitest, JUnit, Elixir, and more. Works with any CI provider, any language, any test framework. Free for up to 175,000 test executions/month.

Taming Names in Software Development

Good names What is a name? A name is a label, a handle, a pointer in your brain’s memory. A complex idea neatly encapsulated. A name lets you refer to “the economy” , or “dogfooding” mid-sentence without needing a three-paragraph essay to explain the term.

Web resource caching: Server-side

While client-side caching works well, it has one central issue: to serve the resource locally, it must first have it in the cache. Thus, each client needs its cached resource. If the requested resource is intensive to compute, it doesn’t scale. The idea behind server-side caching is to compute the resource once and serve it from the cache to all clients.

Everything you should know about certificates and PKI but are too afraid to ask

Certificates and public key infrastructure (PKI) are hard. No shit, right? I know a lot of smart people who’ve avoided this particular rabbit hole. Personally, I avoided it for a long time and felt some shame for not knowing more. The obvious result was a vicious cycle: I was too embarrassed to ask questions so I never learned.

Kubernetes API Access Security Hardening (sponsor)

In a Kubernetes cluster, Control Plane controls Nodes, Nodes control Pods, Pods control containers, and containers control applications. But what controls the Control Plane? This article by Teleport focuses on recipes and best practices concerning API access control hardening in the Kubernetes cluster.

Twenty five thousand dollars of funny money

I used to work at a place that sold ads. One of the things this company wanted was for the employees to try it out and see what it was like to actually use the ads product themselves. It's the usual "dogfooding" thing you hear about sometimes.

We'll wrap up with a bit of a cloud theme today. ☁️

• Dev environments in the cloud are a half-baked solution
• The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
• Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times