Possums Newsletter

Friday newsletterday:

These are all the cool articles I found:

AWS News:
– IAM now shows action-last-accessed per service: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/09/aws-identity-access-management-action-last-accessed-information/

Tech:
– How git stores older versions of files (spoiler, its not just diffs): https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/09/14/in-a-git-repository–where-do-your-files-live-/
– How git handles packfiles (a weird internal git filetype): https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/unpacking-git-packfiles
– XML > YAML apparently? A horrible horrible document I hate to agree with (TOML is great, just discovered CUE): https://changelog.com/posts/xml-better-than-yaml
– Tracing > logging. Could act on this when we had datadog integrated, but that’s expensive. Open Telemetry FTW. I’m probably going to play around with this in my personal time: https://andydote.co.uk/2023/09/19/tracing-is-better/
– FOSS alternative to Datadog or NewRelic: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx
– Idempotency – I remember learning this word in Algebra 1 around cool tensors were A^2 = A (tensors are cool!): https://www.berkansasmaz.com/every-programmer-should-know-idempotency/
– Exponential value at linear cost – Availability with n hosts: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/09/08/exponential.html
– A way to think about debugging: https://ntietz.com/blog/how-i-debug-2023/

Arch:
– Instagram scaling to 14M users with 3 engineers: https://engineercodex.substack.com/p/how-instagram-scaled-to-14-million
– LotusDB (next gen redis?): https://github.com/lotusdblabs/lotusdb
– PageFind, a text search library for web frameworks: https://pagefind.app/
– How to think about aging code: https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/aging-code/


Not technical:
– On asking questions (better questions are good for everyone): https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/asking-right-questions/
– On working with PMs and designers. I enjoy going back to basics and understanding where other profiles come from: https://careercutler.substack.com/p/how-to-be-the-favorite-engineer-among
– On communicating Engieering stuff to non-eng people: https://devinterrupted.substack.com/p/4-engineering-slides-ceos-love-thattt
– On time stealers from developer production: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-240-the-ultimate-guide-to-developer
– A nice postmortem about how mfa failed: https://retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-mfa/

Longer stuff:
– SSH in depth, but only the cool parts: https://grahamhelton.com/blog/ssh-cheatsheet/
– New MongoDB query enging. I’m facinated by db internals: https://laplab.me/posts/inside-new-query-engine-of-mongodb/
– How GEOIP works: https://ipapi.is/geolocation.html
– Netflix migration to GraphQL: https://netflixtechblog.com/migrating-netflix-to-graphql-safely-8e1e4d4f1e72
– Adataptative Rate-Lmiting: https://medium.com/fluxninjahq/why-adaptive-rate-limiting-is-a-game-changer-79f130e6ec71
– Postgres 16 is live! https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-16-released-2715/