I am again starting a newsletter (sort of) with no expectations on its frequency. I will share links that I find useful and my short take on them.
Coding in the Cloud with Codespaces – Link
Why codespaces:
- On demand standard dev environments
- Brings uniformity
- Make software dev more accessible
- Reduces friction
- Enable quick experimentation
We have not commoditized dev. We have commoditized everything else.
Learn to think in sed, awk, and grep – Link
Learn how to do text processing with sed, awk, and grep
Why you should be deploying Postgres primarily on Kubernetes – Link
Covers many reasons why you may want to run Postgres on Kubernetes. Reasons include production ready configuration, connection pooling, automated backup, monitoring, high availability setup, and few others. Also, it talks about an interesting project called Stackgres that automates all of that. With a few lines of YAML you can have your full setup automated and running on Kubernetes in less than an hour.
Intentional connection in the digital office – Link
The real challenge of remote work isn’t that it somehow erases the mysterious serendipity of magical office collisions. The problem is that making connections digitally requires enrollment and effort. If we do it with intent, it actually works better.
Spotify’s open platform for shipping at scale – Link
- Giving teams autonomy and unblocking them
- 2000 Microservices and 4000 data pipelines
- 2000 git pushes a day
- Standardize so that not every team has to reinvent
- Backstage is a tool for creating developer portals
- Backstage started as service catalog then devs started adding automation
- Plugin architecture
- Open source help attracts talent
Context – Link
You have to get deeper to understand the context in which decisions are made. This will help you understand why behind decisions and choices. It is easier said than done.
Generic mitigations – Link
I never thought about mitigations in this way. Generic mitigations is the one useful in mitigating a wide variety of outages. The author talks about how you should have generic mitigations as part of production readiness review. Observability has become part of most production readiness reviews but I have not seen mitigations thought in this way. Author lists examples of many generic mitigations like rollbacks, data rollbacks, upsize, drain, quarantine, etc.
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine – Link
I 100% agree with the author if you know how to upskill yourself quickly and effectively you will do fine in software development. I still think that how you have done software development in your formative years matters a lot. If you get into the right habits and develop software development sense you will do just fine. Technologies come and go and you can’t learn everything.
Migrating Notion’s marketing site to Next.js – Link
I love reading case studies. This is a detailed post by the Notion team on why they moved their marketing site from client side React app to Next.js powered static site. They talked about the rationale behind their decision and choices they made along the way.
An Introduction to JQ – Link
I use jq whenever I have to process JSON on my command-line terminal. It takes some time to get used to the jq filtering API. This post will teach you everything you need to know about jq.
The Art of Not Taking Things Personally – Link
The author talks about ten patterns that can help us avoid taking things personally. This post also made me think about my behavior as well. My favorites from the list are:
- Anxiety is Often Driven by A Lack of Visibility
- Unrequested Advice is Often Driven by Regret
- Selflessness is Often Driven by Guilt
Must read for all of us.
Shekhar Gulati 