Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.

Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. 

There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. 

The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a  low-code/no-code  style. 

Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?

Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to  live online?

 

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.

Dr. Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. 

A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.

Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. 

If you want a more human readable  version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs. 

 

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.

Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. 

Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. 

The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. 

While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks would prefer to be writing business logic and solving new problems. But those input validation errors and resource leaks won’t solve themselves. 

Or will they?

AWS Bug Bust is a global competition launched with the goal of finding and fixing one million bugs in codebases around the world. It takes the traditional bug bash and turns it into a competition that anyone can enter. Got a repo or two that you’ve been meaning to clean up? Enter the Bug Bust and start squashing. 

This competition awards points to organizations, as well as individuals within an organization, for every bug that they fix in their own repos. A little friendly competition can motivate developers to fix more bugs in order to move up the leaderboards. How do you think we built Stack Overflow? Fake internet points are very important around here. With the Bug Bust competition, it’s not just fake internet points and personal glory; top bug squashers—overall and within top organizations—can win all expense paid trips to re:Invent 2021. 

In a traditional bug bust, someone has to find the bugs, file tickets on all of them, then collect them for squashing. In the Bug Bust, Amazon has managed to automate that part of the process. That’s because the Bug Bust is built on their AI-powered code review and profiling tool, CodeGuru. 

CodeGuru uses static analysis and machine learning with some additional automated reasoning to find bugs in code; everything from best practices to concurrency issues, resource leaks, security problems, and more. AI isn’t here to take your jobs, it’s here to automated away the tedious stuff. Developers get to harness the power of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives.

Concurrency and resource leak issues tend to drain the soul out of the developers. You could spend all day trying to optimize and close those. CodeGuru includes a function profiler that looks for a codebase’s most expensive calls. It’s a lightweight agent actively running and looking for ways to reduce the cost of the running application. 

These bugs, along with security issues and AWS API calls, are the ones that earn the most points. But all bugs earn their bashers points; CodeGuru spots code inefficiencies, duplications, and general code quality detectors, and performs input validation. The model behind this is pretrained on years of Amazon bug hunting experience. The system does learn from you as to what is a good bug in your codebase, but it’s not training on your code. It’s your feedback that makes CodeGuru a better bug hunter.

If you have Java and Python code in a GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, or AWS CodeCommit repository, you can jump into the competition. Sign up with your email and you get 30 days to run as many Bug Busts as you want for free. The top ten individual bug busters get VIP treatment at the 2021 re:Invent conference (and an all-expense-paid trip there), which is being held in person this year. Top participating organizations get  a ticket to give to one of their developers as well. For those bashers outside of the top ten, you can still earn some sweet swag by passing some point milestones. 

The contest to win the trip to re:Invent 2021 runs through September, but you can still automate your bug bashes and get swag anytime. Want to get started? Head over to the AWS Bug Bust site now.

Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely 

Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, which had a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, 1 KB of static RAM ,and 4 KB of read-only memory. Pretty good for 1980. 

Weaveworks based their project on Flux, an open source engine. If you're not a big corporation and you want to use it, it's free!

Before there was Kubernetes, Google created Borg, an internal cluster manager. It has yet to be assimilated by Kubernetes. 

Ben thinks that, if it gets too easy to manage Kubernetes clusters, we'll be out of a job talking about the pain of cluster manages. 

Today's lifeboat badge goes to Daniel Ribeiro for the answer to How can I run Go binary files?

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.

You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.

You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.

Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here. 

Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check out good read from Netflix's tech blog here.

Instead of a lifeboat badge we're highlighting an amazing question: Can celestial objects be used in cryptography?

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.

Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView?

You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.

You can check out Applitools and  learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to  Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer?

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO.  You can find him on Twitter here.

Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.

You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python.

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. 

Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.

We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!

Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?

Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.