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Through the stack 1.16 (week 25)

Through the stack 1.16 (week 25)

This is "Through the Stack," a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet-related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead, and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organizations. This publication aims to share thoughts and content that are relevant to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.

This week ...

I had to refrain from including links related to team leadership and the "leading" topic. I have a few articles on this pilled up in the reading list, if they are as good as they seem we might have a nice compilation in the next episode.

Instead, we stayed technical with articles on a pair of databases to keep an eye on, Ruby (of course) but also on tooling and cloud.

From time to time it's probably good to check a few database projects out there to see how they are doing.

The two I keep an eye on are:

They are very different from each other but both can be used by most projects reaching a certain scale.

This week I spotted two articles about CockroachDB. The first one is about its consistency model. It has aged a bit probably but if you are into databases, it might still be of interest to you. The second one mixes in some Google Cloud Platform services to track change in a CockroachDB cluster.

ScyllaDB has often some very interesting stories attached to it. As a high speed implementation of Cassandra, it might have caught your eye already if you ever looked into this class of NoSQL databases. Well, this week I spotted an article about how a team used ScyllaDB on its own to process streams of data and ditched Kafka.

On the red side

A week without Ruby wouldn't be very usual for us at Imfiny. But it's about a side quest: talking to git with Ruby. Years ago there was no solution so we all called git through backticks or Open3. Nowadays we have multiple solutions to run git commands on a git repository from Ruby. Before listing them though, Thoughbot's blog has a nice article (from 2016) about how to rebuild Git in Ruby. A delicious find for those interested in both Git and Ruby and who want to have a play on one of those warm weekends.

That said, back to the main topic. Two implementations caught my eye. The first one is basically a wrapper around the git command: Ruby-git. The second one is more interesting as it's a library to access libgit2 through Ruby. As libgit2 is pure C the speed is pretty nice.

Tools

The web has become Google Chrome's kingdom over the last 10 years. As alternatives slowly fade away one small contender remain: Firefox. Its market share isn't what it use to be but it's still around, especially on Linux-based operating systems. Last week Firefox rolled out "Total Cookie Protection".

To put it simply it confines "cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site."

Food for thoughts

Andrew Mason shared, back in February, an interesting post titled "Stop Hoarding Notes". As a user of Obsidian, he was referring to notes we keep on piling up in there (or any other note management software). Yet, the content of the post is not just about that and is quite interesting to reflect on.

Training

Some people ask me how to get started on technologies such as AWS and GCP. Both have plenty of documentation to do so, but this week I came across Google Cloud announcement targeting college and university members. So possibly a good resource to share with your friends in university.

For those not in university, you probably want to check out "Get started with Google Cloud".

Podcasts

This time two episodes from maintainable have caught my eye (and ear):

Epilogue

This episode is coming to an end. If you want to talk about these topics or share some comments on them, you can reach out to me (see at the top and bottom of the newsletter for details).

Imfiny?

This content is written and published by Imfiny, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others) and train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).
We have courses available on https://learn.imfiny.com/. We are available for 3 to 18 months contracts. Contact us.