Through the Stack: 1.26 (week 51)

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 relevant thoughts and content to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.

Edito

Time has flown! We are back in those last weeks of the year to conclude the first series of "Through the stack".

As you might have seen, in the last month, we have re-posted a few past articles from the original Imfiny blog. Several of them are about health and having a better balance. This is a theme that will continue throughout the coming year, I expect, and will be reflected in the links of this newsletter.

Security and tools

If you are still using Github, you might be interested to know that they now do a free check for leaked secrets within your public repositories.

Git 2.39 has been released with several features and fixes.

DoorDash published an interesting post about how they handle transfer of data between their infrastructure and third parties'. A technical post that is very interesting.

Tech & stacks

Readers of this newsletter won't have any surprises to see a post about ScyllaDB here. The NoSQL column-oriented data store made to look like Cassandra has been on the radar of Imfiny/Pier22 for a few years now. They have published a flurry of posts recently and one caught my eyes as I scanned Feedly for this episode: reducing costs while migrating from Cassandra to ScyllaDB.

Still in the database area: Tailscale has partnered with Crunchy Birdge to let users of the second connect to their PG clusters securely. Although you might not use Crunchy Bridge and might not be planning to (even though the features seem interesting), this is a nice move to see. This might show the way for several vendors to give secure access to PG clusters without fully exposing them to the internet.

While we are talking about PostgreSQL, let's talk about the other database that looks list PostgreSQL: CockroachDB. users of PostgreSQL will probably know of ways to rely on Triggers to propagate changes to services. DoorDash used a similar approach on CockroachDB with Kafka. An interesting read.

Hanami 2.0 has been released ! This is great news: the other "big" Ruby web framework is still alive and growing. The great folks at AppSignal have published a "first look at Hanami 2" post.

Culture

Writing good code is one thing; writing good documentation is another. Lorin Hochstein's published an interesting post about writing documentation for software engineers.

For those of us on the DDD journey or anything related to Agile, communication with the user of the product is essential. Documentation is part of that.

In the same theme, Joseph Glass has published a post about naming in software. A problematic topic, although simple at first. The post is great: it covers the topic from a high altitude before dropping to ever lower details and finishes with a practical example. An excellent read for anyone on an engineering team.

Leadership

The jump from culture to leadership isn't always straightforward but this article ("you are not lacking passion you are lacking energy") from Plum Ertz on Leaddev.com does that. Although focused on the question of "energy and passion", Plum moves nicely to bigger questions through the article to allow the reader to ponder one's approach to work and one's organization.

This is much in the same line as our "Levels of war" approach: take a step back to better focus.

Leaddev.com has also started to regroup posts about leadership in time of crisis. Among those, this week Lena Reinhard published "How to lead through economic downturn".

Music

As I listened to a few tracks suggested by some algorithms I kept thinking "this sound like Dead Can Dance". And indeed it was. A series of flashbacks from the 90s and early 2000s followed ... So here is the track that triggered it and I couldn't help listening to one of their classics.

Any Dead Can Dance track stuck in your memories?

Epilogue

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Next week will be the last episode of the year.

Don't hesitate to ping me through https://twitter.com/ThomasRiboulet_ or through through-the-stack@imfiny.com with content suggestions or comments.

Who are we, by the way?

This content is written and published by Imfiny/CloudPier22, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We also train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).