Here are links I found interesting, with some color commentary. Here we go.
Top Link for the week
A rebirth, as it were, of US manned space flight. Incidentally, as of this time of writing, SpaceX is now docked with IIS!
Automation and Development
- AWS CLI with jq and Bash: I wish AWS CLI is consistent with their query and filtering options. Until that happens, jq is always going to be needed.
- Java turns 25—aging like fine wine or more like milk?: In spite of itself, it is alive and well and will continue to torture developers and sysadmins alike.
- Terraform v0.13.0 beta program: Looking forward to using loops in modules!
- Automation Analytics - ROI Calculator and Notifications enhancements: If you want to know how much money it costs to do manual work as opposed to automated work, this may be a useful tool for you to use.
- Are You a Developer?: I like this, as it dispense with the ridiculous gatekeeping that certain developers have about their profession.
- Terraform: Cool tool that lets you see a graphical view of your Terraform resources. I look forward to its progress.
- How git revert works: Or how to dig yourself out from pushing buggy code into production.
- Introducing Swift AWS Lambda Runtime: I have a greater appreciate of JavaScript and where it is used since I poked around with NodeJS. I need to crave up some time to learn how to write Swift code.
- Terraform, can you keep a secret?: Terraform issues with secrets is pretty well documented, so you really need to make sure to avoid accidentally putting in confidential credentials in your Terraform code.
- AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure graph management service — and needs to act more like it: Terraform is not perfect, but it is increasingly become a huge improvement over CloudFormation. I think this article clearly defined the big reason why CloudFormation can be such a pain.
Cloud, Containers, and Networking - Distributed Environments
- How to Compete with AWS: this is why Azure is so successfully competing with AWS - they have very specific strengths that AWS lack as well as trust with specific business sectors.
- Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?: An explanation as to why Kubernetes has explode in usage and hype. Also, it is pretty easy to mis-spell kubernetes.
- Test your home network performance: I love the speed test from CloudFlare, as it breaks down your metrics and location in a very easy to view UI.
- AWS Networking 101: How AWS Networking works for those who are new in AWS.
General Tech and Science
- Ancient Egyptian coffins and mystery of ‘black goo’"" Sounds like a plot from a bad B-Movie.
- There's a light over in the IndieWeb space: The idea of a independent web is more important than ever to counter the dominance of certain tech companies.
- What Causes Beef Rainbows?: Beef rainbow always freak me a bit, as it reminds of gasoline in the water. Glad to hear they are safe to ignore.
- The Incredible Story of the US Army's Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains: Land trains sound cooler than what they actually look like, but it is still neat.
- Can 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so!: Maths are hards.
- CLIs are reified UIs: Explanation as to why CLI are superior to GUIs using mildly pretentious words. FYI to the reader, here is the definition of reify.
- Vitamin D: the New COVID-19 Chloroquine?: I have to admit that I have been taking Vitamin D with the thinking that it will help me fight Covid-19. This article clears up the misconceptions behind Vitamin D.
- Hacker Folklore: An explanation of the common technical terms use in the industry, some which dated back centuries.
How Tos, Learning, and Certifications
- Reddit: Lessons Learned from Mistakes Made Scaling to 1 Billion Pageviews a Month: learned lessons that can be used to scale your environment.
- Introduction to Algorithms: Free videos that help you brush up on basic computer science concepts.
- Juniper Networks Open Learning Schedule: Free exam webinars for taking the Juniper certification exams.
Operating Systems
- Linux networking: socket stats via ss: If you are still using netstat, it is time to move on to ss.
- ZFS focus on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: what’s new?: ZFS on Linux has fairly checkered history due to licensing and stability, which lead to its very slow adoption. Let see where this goes.
- Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 brings updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: Latest packages for Red Hat 7 Linux distribution. Particularly important as some packages like Python 2 are no longer supported upstream.
Open Source
- The Day AppGet Died.: A fairly bittersweet story about how Microsoft essentially copied an Open source project with winget. I guess some things never change.
Hardware
- The Raspberry Pi 4 is Now Available With 8GB RAM: Very excited for this. This means I can now have a fairly beefy home kubernetes cluster.
- The radix 2^51 trick: Computers maths differently.
Security
- Read-only Jenkins Configuration: I put this under security as this will address reliability and security issues with Jenkins.
- Universal Patch Manager: A promising project on patching your Linux instances. Hopefully this gets active community support.
- What is the optimal password length: What you need to know when you create your password.
- Moving to the Cloud? How to Secure APIs on AWS, Azure, and GCP : A comparison on how you would secure your API services on each major cloud provider.
- OpenSSL 3.0: Biggest changes to OpenSSL since. . . like forever.
- Linux Security Hardening and Other Tweaks: Basic steps on how would you harden your Linux machine.
- Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom: An older article, but it is becoming a classic.
- Security Tools! - Curated list of security tools for Hackers & Builders!: A list of all the tools used for securing your environment.
Careers
- Sysadmin skills: What junior sysadmins need to know: Important soft skills to know if you want to grow beyond being a junior sysadm - or any junior anything, for that matter.
- Top 10 Soft Skills You Need as an IT Professional: In this newly competitive IT environment, it is now more important than ever to have good to great soft skills.
- Startup or Enterprise, A Tale of Two Careers: It is important to understand the difference between working in a startup vs working in a larger business, as it does determine your quality of life as well as job satisfaction.
Entertainment
- How We Made: Airplane!: Surely, you must be serious.