After a false start in 2023, I want to get back to posting weekly link posts again. If for no other reason, but to make it easy for me to make notes about some of the good stuff I see on the internet, and search for it later.
- I watched this mad video by Strange Parts (aka Scotty Allen) where he built a custom Aluminium back for his iPhone. We tend to glaze over the amount of engineering that goes into building modern, sophisticated products that we use every day. This video gives us a sneak peek into the effort needed to reverse engineer just one component, the back, of an iPhone. I’m in awe of the video, the humongous effort to get this working, and have new found respect for all the production engineers around me.
- As a DevOps/Site Reliability professional in a software startup, I’ve often had to think about hwo to share secrets of various kinds with other members on the team. The approaches have evolved over time, with some depending on using the cloud provider’s secret store itself, but each ends up having some rough edges (in this particular case, how does one share AWS access for a new member in the team, during their initial developer environment set up, but not so much access that they can harm user facing systems). I found this neat usage pattern that relies on the convention of using
.env
files, but instead of checking those credentials into version control, it refers to a path in a shared 1Password vault. I’m sure other team password vault services will have some ways to do this, so if you’re on a team that needs to share secrets, here’s a low hanging fruit to pick! - I’ve often wondered about how people learn to read/understand code, especially when they join a new team or project. There’s been some academic conversations and papers about it too, but I’ve not yet come across ones that are easy to grasp for us normie developers. However, I did find an excellent post about how to start working and contributing back to a large codebase (which is the next logical step after reading): Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases. I can vouch for these approaches and patterns as being very effectively used by the really smart folks in the tech industry.
- Ever since I started using FreeBSD on my home server, I’ve been enjoying reading posts and watching videos by folks in the community. Michael W Lucas is a very prolific and entertaining speaker, who I’ve probably shared about previously on this blog. Stefano Marinelli is another person in this community who has been sharing excellent blog posts about their work with real world clients that depend on FreeBSD systems. Although this post can feel like a big self plug for the author, I related very much to the underlying ethos of a stable, reliable and performant system that gives everyone around it peace of mind.
- Lastly (but not the least), Sunanda has published the second edition of her Today I Learnt (from the internet) series of posts as a book titled 2IL. As someone who enjoys learning something new everyday, I’m so happy to see folks publicly sharing their learnings too.