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Here are the things that caught my eye this week. I’d love to hear what you found most interesting this week. Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
Today’s JavaScript trash fire and pile on
Four years ago I wrote a slightly inflamatory blog on what still sucks in front-end dev. One of the points was on Bower and how JS library management sucks. Sadly, the tools have changed, but JS library managment still sucks.This post is in response to the recent npm even-stream package that had malicious code injected into it by a new maintainer. Link: https://medium.com/@cnorthwood/todays-javascript-trash-fire-and-pile-on-f3efcf8ac8c7
Open-Source Maintainers are Jerks!
As software developers we often make use of open-source software (OSS) but do we ever think about all the man hours that go into developing and supporting the project. When OSS breaks, or we need a new features, we log an issue on gitHub and then sit back awaiting a response. After a week of waiting we start complaining about how badly the project is run. The thing about OSS that’s too often forgetten, it’s AS-IS, no exceptions. Different projects may operate differently, with more or less people, with work being prioritised differently, on differing release schedules but in all cases the software delivered is as-is, meaning that there is absolutely no SLA. In this talk we’ll look at a day in the life of an OSS maintainer: what drives them, what annoys them and what keeps them up at night. Maintainers aren’t jerks, they just care about the project more than you do.Thought this was a worthwile related talk to watch in regards to the npm package issue this week. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm_RuObpeGo
Serverless Data APIs with Azure Functions and Cosmos DB
Azure Functions, Microsoft’s serverless offering, allow developers to focus on their code and not be concerned with infrastructure or DevOps. And thanks to a slew of built-in integrations, it’s also easy to have your functions get and send data to various services or even be triggered by events in those services. One such integration is with Azure Cosmos DB, the multi-model, globally distributed NoSQL data service. Cosmos DB exposes data as documents that you can access via SQL, JavaScript MongoDB or Cassandra as well as graph and key-value store. In this session, you’ll see how easily you can build an API from a set of Azure Functions that interact with Cosmos DB documents and some other services. We’ll go all cross-platform with Visual Studio Code and Node JS.Julie Lerman – Serverless Data APIs with Azure Functions and Cosmos DB | Øredev 2018 from Øredev Conference on Vimeo. Link: https://vimeo.com/302679933
windows-dev-box-setup-scripts
The goal of this project is to provide a central place to share ideas for streamlining dev box setup and provide sample scripts for common dev scenarios. It’s likely you will want to take the scripts here and modify them to fit your particular needs.I was recentlys setting up a new dev machine and Rich Turner pointed me to this repo.
Guarded Devirtualization
Guarded devirtualization is a proposed new optimization for the jit in .Net Core 3.0. This document describes the motivation, initial design sketch, and highlights various issues needing further investigatio The .Net Core jit is able to do a limited amount of devirtualization for virtual and interface calls. This ability was added in .Net Core 2.0. To devirtualize the jit must be able to demonstrate one of two things: either that it knows the type of some reference exactly (say because it has seen aLink: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/5af32b00186ba37f5b2cdc4b0a9b5715d7807f1d/Documentation/design-docs/GuardedDevirtualization.mdnewobj) or that the declared type of the reference is afinalclass (akasealed). For virtual calls the jit can also devirtualize if it can prove the method is marked asfinal.