37 / Preventing Log4j with Capabilities

Welcome back and a happy new year! 🎇

Tweet of the Week

Ah, nice to be on holiday, at Christmas, where I can forget about what happ… — @mgdm

Favourites

• Generics facilitators in Go (rakyll.org)

  Jaana Dogan introduces a workaround for Go’s lack of parameterised methods.

• Preventing Log4j with Capabilities (justinpombrio.net)

  Justin Pombrio about the concept of capabilities and how they could’ve prevented the Log4j disaster. I want this in every language!

• Why is my Rust build so slow? (fasterthanli.me)

  Amos dives deep into Rust build-times and the impact of splitting a project up into crates or using a different linker.

Culture

• Sustainable creativity in a world without copyright (drewdevault.com)

  Drew DeVault paints a picture of a world without copyright and how artists will benefit from it.

• The Gift of It's Your Problem Now (apenwarr.ca)

  apenwarr describes the complicated relationship of paying for open source and how paying for gifts does not work.

• Labs & Simulation Environments (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss describes best practices when doing lab or simulation environment work sample tests.

Software Engineering

• Contexts and capabilities in Rust (tmandry.gitlab.io)

  Tyler Mandry describes their idea of having contexts and capabilities in Rust.

• Three Minor Features in Go 1.18 (blog.carlmjohnson.net)

  Carl M. Johnson about three minor features in Go 1.18: runtime/debug.BuildInfo, http.MaxBytesHandler and strings.Cut.

• Trying Out Generics in Go (markphelps.me)

  Mark Phelps tried out the new generics in Go 1.18 and has a few tips to get started.

• Tools You Should Know About: nix-shell (cuddly-octo-palm-tree.com)

  Gary Verhaegen explains nix-shell with concrete examples on how to get started.

• Fix the unit test and open a giant hole everywhere (rachelbythebay.com)

  Rachel tells the story of a small change in a commonly used internal package lead to severe security issues.

• My negative views on Rust (chrisdone.com)

  This newsletter has a lot of (pro) Rust news, so here’s a piece by Chris Done that shows their negative views on the language.

Cutting Room Floor

• (mac)OStalgia (swallowmygraphicdesign.com)

  Michael Feeney built a Mac OS 9 UI Kit for Figma and proceeded to imagine Spotify, Slack, Chrome and more in a Mac OS 9 look.

• Hacking Stories #2 - The virus that came in from the cold (kerkour.com)

  Another fictional hacking story by Sylvain Kerkour about a revengeful person who hacks their previous employer using a supply chain attack.

• Five Thousand Stories (randsinrepose.com)

  Michael Lopp about the personal value of things and their new custom-made bookshelf.