83 / Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down

Hey everyone, hope your week has been good 😌

Toot of the Week

Give a man a fish. Sure, why not? Go around giving strangers weird fish gifts. Who cares — @donni@mastodon.social

Rust

• Memory Safe Languages in Android 13 (security.googleblog.com)

  Jeffrey Vander Stoep about the effect the switch to memory safe languages (i.e. Rust) had on memory safety vulnerabilities and speed. If you only read one article from this newsletter, make it this one.

• How much does Rust's bounds checking actually cost? (blog.readyset.io)

  The author benchmarks a complex test with over 1k bound checks against the same test with bounds checks disabled.

• WebAssembly: TinyGo vs Rust vs AssemblyScript (ecostack.dev)

  Sebastian Scheibe benchmarks different languages compiled to WebAssembly.

• Threads and messages with Rust and WebAssembly (tweag.io)

  Joe Neeman about Threads in WASM and communication performance.

• Measuring the overhead of HashMaps in Rust (ntietz.com)

  nicholas measured the overhead of using a HashMap and BTreeMap in Rust.

Tech

• Git Notes: git's coolest, most unloved­ feature (tylercipriani.com)

  Tyler Cipriani explains git notes and possible use cases. Thanks, Lukas!

• OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL (evilmartians.com)

  Andrey Sitnik and Travis Turner about the new oklab color space in CSS and why it’s better than everything else.

• Developer Experience Infrastructure (DXI) (kenneth.io)

  Kenneth Auchenberg explain what DX means in 2022 and coins a new acronym for Developer Experience Infrastructure: DXI

• Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down: From a Real Twitter SRE (matthewtejo.substack.com)

  Matthew’s Writing explains the automations and safety measures in place for the caches at Twitter.

• Using Server Sent Events to Simplify Real-time Streaming at Scale (shopify.engineering)

  Bao explains how Shopify used Server Sent Events (SSE) at scale for the Black Friday Cyber Monday Live Map.

Cutting Room Floor

• PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet (jwz.org)

  Jamie Zawinski about Hive and Post and why you should not use them.

• Warning: do not use Hive Social (zerforschung.org)

  Zerforschung found a number of critical vulnerabilities, including editing other people’s posts, which were ignored until Hive deactivated their servers.

• ‘Goblin Mode’: A State of Not Caring What Other People Think (wsj.com)

  Ben Zimmer about the origins of the term “Goblin Mode”.

• why Japan's internet is weirdly designed (youtu.be)

  Sabrina Cruz explains why Japanese websites look different than the rest of the world.

• In 2022, I thought a lot about my Mum, the internet and a cashless society (ithoughtaboutthatalot.com)

  A story about a woman that never got into technology and how society is ignorant of these people.

• Photography for geeks (lcamtuf.coredump.cx)

  An introduction into photography with example images that illustrate the effect of different techniques.