We've got a smorgasbord of delights for you this week, ranging from mechanical switches to the cloud and beyond. Also, Michael's cosplaying as Megaman, Joe learns the difference between Clicks and Clacks, and Allen takes no prisoners.
Leave us a review if you have a chance! (/reviews)
The Show
Why are mechanical keyboards so popular with programmers?
Is it the sound? Is it the feel? What are silent switches? Are they missing the point?
You can buy key switches for good prices (drop.com)
Cloud Costs Every Programmer should know (vantage.sh) (Thanks Mikerg!)
List of static analysis tools, so you can get with the times! (GitHub) (Thanks Mikerg!)
From itsmatt:
"I’d love a breakdown of what each of you think are your key differences in philosophies or approaches to software development. Could be from arguments or debates on older episodes, whether on coding, leadership, startups, AI, whatever - just curious about how best to tell everyone’s voices apart based on what they’re saying. I know one of you is Jay Z (JZ?), but slow to pick up on which host is which based on accents alone."
How do you center a div? Within a div? With right-align text? What about centering 3 divs? What if you want to space them out evenly? If you've been away from CSS for a while, you may be a bit rusty on the best ways to do this. Not sure if it's "the best" but an easy solution to these problems is to use Flexbox, and lucky for you there is a fun little game designed to teach you how to use it. (flexboxfroggy.com)
Drop.com is a website focused on computer gear, headphones, keyboards, desk accessories etc. It's got a lot of cool stuff! (drop.com)
Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? Recovering files in git doesn't have to be hard with the "restore" command (rewind.com)
Have trouble with your hands and want to limber up? Also doubles as a cool retro Capcom Halloween costume. It's a LifePro Hand Massager! (amazon)
In this episode, we are talking all about GitHub Actions. What are they, and why should you consider learning more about them? Also, Allen terminates the terminators, Outlaw remembers the good ol' days, and Joe tries his hand at sales.
GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform launched in 2018 that lets you define and automate workflows
It's well integrated into Github.com and fits nicely with git paradigms - repository, branches, tags, pull requests, hashes, immutability (episode 195)
The workflows can run on GitHub-hosted virtual machines, or on your own servers
GitHub Actions are free for standard Github runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners, private repositories get a certain amount of "free" minutes and any overages are controlled by your spending limits
2000 minutes and 500MB for free, 3000 minutes and 1Gb for Pro, etc (docs.github.com)
Examples of things you can do
Automate builds and releases whenever a branch is changed
Run tests or linters automatically on pull requests
Automatically create or assign Issues, or labels to issues
Publish changes to your gh-pages, wiki, releases,
Check out the "Actions" tab on any github repository to check if a repository has anything setup (github.com)
The "Actions" in GitHub Actions refers to the most atomic action that takes place - and we'll get there, but let us start from the top
Workflows
Workflow is the highest level concept, you see any workflows that a repository has set up (learn.microsoft.com)
A workflow is triggered by an event: push, pull request, issue being opened, manual action, api call, scheduled event, etc (learn.microsoft.com)
TypeScript examples:
CI - Runs linting, checking, builds, and publishes changes for all supported versions of Node on pull request or push to main or release-* branches
Close Issues - Looks for stale issues and closes them with a message (using gh!)
Code Scanning - Runs CodeQL checks on pull request, push, and on a weekly schedule
Publish Nightly - Publishes the last set of successful builds every night
Workflows can call other workflows in your repository, or in a repository you have access to
Special note about calling other workflows - when embedding other workflows you can specify a specific version with either a tag or a commit # to make sure you're running exactly what you expect
In the UI you'll see a filterable history of workflow runs on the right
The workflow is associated with a yaml file located in ./github/workflows
Clicking on a workflow in the left will show you a history of that workflow and a link to that file (cli.github.com)
Jobs
Workflows are made up of jobs, which are associated with a "runner" (machine) (cli.github.com)
Jobs are mainly just a container for "Steps" which are up next, but the important bit is that they are associated with a machine (virtual or you can provide your own either via network or container)
Jobs can also be dependent on other jobs in the workflow - Github will figure out how to run things in the required order and parallelize anything it can
You're minutes are counted by machine time, so if you have 2 jobs that run in parallel that each take 5 minutes…you're getting "charged" for 10 minutes
Steps
Jobs are a group of steps that are executed in order on the same runner
Data can easily be shared between steps by echoing output, setting environment variables or mutating files
An action is a custom application written for the GitHub Actions platform
GitHub provides a lot of actions and other 3p (verified or not) providers do as well in the "Marketplace", you can use other people's actions (as long as they don't delete it!), and you can write your own
Github Checkout - provides options for things like repository, fetch-depth, lfs (github.com)
Setup .NET Core SDK - Sets up a .NET CLI environment for doing dotnet builds (github.com)
Upload Artifact - Uploads data for sharing between jobs (90-day retention by default) (github.com)
Docker Build Push - Has support for building a Docker container and pushing it to a repository (Note: ghrc is a valid repository and even free tiers have some free storage) (github.com)
Custom Examples
"run" command lets you run shell commands (docker builds, curl, echo, etc)
We glossed over a lot of the details about how things work - such as various contexts where data is available and how it's shared, how inputs and outputs are handled…just know that it's there! (docs.github.com)
You grant job permissions, default is content-read-only but you must give fine-grained permissions to the jobs you run - write content, gh-pages, repository, issues, packages, etc
There is a section under settings for setting secrets (unretrievable and masked in output) and variables for your jobs. You have to explicitly share secrets with other jobs you call
There is support for "expressions" which are common programming constructions such as conditionals and string helper functions you can run to save you some scripting (docs.github.com)
Verdict
Pros:
GitHub Actions is amazing because it's built around git!
Great features comparable (or much better) than other CI/CD providers
Great integration with a popular tool you might already be using (docs.github.com)
Works well w/ the concepts of Git By default, workflows cannot use actions from GitHub.com and GitHub Marketplace. You can restrict your developers to using actions that are stored on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, which includes most official GitHub-authored actions, as well as any actions your developers create. Alternatively, to allow your developers to benefit from the full ecosystem of actions built by industry leaders and the open-source community, you can configure access to other actions from GitHub.com.
Great free tier
Great documentation https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-containerized-services/creating-postgresql-service-containers
Hosted/Enterprise version
Cons:
Working via commits can get ugly…make your changes in a branch and rebase when you're done!
Next Steps
If you are interested in getting started with DevOps, or just learning a bit more about it, then this is a great way to go! It's a great investment in your skillset as a developer in any case.
Examples:
Build your project on every pull request or push to trunk
Run your tests, output the results from a test coverage tool
Run a linter or static analysis tool
Post to X, Update LinkedIn whenever you create a new release
There is a GitHub Actions plugin for VSCode that provides a similar UI to the website. This is much easier than trying to make all your changes in Github.com or bouncing between VSCode and the website to see how your changes worked. It also offers some integrated documentation and code completion! It's definitely my preferred way of working with actions. (marketplace.visualstudio.com)
Did you know that you can cancel terminating a terminating persistent volume in Kubernetes? Hopefully you never need to, but you can do it! (github.com)
How are the Framework Wars going? Check out Google trends for one point of view. (trends.google.com)
Rebasing is great, don't be afraid of it! A nice way to get started is to rebase while you are pulling to keep your commits on top. git pull origin main --rebase=i
There's a Dockerfile Linter written in Haskell that will help you keep your Docker files in great shape. (docker.com)
Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT (youtube)
What is OpenTelemetry?
An incubating project on the CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (cncf.io)
What does incubating mean?
Projects used in production by a small number of users with a good pool of contributors
Basically you shouldn't be left out to dry here
So what is Open Telemetry? A collection of APIs, SDKs and Tools that's used to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data
This helps you analyze your software's performance and behavior
It's available across multiple languages and frameworks
It's all about Observability
Understanding a system "from the outside"
Doesn't require you to understand the inner workings of the system
The goal is to be able to troubleshoot difficult problems and answer the "Why is this happening?" Question
To answer those questions, the application must be properly "Instrumented"
This means the application must emit signals like metrics, traces, and logs
The application is properly instrumented when you can completely troubleshoot an issue with the instrumentation available
That is the job of OpenTelemetry - to be the mechanism to instrument applications so they become observable
List of vendors that support OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/vendors/
Reliability and Metrics
Telemetry - refers to the data emitted from a system about its behavior in the form of metrics, traces and logs
Reliability - is the system behaving the way it's supposed to? Not just, is it up and running, but also is it doing what it is expected to do
Metrics - numeric aggregations over a period of time about your application or infrastructure
CPU Utilization
Application error rates
Number of requests per second
SLI - Service Level Indicator - a measurement of a service's behavior - this should be in the perspective of a user / customer
Example - how fast a webpage loads
SLO - Service Level Objective - the means of communicating reliability to an organization or team
Accomplished by attaching SLI's to business value
Distributed Tracing
To truly understand what distributed tracing is, there's a few parts we have to put together first
Logs - a timestamped message emitted by applications
Different than a trace - a trace is associated with a request or a transaction
Heavily used in all applications to help people observe the behavior of a system
Unfortunately, as you probably know, they aren't completely helpful in understanding the full context of the message - for instance, where was that particular code called from?
Logs become much more useful when they become part of a span or when they are correlated with a trace and a span
Span - represents a unit of work or operation
Tracks the operations that a request makes - meaning it helps to paint a picture of what all happened during the "span" of that request/operation
Contains a name, time-related data, structured log messages, and other metadata/attributes to provide information about that operation it's tracking
Some example metadata/attributes are: http.method=GET, http.target=/urlpath, http.server_name=codingblocks.net
Distributed trace is also known simply as a trace - record the paths taken for a user or system request as it passes through various services in a distributed, multi-service architecture, like micro-services or serverless applications (AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions, etc)
Tracing is ESSENTIAL for distributed systems because of the non-deterministic nature of the application or the fact that many things are incredibly difficult to reproduce in a local environment
Tracing makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot problems because they break down what happens in a request as it flows through the distributed system
A trace is made of one or more spans
The first span is the "root span" - this will represent a request from start to finish
The child spans will just add more context to what happened during different steps of the request
Some observability backends will visualize traces as waterfall diagrams where the root span is at the top and branching steps show as separate chains below - diagram linked below (opentelemetry.io)
Attention Windows users, did you know you can hold the control key to prevent the tasks from moving around in the TaskManager. It makes it much easier to shut down those misbehaving key loggers! (verge.com)
Does your JetBrains IDE feel sluggish? You can adjust the heap space to give it more juice! (blogs.jetbrains.com)
Beware of string interpolation in logging statements in Kotlin, you can end up performing the interpolation even if you're not configured to output the statement types! IntelliJ will show you some squiggles to warn you. Use string templates instead. Also, Kotlin has "use" statements to avoid unnecessary processing, and only executes when it's necessary. (discuss.kotlinlang.org)
Thanks to Tom for the tip on tldr pages, they are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples. (tldr.sh)
Looking for some new coding music? Check out these albums from popular guitar heroes!
In this episode, we're talking about the history of "man" pages, console apps, team leadership, and Artificial Intelligence liability. Also, Allen's downloading the internet, Outlaw has fallen in love with the sound of a morrvair, and Joe says TUI like two hundred times as if it were a real word.
DevFest Florida is a community-run one-day conference aimed to bring technologists, developers, students, tech companies, and speakers together in one location to learn, discuss and experiment with technology. (devfestfl.org)
What are (were?) man pages?
"man" is a command-line "pager" similar to "more" or "less" that was designed specifically to display documentation - ahem, "manuals"
"man" pages would show you documentation for many apps in a (mostly) consistent manner that was available offline
Do people still use them?
People would print these out in the 70's and beyond!
Meta has been making serious strides in AI with LLAMA and...it's open source! Does that make them any more or less liable for the information? Does "publically available information" change things
Resources we like
Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon)
Want to learn something new while also making your life easier? Why not try writing a TUI!? Here's an article that will kindly introduce you to terminal user interfaces, libraries like "Clap", "TUI", and "Crossterm" that people are using to write them, and…you can get some XP with Rust while you're at it! (blog.logrocket.com)
Are you looking to upgrade your Kubernetes cluster? Check for API problems first!
Are you a browser tab fiend? Did you know you can reload all your tabs simultaneously with a simple shortcut? (groups.google.com)
No more nasty wiring jobs, get yourself to the hardware store website and pick up some wire and splicing connectors. Keep things nice, tidy, and organized. (wago.com)
Matt’s Off-road recovery channel is amazing if you're into cars or... beautiful-sounding things.
Are you tired of manually correlating logs and events? No more! Check out the Open Telemetry project for your distributed tracing and analytics needs! (opentelemetry.io)
In this episode, we're talking about lessons learned and the lessons we still need to learn. Also, Michael shares some anti-monetization strategies, Allen wins by default, and Joe keeps it real 59/60 days a year!
Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns: Effective testing styles, patterns, and reliable automation for unit testing, mocking, and integration testing with examples in C# (Amazon)