SmoothTerminal

ls ./articles

ReasonML is cool, Swift adopts LSP, Software engineering wisdom, Server side templating: who needs it?

ReasonML: Strict, powerful and forgiving - A great intro to ReasonML. ReasonML is a typescript style competitor to JS, along with reasoning and a short comparison to other competitors in the space. In case you've not gone through the ...

PostgreSQL: Efficient Queries - Indexing

How to index your tables to make your queries perform far more efficiently.

PostgreSQL: Explain

Understand what is going on under the hood of your queries.

Agile is Bullshit at the DoD, Deplatformed is the new black, Lua’s architecture, easy web performance gains

Lua is cool, been around a long time, and here is a deep dive into its design. Everyone will learn something useful from this article.

Gab.com is a weird cat. They support free speech, but have been deplatformed for that notion. At the same time,...

PostgreSQL: Analyze

How to keep PostgreSQL updated on the status of our tables so it can run queries as efficiently as possible.

PostgreSQL: Vacuum / Autovacuum

Eliminate the bloat in your database with vacuum and autovacuum.

Open Source Spotlight: Milligram - A minimalist CSS framework

This week the spotlight is on Milligram, which was created by CJ Patoilo.

Milligram is a super lightweight CSS framework, only weighing in around 2KB when minified and gzipped. It's pretty detailed for such a minimalist UI library and it has a...

Getting started with React 360 and Elixir

We will be using Elixir, a little phoenix ( little ), and React 360. You can read up on each here:

It should be noted that it is, at the time of writing this, hard to find good supporting docs for React 360, it has been...

WASM goes back to the Future, Give Lisp a chance, Microservices vs Monoliths, MongoDB RE-licenses, and Linkdump meta

WebAssembly's post-MVP future - Mozilla publishes the pièce de résistance on WASM--where it started, where it's at, and where it's going. Seriously, don't miss this. They outline the full development process and the long term...

Hacktoberfest! Get a sweet t-shirt for opening 5 PRs

This is one in a series of weekly spotlights on cool projects in the open source community that are looking for exposure or assistance. If you'd like your project to be featured, hit up us up at support at this domain and let us know about...

HackTracks - Music to Code By

We put together a playlist with some songs we love to listen to while coding. We thought you might enjoy it.

Give us some suggestions in the comments or on twitter @smoothterminal

PostgreSQL: General Configuration 2

Understanding pg_hba.conf, postgresql.conf, and how to use them to tune our systems.

Dropbox details their edge services, on replacing Redux, and the debate over Protobuffers

Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network - An overview of how Dropbox keeps exabytes of data available and fast

3 Ways We're Using Elixir to Solve Real Problems - Websockets, Webhooks, and load balancing, Oh my!

Protobuffers Are Wrong [...

PostgreSQL: General Configuration 1

Getting up and running with PostgreSQL.

Open Source Spotlight: Elm-Beam, Exploring Elm on the Erlang VM

Our weekly spotlight of a cool project in the open source community that is looking for exposure or assistance. If you’d like your project to be featured, hit reply and let us know about it.

elm-beam is an experimental compiler for running Elm on...

PyTorch makes ML easier, Minecraft programming insanity, Vue.js += 1, Grindr/Fuckr spurs open source debate.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines

This week in neural networks... PyTorch, which provides "tensors and dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration", released a preview of their 1.0 release this...

Open Source Spotlight: Ignite - the React Native Starter Kit

Production ready starter kits for the React Native ecosystem.

💵💵 Java 11 - now with license fees 💵💵; Neckbeard wisdom; CA makes empty promise on IoT security

Java 11 license changes, Two discussions of retained developer wisdom, CA passes more useless laws, Dropbox drops the mic after a major Python 3 migration.

Spotlight: Tortoise, an event-sourcing library based on the MQTT protocol.

Tortoise is an MQTT client written for Elixir. MQTT is a lightweight machine to machine pub/sub protocol. Tortoise’s goal is to wrap the message passing nature of MQTT in a library that feels natural to an Elixir developer—that is, passing a...

Deploying to Testnet

Deploy our smart contract to the Ropsten Ethereum network while learning about Metamask and Faucets.

ls ./news

CSS in JS is a popular pattern, especially in the React and React Native communities. In CSS in JS in real-life, Artur Siery explores pros and cons of CSS Modules, SASS/LESS, Style Components, Glamorous, Styletron, Styled JSX, and JSS. If you want to deep-dive into how styled-components works, Eugene Gluhotorenko goes into great detail on that as well. This is a bad pattern and a return to inline styles. Mixing presentation and logic never works out well, and generating a bunch of unique utility classes doesn't make for sustainable design implementation, and leads developers to violate all kinds of DRY principals.

08-18

Some Clojure projects are giving out “liveness advisories”. Jeremy Pinnix pointed out one instance where no changes have been made in over 3 years. The project’s author assures that there just happen to be no changes needed, and the project is indeed alive and well. Some software projects don’t want to go on the cart.

08-18

Redmonk updated their regular programming language popularity study, and with no changes in the top performers: no one was surprised. Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, and C# were the top performers. Check out the sweet graph and the full write up.

08-18

Ever thought about using Elixir + Nerves to control your car? Neither did we, but follow along with Konstantin Zolotarev as he explores the CAN interface, and IBus messaging on his 2003 BMW.

08-18

Patrik Krupar talked through how he built up his design chops. Patrik advises, “Design is a skill, and like any other skill, it can be learned.” Checkout the guide, where he covers software, tools inside of that software, mentality differences, and some basic design tenets. Also on the design front, Jason Rodriguez preaches that the easiest way to keep your web apps accessible is to just use text. He’s right, and that post is a great read.

08-18

Electron Fiddle brings Electron a playground experience like JSFiddle for desktop apps. The article by Felix Rieseberg goes into details on its features, including a fantastic IDE-like experience powered by Monaco and the ability to easily build, export, and share your projects. The orange site discussion of accessibility patterns around the release of Electron Fiddle is just as interesting as the project itself.

08-18

Mark de Jong explains Scala Sagas from first principles. In general, Sagas are useful for quasi-transactionally composing actions that can potentially fail (in this example, talking to disparate API endpoints) into a single unit, and providing compensating actions in the event of failure.

08-18

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Google announced the stable release of Dart 2. Dart 2 features a sound type system, flexible tooling, a web framework, and an updated inference type system that minimizes boilerplate. The Dart team touts it’s much compile size and use for building consistent UXs, and includes over prebuilt UX components for use. Dart is aiming to be a real competitor in the web and mobile app building space (via Flutter), and this is an update worth looking into.

08-18

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We all know it’s impossible to exit Vim, but where did Vim come from? Sinclair Target discusses Vim’s roots, and how Vim came to be in his piece ‘Where Vim Came From’. If you’re not familiar with Vim’s history, this will make for a fun read.

08-18

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Eric Homes was able to gain commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes. He details the process he went through for the exploit, now that it’s been mitigated. tl;dr - Homebrew intentionally exposes their Jenkins publicly, and Jenkins contained a GitHub API token that had commit privileges to a few homebrew repositories. We published a story recently on keeping your secrets hidden that covers (almost) this exact issue.

08-18

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If you like OCaml and JavaScript you will probably love ReasonML. Alex Allen started a multi-part series for getting started with ReasonML. In the first piece you can see a breakdown of what ReasonML is, and shows how to get set up with it. Then, in the second piece of the series Alex covered the core fundamentals of ReasonML, including let, type, string, char, and more.

08-18

Yiming Chen details how to do outside-in TDD with Phoenix. Even if you aren’t a Phoenix developer, it’s a fantastic detailed walkthrough of the process of test-driving an app by writing feature tests first, then driving down into unit tests from there. The TDD strategy is: feature test; unit test controller action; unit test context functions; unit test view; a routing rule to pass the feature test.

08-18

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Megzari Raphael provides step-by-step instructions on Instrumenting Phoenix apps with Prometheus. The article provides instructions on integrating prometheus dependencies in the Elixir application and some sample dashboards.

08-18

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Tired of typing in those long git commands? Try lazygit, doesn’t git much simpler than this.

08-18

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So now you have monitoring on your servers? I’m sad to tell you that at scale that’s not enough. In "You can’t debug systems with dashboards", Charity Majors goes in-depth into how they increased observability at Parse through dynamic sampling.

08-18

Dev news that's not boring.

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