Fridays Are For Learning, 2018-W25.

Fridays are for learning.¹ These are some interesting links for the week ending June 22, 2018.

• Joe Duffy says “Hello, Pulumi!” Pulumi is a new service to configure cloud services/IaaS programmatically using JS/TypeScript/Go/Python. Modern deployment systems now mean diving into piles and piles of YAML, compounded by the piles of additional YAML you need to configure that YAML for tools like Helm. So in a general sense I agree that higher-level tools would be useful. That said, I’m not sure this is the way to go, from two perspectives:

  1. There are dangers inherent to switching back from declarative configuration to an imperative way of thinking. On first thought it seems to me if you are using an imperative language simply to make the declarative configuration easier to write, maybe that’s not so bad, but With Great Power etc. etc. etc.

  2. Pulumi is actually a CLI and a hosted service; is it possible to self-host the hosted part or is everyone who uses this system tied to the fortunes of some external third-party? Just this week NPM saw a production outage due to a dependency on an external service that was acquired by Twitter and shut down with 30 minutes notice, at 6 am local time. Do not miss this lesson.

• flake8-bugbear is a flake8 plugin to provide some more opinionated style warnings for Python than flake8 does by itself.

• The Go object lifecycle.

• Exploring the landscape of Go testing frameworks.

• The war on developer productivity, and how Derrick Reimer intends to solve it. For all its significant benefits, Slack can turn into a developer productivity sink, as it exploits (in the same way as many modern apps) some aspects of the human brain that can prevent people from focusing on their actual work. Whenever possible I try to limit my usage of Slack to when it’s truly needed (synchronous communication); I like to view it as a searchable text-based replacement for multiparty phone calls. Maybe Derrick’s new project Level will be able to bridge the gap between the asynchronicity necessary for getting stuff done and the otherwise generally useful features of Slack.

• The state of type hints in Python.

• Jessie Frazelle looks at installing and using Wireguard, obviously with containers. Even if you aren’t living your best containered life like Jessie, it’s still a nice overview of how simple it is to plug and play Wireguard. I’m looking forward to it becoming a standard piece of Linux networking.