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Web Review, Week 2024-16

Friday, 19 April 2024 | Kevin Ottens


Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-16.


The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Tags: tech, internet, infrastructure

Very fascinating piece. This shows the underappreciated job of maintaining the subsea cables needed for the Internet to function and how extreme the conditions can be. Definitely a peculiar life for the folks in that trade… also shows the repairs are clearly underfunded and that not enough people are embracing this career. And now, add geopolitics to the mix, it should make you wonder how all of this work at all and for how long it’ll keep working.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships


Where The Wild Things Are: Brute-Force SSH Attacks In The Wild And How To Stop Them : Flux Research Group

Tags: tech, ssh, security

Interesting study on the brute force attacks against SSH. It gives plenty of insights and leads to a potential approach to detect most of them.

https://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/singh-nsdi24


Neverest CLI

Tags: tech, email, tools, command-line

Looks like a nice tool to backup and restore emails. Probably to check out next time you migrate your emails to another server.

https://pimalaya.org/neverest/cli/latest/


Mysterious Moving Pointers - blomqu.ist

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Interesting case… even though honestly we shouldn’t need to dig out this kind of details.

https://blomqu.ist/posts/2024/move/


Traces the shared-object dependencies of a binary, and graphs them

Tags: tech, library, dependencies

Neat little tool. Since I had to do this kind of work a few times, this is indeed a good idea to have a public and maintained script for it.

https://github.com/stolk/sotrace


Create graphs from your CommonJS, AMD or ES6 module dependencies

Tags: tech, dependencies, javascript, tools

Looks like a nice tool to explore dependencies in JS based projects.

https://github.com/pahen/madge


Setting up PostgreSQL for running integration tests

Tags: tech, tests, performance, databases, postgresql

Interesting use of database templates and memory disks to greatly speed up test executions.

https://gajus.com/blog/setting-up-postgre-sql-for-running-integration-tests


WebXR retro computer simulation | Dom Pajak

Tags: tech, web, 3d, xr

Funny side project. This shows well many of the challenges one should expect when working on mixed reality projects. It’s also nice to see how the ecosystem matured for such features in the browser.

https://www.dompajak.com/blog/webxr-beeb-virtual-beeb/index.html


Spectral Ray Tracing

Tags: tech, 3d, art, physics

Interesting approach to have a ray tracer which doesn’t quite follow physics for artistic purposes.

https://larswander.com/writing/spectral-ray-tracing/


What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’ · GitHub

Tags: tech, failure, project-management, product-management

This is definitely an ambiguous term. You need to know where stand the people employing it in order to figure out the exact meaning of “root cause”.

https://github.com/readme/guides/root-cause


Why you need a “WTF Notebook”

Tags: management, coaching, learning, organization

Definitely this. Listen and write down issues before you start to complain. There might be reasons why things are as they are. Take the time to understand them and refine to have a better feedback.

https://www.simplermachines.com/why-you-need-a-wtf-notebook/


Mental Health in Software Engineering

Tags: tech, work, life, management, burnout, health

A good reminder that mental health can be hard to keep in check in our profession. Pay attention to how you feel, anxiety is a sneaky foe. Lots can be done to improve if taken care of early enough.

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/mental-health-in-software-engineering/


This is a teenager

Tags: sociology, politics, data-visualization

Excellent visualization which shows how adverse experiences during childhood shape our lives as adults.

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/



Bye for now!