The Best of Better Programming (December 5–11, 2020)

My favorite articles that we published this week

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Hey everyone, I hope you had a good week.

We’re trying something a little different on our newsletter this week. These are a combination of the best-performing articles this week and a few of my personal favorites sprinkled in. I wanted to introduce some new faces and their work in this week’s newsletter.

Here are 16 stories we loved this week:

1. These Modern Programming Languages Will Make You Suffer by Ilya Suzdalnitski — Ilya wrote our most-read article this month, with a deep dive on (some pros and) mostly the cons of the programming languages we all use and love. From type systems to immutability, JavaScript, Python, Go and more, let’s explore the worst parts of modern programming languages and where they might be able to get better.
2. Demystifying Spring Boot by Jordan Williams—Jordan gets into building a basic API in Spring Boot. I’ve never used Spring Boot myself so this was a refreshing tutorial to just get up and running and build something simple and straightforward.
3. Application Logging Best Practices (A Support Engineer’s Perspective) by Thilina Ashen Gamage—Logging has been a hot topic lately on Better Programming. I like Thilina’s perspective here as many early stage companies don't have support engineers. Taking his suggestions could just help you and your team work a little bit better and stave off a few critical bugs.
4. 9 Hard Lessons I Struggled to Learn During My 18 Years as a Software Developer by Fernando Doglio — Fernando opening up about his career struggles with a healthy amount of context. My personal favorite: “7. The Last 10% of a Project Takes 90% of the Time.” As someone who’s currently working to get the last part of a v1 done in Moneyball for Medium, I’m deep in that last 10%.
5. Create React Components Using Hygen by Manato Kuroda — Hygen is a Node-based code generator. Save yourself from re-typing the same React boilerplate for the 1000th time and check out Hygen.
6. Apple Silicon: The Dev Tools That Work and Don’t Work (Yet) by Donovan So — Following up on Eric’s article from last week, Donovan covers the virtualization software, tools, IDEs, languages, and frameworks that aren’t quite at 100% on Apple’s shiny new hardware. I still want on M1 MacBook Pro though.
7. Kubernetes Is Deprecating Docker by Gaurav Agarwal—Is there a reason to panic? Frequent devops writer, Gaurav, is here this week to talk about what this change means for both K8s and Docker. Read this companion piece as well by Edgar Rodriguez, Kubernetes Just Deprecated Docker Support. What Now?.
8. Lesser-Known but Powerful Unix Commands to Polish Your Tech Skills by Kirshi Yin — When I got into writing Bash scripts, my relationship to my computer and my work changed. Everything got better. Kirshi looks at Unix commands that can help us be more productive.
9. What’s New in TypeScript 4.1? by Rakia Ben Sassi — Rakia is back this week to look at the new developments in the world of TypeScript. JSX factories, recursive conditional types, and more.
10. k0s: Kubernetes in a Single Binary by Luc Juggery — What is K0s and how can you use it in your K8s workflows? Dive into this useful overview by Luc.
11. Level Up Your SQL Skills by Mandi Gunningham — MySQL can feel intimidating when you’re just starting out. How can we make our queries more efficient? How can we have minimal impact on user experience while also getting the data we need? Mandi’s got you covered going beyond SQL basics.
12. Create Beautiful Images in CSS to Buff Up Your Portfolio by Albert Walicki — This is a fun piece from Albert, making clouds with advanced CSS to make your portfolio weather app really pop.
13. All About IDOR Attacks by Vickie Li — Learn about insecure direct object references, implications of their attacks, and how to prevent them from cybersecurity writer Vickie Li.
14. 101 Tips to Make You a Better Developer by Simon Holdorf — Simon is back this week with a big list of short advice for your programming journey, no matter where you are. I like #56: just start coding and #80: take care of API security. I think we should all spend less time obsessing over the beginning and just get started and more time thinking about writing secure code, even if few people are using it at first.
15. My December Recommendations for Flutter Packages by Jelena Jovanoski — Jelena has 5 fun recommendations for useful Flutter packages including better alert dialogues and an emoji keyboard.
16. Creating an Authentication API With Golang by Emmy Chamberlain — While we’re on the topic of creating secure APIs, Emmy is back this week to teach us how to create a Golang API with an authentication layer.

Exciting Career Opportunities From Better Programming Jobs

BetterProgrammingJobs.com continues to grow this week! If you're an employer or your company is hiring, you can post a job for free and promote it to this email list of 75,000+ devs next week for just $100.
Featured Career Opportunities:
* Hidden Door is hiring a Platform Game Engineer: 
Hidden Door is inventing a new kind of online social narrative game for kids to imagine and explore limitless story worlds together. It's like Roblox meets Dungeons and Dragons, designed for safety, enabled by AI and NLP.
Do you love designing, architecting, and implementing applications? We're looking for a Platform Game Engineer. More details below:
Apply to Hidden Door

* Better Programming is hiring a Part-Time Replacement Editor:
I'm going to be going on paternity leave mid-January through the beginning of March and I'm looking for someone to fill in in my place while I'm spending time with my new family member!
We're looking for someone who knows the programming space on Medium well. That person should have a few years of recent developer experience. Past editorial experience is preferred but not a must-have.
This is a part-time position, likely ~20 hours a week with full support from the Better Programming team.
Email me zack+replacementeditor@zackshapiro.com if interested with details about your background.

That’s it for this week! As always, thanks for reading Better Programming!

Stay safe, healthy, and please wear a mask,
– Zack Shapiro and The Better Programming Team