Good morning!

When we started this newsletter almost 3 years ago, one of my goals was to help developers like you and me to learn more about technology and the world it impacts. A lot of the challenges and problems we developers face are relatively similar regardless of the exact tools we use and I've personally always found a lot to learn across different technology communities. 

Looking back now, as our developers have shared over 100 interesting articles, tools and videos and each because of their personal taste or reasons, I'm glad to see that we're on the right path. 

And I'm happy you are one of our readers. If you have friends or colleagues like you, consider giving them a tip that they too can get these emails to their inbox once a month if they sign up here. 

Meet Knut, this month's curator

Knut is a Berlin based software developer who loves to build software that makes it easier and more joyful for people to accomplish their tasks. He cares deeply about software quality and loves sharing his experiences and knowledge as well as helping others thrive in their work. When he is not working at Futurice or tinkering with Open Data, you will probably find him in the bouldering gym.

Knut's Picks

Database constraints in Postgres: The last line of defense

In my experience, PostgreSQL is a much deployed, but often underused technology. Many projects only treat it as plain data storage which is far below what we can do with PostgreSQL. In this article, the author showcases different database constraints which allow us to ensure that the stored data matches the domain model. Jan talked about the idea of Parse, Don’t Validate in edition 19 of this newsletter and I feel like constraints allow us to push this thinking to the database level.

Writing a Wikidata Query: Discovering Women Writers from North Africa

I have been fascinated by Wikidata for a couple of years now. Wikidata, a project by the Wikimedia foundation - the same organization that also operates Wikipedia - is a collaboratively edited knowledge graph aiming to be the data equivalent of what Wikipedia is for prose. In this article, Alex Stinson walks us through using the Wikidata Query Service to build an interactive map of women writers coming from North Africa.

You will learn how knowledge is modeled in Wikidata and how to build a query to answer your questions step by step. In my experience, Wikidata can be quite difficult to grasp at the beginning. I encourage you to follow the tutorial and play around with the query service to see just how cool it is to have a tool that lets us ask arbitrary questions about the world that surrounds us.

The why’s and how’s of jelling teams

As consultants, we work in ever-changing environments. Some of the projects are closer to our hearts than others. What we can rely on, though, are the great people that we will be working with. In this blog post, Mike Crittenden defines the concept of the jelling team and postulates that a team that is working together well will develop high-quality solutions and find joy in their shared work. He further talks about roadblocks that can keep teams from jelling and proposes mitigations to ensure that teams can thrive. 

New tool: Mess with DNS!

At the end of last year, Julia Evans published a new tool that allows us to get a better feeling for how DNS works by experimenting with it. I’m fascinated by DNS because it manages to be both very simple and very easy to mess up. In the article, the author explains her reasoning for writing the tool - giving people a safe way to play with this technology that can otherwise be quite intimidating. I encourage you to play around with it and to try some of the experiments. 

How secure is 256-bit security?

When working with computers, we can quickly get into the realms of numbers that are so big that they are hard to imagine. In this video, the author tries to give the audience a feeling for the size of the number 2²⁵⁶. I enjoyed watching this video and realizing just how incredibly unlikely it would be for someone to guess the reverse of a SHA256 hash correctly.

TechWeeklies Talk: Setting up a DevSec culture in the wild

Many developers are interested in Security. Yet, they often seem to struggle to get security efforts into their product roadmaps. With security and development silos still very much present in the organizations, where do we start? Luisa Emme has 3 successful and effective tips to overcome this. 

Jobs

Full Stack Developer (f/m/x)

If you get excited about creating and being a part of innovative and beautifully crafted digital experiences, that have a positive impact on people’s lives and deliver real value, welcome home. Help us to co-create future digital businesses. 

Join us in Berlin>>     Join us in Freiburg>>    Join us in Munich>>