Dev Catch Up - #5

Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the last week

Tech is constantly evolving every week with new developments and happenings. And as usual, DevShorts is back with another issue to simplify your digests from the community. Like our last ones, this issue also covers the unique stories trending in our developer circle, along with a look at new open-source projects, tutorials, walkthroughs, and much more. If you missed our old editions, you can see them here.

Must Reads

• Meta recently launched an upgraded version of their open-source large language model named Llama 2. It is pretrained on 2 trillion tokens of data and has double the context length, making it more significant than any available datasets. It is outperforming other open-source models in their equivalent weight class. Take a deep understanding of this model by listening to this podcast from Latent Space, where they talk about the model in detail, its use cases, and future developments.

• GitHub is again on the news this week, with one of its feature updates generally available. The repository rules feature is going generally available to all users. Defining branch protection rules in public repositories becomes easy for developers with the help of this feature. A single ruleset can protect multiple branch patterns using flexible targeting options. Contributors and collaborators in the repository can view rules through an overview page. Learn more about this feature and how to use it through the official GitHub blog.   

• Out-of-memory events or simply OOM errors occur when a program or a system attempts to allocate more memory than the allowed or available limit. It is widespread in Linux environments where programs do tend to allocate a lot of memory. To keep the Linux machines operational, there is a special kernel functionality called Out of Memory Killer, which kills the big processes with the least priority and can recognize and respect processes with constraints with Linux cgroups. This is not a smooth process and can cause interruptions leading to challenges. This article from Redpanda discussed in detail on solving challenges caused by OOM killers in Linux. 

• Infrastructure management is evolving with new strategies and technologies that are coming out now and then. A system that has gained momentum in recent days is the use of feature flags in Infrastructure as Code or IaC. IaC is the process by which you can manage infrastructure in a programmable way with the help of code to define and deploy infrastructure resources. Revolutionize infrastructure management by learning more about the power of feature flags, explained in detail in this article published in Dzone.  

• Command Query Responsibility Segregation, or CQRS, is a pattern that states that you can use a different model to update information rather than using the model through which you can read the information. This separation of models can add value for certain systems, while for most others, it can bring unnecessary risks and complexity. Get to know about this pattern from this detailed explainable article from Martin Fowler and also understand how this pattern can be used for event sourcing of SaaS applications from this article by HackingSaaS.

Now, we will head over to some of the news and articles that will be at a place of interest for developers and the tech community out there. 

Good to know

• The software tools specifically designed to translate and optimize source codes written in high-level programming languages to machine code that can run in an Advanced RISC Machine or ARM processor are called ARM compilers. Those processors are used abundantly in embedded systems, mobile devices, the Internet of Things, etc. Know about the different ARM compilers and their comparison, consisting of similarities and differences, by reading this article from M0AGX.  

• Data modelling is the process through which a conceptual representation of data and its relationship with a specific domain is created. It consists of the structure, rules, and constraints that define how data is stored, organized, and accessed within a database or an information system. But implementing data modelling is challenging, and this video from Seattledataguy talks about it in detail.  

• Observability with OpenTelemetry is more than a buzz these days. Combining the open-source observability framework with modules from existing Observability tools like Prometheus can create powerful trace-based alert mechanisms. Ran Nozik explained this in detail in this article from Helios, where traces from OpenTelemetry are put together with Prometheus metrics by leveraging its open-source modules giving a powerful alerting mechanism as an end product.

• With AI trending this year, it is evident a lot of new open-source projects are popping up with innovative ideas. One such project is AutoChain from Forethought Technologies, and it aims to enable the rapid iteration of generative agents by simplifying agent customization and evaluation. Building custom generative AI agents and evaluating them is time-consuming and difficult, and AutoChain solves that by providing an extensible framework, custom tools, and automatic evaluation of agents. You can find this project from its GitHub repository here.  

• OpenTelemetry nowadays is a trendy technology in the observability space, and developers love creating new tools that can help with the usage of the open-source project. One such tool that caught our attention is Otel-bash. It is a library that helps instrument, trace, and debug bash scripts with OpenTelemetry. Try it out from the GitHub repository here.

Lastly, we will take a look at some of the trending scoops that hold a special mention for the community. 

Notable FYIs

• Since Open AI and Chat GPT have taken the tech industry by storm, machine learning models are always in the talk. Here is an article titled “5 models that aren’t Chat GPT and what you can use them for” from Technically, which explores the different open and closed source models that will make life easy.  

• PromQL, the Prometheus Query Language, is difficult for first-timers to understand. Julian from PromLabs made a video where he explained in detail the different behaviours of functions in PromQL responsible for computing increment rates for counter metrics, the difference between them, their dealings with counter resets, and the perfect way of their usage.   

• We all know about Docker, one of the most popular tools for containerising applications and their dependencies. This mini article from ByteByteGo explains how Docker works behind the scenes while applying different commands in the Docker CLI.  

• If you know about security and authentication, you must be familiar with the term “Firewall”. A network security device or software acts as a barrier between internal trusted and external untrusted networks. ByteByteGo created an animated article where Firewall is explained beautifully so that even a kid and an adult can understand it. 

• An open-source query language called Pipelined Relational Query Language or PRQL is gaining traction because it is a modern data transformation language and an alternative to the existing SQL. It is readable, explicit, and declarative but forms a pipeline of transformations while supporting abstractions like variables and functions. While it can be used in any SQL database because of its compliance, you can try it from its GitHub repository here.  

That’s it from us this week. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable, and a subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading it for the first time.