6S Links

Last night saw the first phase of the rollout of an app I made go live at 9 pm EST, which meant watching top at 2 am. It’s weird seeing more people flood onto a server than there are digits in my phone number. Normally I would have caught up on sleep later (well, technically I did fall asleep while watching Legend), but instead I was up at 8:01 to pre-order an iPhone. Life over, links begin.

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups – As 383 has grown, well past 30 people now, I’ve seen the struggle to retain culture. It’s definitely the most important thing about a business, because unlike anything else, once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Guess Which Company Already Dominates Everywhere TV – Naysayers love to disparage Apple, but even our own statistics bear out the same; when it comes to mobile, there is Apple and then there is second place with single digit percentages.

How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison bcrypt hashes efficiently – This is my biggest fear. Building a fortress you need to check every door, window and passage, but an attacker only needs to find the one you missed.

Inside the Design Labs Where the iPhone’s Coolest New Feature Was Built – R&D costs money. And to do something well takes an awful lot of R&D.

The CIA’s most famous ship headed for the scrapyard – I’ve loved the story of Hughes ever since I first read about it. Shame to see it go.

Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys From Leaked Photos – This is the perfect real-world analogy of why a “golden key” for online encryption is such a bad idea. All it takes is for one leak and all of a sudden everyone is vulnerable.

Node v4.0.0 – They’ve finally dragged iojs back in and picked up semver. That alone makes this an awesome update.

AWS in Plain English – One thing I like about Rackspace compared to Azure and AWS? They just call stuff what it is. Route 53 vs Cloud DNS, which one’s easier to remember.

HomeMirror – For those with spare ‘droids and a hankering with some tinkering.

The State of Front-End Tooling – SASS dominates, Gulp is growing, and I’m leaving it all behind.

Lovefield – We have one of the most well-tested and robust SQL implementations around with SQLite, but nope, browser vendors had to go with IndexedDB and so now we end up with this to get by.

Time Traveling in Node.js Notebooks – Not only is Tonic itself really cool, this is a great write-up on how to do something really difficult.

The Hardest Program I’ve Ever Written – One lecturer told me, a program is just a tool to rearrange bits. Deciding which bit to flip is the tricky bit.

Optimizing Site Performance via Anycast Routing – Our old clients were happy on a shared host but now, with global marketshare, we’re branching out into multiple DCs, replication and Anycast.

Apple TV Markup Language Reference – The new UI is gorgeous in it’s spartanness. Oddly no namespace, which makes it super simple to write, but worries me about their shortsightedness.

The guide to implementing 2D platformers – Because inside every web dev is a game dev trying to get out.

Why Microframeworks Lead to Lean Applications – A few little articles on microframeworks. Having decoupled a couple of recent apps, it’s difficult finding the right boundaries on which to cleave.

How we ended up with microservices – Finally, some good rationale for why microservices make sense. “The next version” is second system syndrome incarnate. It’s much easier to rewrite a service than an app.