NDC Oslo 2015: Talk notes, recommended talks (security, FP, etc.)

A great conference. A good deal of good talks. To (perhaps) check later Wednesday Practical CSS tips & tricks for backend developers – really useful tips! video No Estimates, Let’s Explore the Possibilities video Form with Function: Adding Behavior with CSS – recommended by a friend (modal dialogs, tab switching, …) video ? Anti-fragile and

Notes from Troy Hunt’s Hack Yourself First workshop

Troy Hunt (@troyhunt, blog) had a great, very hands-on 2-day workshop about webapp security at NDC Oslo. Here are my notes. Highlights – resources Personal security and privacy https://www.entropay.com/ – a Prepaid Virtual Visa Card mailinator.com – tmp email f-secure VPN https://www.netsparker.com/ – scan a site for issues (insecure cookies, framework disclosure, SQL injection, …) (lot of $k) Site

Example: Functional Reactive Programming decisively beats Imperative on simplicity, length

@theburningmonk Yan Cui has a nice example demonstrating how Functional Reactive Programming [slides 185 – 206] (with Elm’s Signals) yields a much shorter and easier to understand (one you know FRP) code than an imperative code with mutations spread all over the code base. The game Use the Up and Down keys to move the platforms and thus

NDC: Async and Streaming JavaScript, We’re All Doing it Wrong! (Promises, Streams, Rx)

By Matthew Podwysocki Events Lot of work (setup, remove listeners …), not composable. Promises No way to abort promise in progress. (Me: has to remember to check for errors: then(onOk, onError).) No try-catch-finally; only try-catch. Streams Node: Stream 1 were terrible (pause/resume unusable, data sent before ready, …).

Why do companies fail at adopting Functional Programming?

According to the NDC Oslo talk Lean and Functional Programming by Bryan Hunter, these are the reasons why companies fail to adopt FP: They say “our developers aren’t smart enough” (to use F#, Erlang) [they should invest in their education!] Culture of hiding problems => little incentive to adopt a paradigm that solves/prevents them if they’re invisible

AWS API: Proper syntax for filtering by tag name and value (e.g. describeInstances)

It took me quite a while to figure out the right syntax for filtering instances by tag name and value in the AWS EC2 API’s describeInstances. The documentation is not exactly crystal-clear to me: tag:key=value – The key/value combination of a tag assigned to the resource, where tag:key is the tag’s key. Anyway, here is

Mounting an EBS volume to Docker on AWS Elastic Beanstal

Mounting an EBS volume to a Docker instance running on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (EB) is surprisingly tricky. The good news is that it is possible. I will describe how to automatically create and mount a new EBS volume (optionally based on a snapshot). If you would prefer to mount a specific, existing EBS volume, you should