Hacker Bits, June 2016
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hacker bits June 2016 new bits Hello from sunny (finally!) Redmond! Can it really be June already?! Time does indeed fly…just ask Adrian Kosmaczewski who shows us how to navigate an industry littered with forgotten technologies and has-beens. Find out more in his blast-through-the-past account of “Life as a developer after 40.” Curious about Progressive Web Apps? Then don’t miss this issue’s interview with Henrik Joreteg, expert on all things PWA, who gives us the lowdown on this exciting new mobile technology. As always, our objective at Hacker Bits is to help readers like you learn and grow, and that’s why we are rolling out a new feature called Spotlight where we get tech experts to reveal their professional secrets. Lastly, congratulations to the winners of our giveaway! Time is precious so let's dive into another wonderful issue of Hacker Bits! Peace and plenty of ice cream! — Maureen and Ray [email protected] content bits June 2016 Fingerprints are usernames, not Are Progressive Web Apps the 06 passwords 34 future of the Internet? Am I really a developer or just a 08 good Googler? 38 19 tips for everyday git use Develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, It takes all kinds 10 impatience, and hubris 48 When to rewrite from scratch: 16 Being a developer after 40 52 autopsy of a failed software Implementers, solvers, and Clojure, the good parts 26 finders 56 20 lines of code that will beat A/B 30 testing every time hacker bits 3 contributor bits Dustin Kirkland Scott Hanselman Reginald Braithwaite Adrian Kosmaczewski Dustin is an Ubun- Scott is a web develop- Reg is the author of Adrian is a writer, tu dev and product er and has blogged at JavaScript Allongé, software developer manager at Canoni- hanselman.com for over CoffeeScript Ristretto and teacher. He is the cal. Formerly, CTO of a decade. He works and raganwald.com. He author of two books Gazzang, he created in Open Source on develops user experi- about mobile software an innovative manage- ASP.NET and the Azure ences at PagerDuty. His development, and has ment system for cloud Cloud for Microsoft out interests include con- shipped mobile, web apps. At IBM, Dustin of his home office in structing surreal num- and desktop apps for contributed to many Portland, OR. Scott has bers, deconstructing iOS, Android, Mac OS Linux security projects 3 podcasts, hanselmin- hopelessly egocentric X, Windows and Li- and filed 70+ pat- utes.com, thisdevelop- nulls, and celebrating nux since 1996. Adri- ents. He is the author erslife.com and ratch- the joy of program- an olds a Masters in of 20+ open source etandthegeek.com. ming. His other works Information Technology projects, including He's written a number are on GitHub and from the University of Byobu, eCryptfs, ssh- of books and spoken in Leanpub, and you can Liverpool. import-id, and entropy. person to almost 500K follow him on Twitter ubuntu.com. Twitter devs worldwide. @raganwald. @dustinkirkland. Randall Koutnik Steve Hanov Alex Kras Justin Etheredge Randall is a Senior UI Steve can be found at Alex is a Software Engi- Justin is the cofounder Engineer at Netflix and various coffee shops neer by day and Online of Ecstatic Labs, a small holds a lot of strong in Waterloo, Ontario, Marketer by night. You consulting company opinions about Star where he writes code can find his blog and based out of Richmond, Wars. He'd love to hear and occasionally re- learn more about him Virginia. His goal is to from you via hacker- sponds to emails from at alexkras.com. make software more [email protected]. customers of his web friendly, one applica- businesses webse- tion at a time. quencediagrams.com and zwibbler.com. He has three children, one wife, and two birds. 4 hacker bits Umer Mansoor Allen Rohner Ray Li Maureen Ker Umer is a software Allen is the founder of Curator Editor developer, living in Rasterize and CircleCI. Ray is a software en- Maureen is an editor, San Francisco, CA. He He is a Clojure contrib- gineer and data en- writer, enthusiastic currently works for utor, and has commits thusiast who has been cook and prolific collec- Glu Mobile as Platform in clojure.core, contrib, blogging at rayli.net tor of useless kitchen Manager, building a lein, ring, compojure, for over a decade. He gadgets. She is the cloud gaming backend. noir, and about a loves to learn, teach author of 3 books and He previously served as dozen more libraries. and grow. You’ll usu- 100+ articles. Her work the Head of Software He blogs at rasterize.io ally find him wrangling has appeared in the for Starscriber where he and you can follow him data, programming and New York Daily News, built high performance on Twitter @arohner. lifehacking. and various adult and telecommunications children’s publications. software. He blogs at CodeAhoy.com. hacker bits 5 Interesting Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords By DUSTIN KIRKLAND 6 hacker bits s one of the maintainers I'm bringing this up again you need a password or pass- of eCryptfs, and a long to highlight the work released phrase. Something that can be Atime Thinkpad owner, I by The Chaos Computer Club, independently chosen, changed, have been asked many times which has demonstrated how and rotated. I will continue to to add support to eCryptfs for truly insecure Apple's TouchID advocate this within the Ubuntu Thinkpad's fingerprint readers. is. development community, as I I actually captured this as There may be civil liberties have since 2009. a wishlist bug in Launchpad in at issue as well. While this piece Once your fingerprint is August 2008, but upon thinking is satire, and Apple says that it compromised (and, yes, it about it a bit more, I later closed is not sharing your fingerprints almost certainly already is, if the bug as "won't fix" in Feb- with the government, we've been you've crossed an international ruary 2009, and discussed in a kept in the dark about such border or registered for a driv- blog post, saying: things before. I'll leave you to er's license in some US states draw your own conclusions on and countries), how do you Hi, thanks so much for that one. change it? Are you starting to the bug report. I've been But let's just say you're okay see why this is a really bad idea? thinking about this quite a with Apple sharing your fin- There are plenty of inven- bit lately. I'm going to have gerprints with the NSA, as I've tions that exist, but turned out to mark this "won't fix" for already told you, they're not to be bad ideas. And I think now. private at all. You leave them on fingerprint readers are another everything you touch. And let's one of those. The prevailing opinion from security profession- als is that fingerprints are perhaps a good re- Biometrics...cannot placement for usernames. However, they're really not a good replacement for authenticate a person passwords. or a thing alone. Consider your laptop... how many fingerprints of yours are there on your say you're insistent on using fin- This isn't a knock on Apple, laptop right now? As such, gerprint (biometric) technology as Thinkpad have embedded it's about as secret as your because you can. In that case, fingerprint readers for nearly a username. You don't leave your fingerprints might identify decade. My intention is to help your password on your you, much as your email address stop and think about the place spacebar, or on your beer or username identifies you, per- of biometrics in security. Bio- bottle :-) haps from a list. metrics can be used as a light- I could see some value, per- weight, convenient mechanism This Wikipedia entry (al- haps, in a tablet that I share with to establish identity, but they though it's about Microsoft my wife, where each of us have cannot authenticate a person or Fingerprint Readers) is our own accounts, with indepen- a thing alone. pretty accurate: * http:// dent configurations, apps, and So please, if you have any re- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mic- settings. We could each con- spect for the privacy your data, rosoft_Fingerprint_Reader veniently identify ourselves by or your contacts' information, our fingerprint. But biometrics please don't use fingerprints So, I'm sorry, but I don't cannot, and absolutely must (or biometrics, in general) for think we'll be fixing this for not, be used to authenticate authentication. now. an identity. For authentication, Reprinted with permission of the original author. First appeared on Oct 1, 2013 at blog.dustinkirkland.com. hacker bits 7 Interesting Am I really a developer or just a good Googler? By SCOTT HANSELMAN got a very earnest and well- game. It'll get hard as I prog- weeks, if not weekly. phrased email from a young ress through the levels, but not Third, try programming for a I person overseas recently. crushingly hard. Each level I day without Googling. Then two squeak by I'll find myself asking, days, maybe a week. See how it Some time in my mind "Did I deserve to pass that level? feels. Remember that there was sounds come that Is that I'm not sure I could do it again." a time we programmed without I am really a developer or You get that feeling like copying our work. just a good googler.