FAUN Weekly

Hey there,

We're back after a long hiatus. We've been busy with our latest project FAUN SkillStep (a work-in-progress online learning platform for developers) and other projects. But we're back now, and we're going to be posting more regularly.

Our latest issue was a special issue in which we featured the Open Source projects you loved the most during 2023 (based on data). If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here .

Many new subscribers joined us during the last few weeks. Welcome to the FAUN family! We're glad to have you here, FAUNer!

As you may know, we put some newsletters on hold for a while. We're going to resume them gradually very soon. If you are subscribed to Kala (AI/ML), The Chief I/O (Cloud Native), or VarBear (Programming), you'll be receiving them soon. In the meantime, you're going to receive this newsletter, FAUN weekly, that features different topics (from DevOps and Cloud Native to AI/ML, Programming, Blockchain, and more).

Don't forget to add "community@faun.dev" to your contacts to avoid our emails going to your spam folder.

Happy hacking!
Aymen from FAUN

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Unity Software Inc., which replaced its chief executive officer in October, plans to reduce its workforce by 25%, eliminating about 1,800 jobs in a new round of cuts.

Discord has made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce in order to focus and improve its operations. The company is confident that this move will position them well for future growth and allow them to continue delivering a strong and profitable business.

GPT-4 Turbo, the new and improved version of OpenAI's language model, is now available for free in Microsoft Copilot, providing users with enhanced capabilities. The rollout of GPT-4 Turbo has been done gradually, with access to the AI upgrade being a pleasant surprise for many users.

Twitch, the livestreaming site owned by Amazon.com Inc., is cutting 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, in an effort to stem losses following previous rounds of layoffs. The company has experienced concerns over financial losses and the departure of several top executives.

Website downtime can significantly negatively impact businesses that rely on their online presence and connectivity. Without a website, companies can lose sales, damage their reputation, and frustrate customers trying to access information or services. That's why having an effective alert system for website and application monitoring is critical.

Open-source alternatives to Terraform Enterprise/Cloud provide cost-efficient solutions, flexibility, customization options, community-driven development, and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in. These alternatives offer innovation, transparency, and security, allowing organizations to stay at the forefront of technological advancements. Terrakube, OTF, and Gaia are three comprehensive open-source alternatives that offer unique features and contribute to the world of Infrastructure as Code.

"Assumptions are the hidden icebergs in cybersecurity's vast ocean. Although we might believe our security controls are foolproof, the statistics paint another picture. According to the Blue Report 2023 by Picus, only 59% of attacks are prevented, just 37% detected, and a scant 16% triggered alerts."

DevOps practitioners face both rewards and challenges. The most rewarding aspect is removing friction and fully automating DevOps processes, while the challenges include staying up to date with changes and balancing dynamics between different areas.

LLMs (large language models) are surprisingly easy to build and run, and hobbyists have been able to build and fine-tune them. However, the ethical implications and the balance between positive and negative impacts of LLMs are complex and still being debated.

A pattern for error handling in Go is described that simplifies error handling and eliminates repetitive code. The pattern involves converting error-returning handlers to standard http.HandlerFunc, using a custom error type to include an HTTP status, and creating a customHandler function to handle errors and set the appropriate HTTP status.

Modern-day engineering teams rely on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) providers to build automated pipelines and testing tools. However, troubleshooting failures and monitoring complex CI/CD systems can be challenging, and tools like CI Visibility can help address these challenges.

htmx is not just another JavaScript framework, but rather a library that can be used to add dynamic functionality to web pages. It can be considered a framework in the sense that it provides a structure for frontend markup and database query endpoints. However, it has the advantage of being a framework that works seamlessly with HTML and has zero dependency conflicts.

Writing Python code daily is essential for anyone who loves programming. While writing everything by hand can be time-consuming, sometimes it's necessary to quickly write a script to handle tasks like data manipulation or parsing JSON. ChatGPT can be helpful for automating certain aspects of Python scripting, but it's important to be cautious and test the code in a proper environment.

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Lobe Chat - an open-source, high-performance chatbot framework that supports speech synthesis, multimodal, and extensible Function Call plugin system. Supports one-click free deployment of your private ChatGPT/LLM web application.

Command-line interface for ChatGPT, Claude and Bard

World's most advanced database DevOps and CI/CD for Developer, DBA and Platform Engineering teams. The GitLab/ for database DevOps.

A curated awesome list of lists of interview questions. Feel free to contribute!

Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more...

In the early 1970s, Alan Kay and his team at Xerox PARC conceptualized the Dynabook, a precursor to modern laptops and tablets. Although it was never built due to technological limitations at the time, its vision of a portable, user-friendly computer with graphical interface and network capabilities greatly influenced the design of future personal computing devices.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live” ~ John Woods