The Overflow #145: An entrepreneur embraces OSS

Welcome to ISSUE #145 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: your humble narrator finds a platform that solves the problems he spent two years trying to solve, the US military has a plan for fighting zombies, and EU academics want to take the bias out of search.

From the blog

I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free stackoverflow.blog
As companies scale, finding who owns what service becomes harder than expected. And that’s just the start.

Five nines uptime without developer burnout stackoverflow.blog
The days of traditional application monitoring are fading. Applications today are no longer a single program, but a network of services connected by API and RPC endpoints across cloud containers that are created and removed as needed.

A serial entrepreneur finally embraces open source (Ep. 486) stackoverflow.blog
Serial entrepreneur Arpit Mohan, cofounder and CTO of Appsmith, tells Ben and Cassidy about his path to building Appsmith, an open-source project that makes it easy for engineers to build, ship, and maintain internal tools.

Out-of-the-box data system discovery and classification promotion
Transcend Data Mapping learns your database schema and automatically classifies the personal data within, so your company isn’t left with incomplete data visibility – and you don’t have to maintain database queries.

Interesting questions

How would the US military efficiently deal with Necromorph-like zombies? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
We could speculate—or you could read the unclassified CONPLAN 8888 document and find out what the US military actually plans to do.

Why do lawyers write contracts with language that is more difficult to understand than other works? law.stackexchange.com
Do lawyers get paid, remunerated, compensated, or enriched for every word they write?

How to address team member who excessively defers to me and is unwilling to give clear feedback  workplace.stackexchange.com
People come with their own cultural expectations, so you may have to tell new folks what you expect of them.

Validating an RSA public key crypto.stackexchange.com
When your security team is so paranoid, they validate the encryption keys.

Links from around the web

First batch of color fonts arrives on Google Fonts material.io
The future is now! Letters have colors! With the (somewhat) new font format called the COLRv1 binary vector format, see how your fonts express themselves in new ways.

Upcycling a 40-year-old Tandy Model 100 portable computer spectrum.ieee.org
If you like recycling, you will LOVE the concept of upcycling, especially when it comes to cool older tech!

Theatre.js v0.5 is out! www.theatrejs.com
This is a very cool library for programmatically and visually animating 3D objects in the browser.

OpenWebSearch.eu openwebsearch.eu
It’s no secret that web searches are biased. That’s by design. This is an interesting new initiative from academic groups in the EU to provide open, unbiased access to information.

A blast from the past: Infrastructure as code: Create and configure infrastructure elements in seconds.