Recommended reading

Recommended reading

Security

Hashing algorithms

• An Introduction to Cryptographic Hash Functions
  • Very short intro.
  • Hashing functions, rainbow tables, salt
• An Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes
  • Brief explanation with command-line examples and diagrams.
  • Hashing passwords, digital signatures, collisions, collision resistance, weaknessess in SHA-1 and MD5.
• Don’t Hash Secrets
  • Hashing and salting. Why a hash on its own is not a good signature (you can easily get a hash of the original input with stuff added at the end). HMAC.
• Hash Collisions and the Birthday Attack
  • Hash collisions, birthday paradox, finding two passwords that hash to the same value (birthday attack).

Attacks

• Length extension attack
• Sybil attack

SSL

• OCSP stapling

Blockchain

Ethereum

• Ethereum White Paper
  • General explanation of the blockchain and comparison with Bitcoin.
• Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger (yellow paper)
  • Highly technical explanation of ethereum internals.
• Ethereum Documentation
  • User guide. Explains history, usage, existing clients, communities, etc.
• Ropsten To Kovan To Rinkeby: Ethereum’s Testnet Troubles
  • Ethereum testnets, past and present: Morden, Ropsten, Kovan, Rinkeby.
• Technical Introduction to Events and Logs in Ethereum
  • Use cases for events: returning values from smart contracts, asynchronous triggers with data, cheaper form of storage.
  • Events and logs are the same mechanism, just on different levels of abstraction.
• The Ethereum-blockchain size will not exceed 1TB anytime soon
  • Pruning modes and sync modes in ethereum clients.
  • Analysis of disk space requirements in real conditions in various modes.

Golem

• Golem Crowdfunding Whitepaper
  • High level explanation of how system is meant to work in its various iterations.
• Golem Architecture
  • Short article explaining how golem will work.
• A Probabilistic Nanopayment Scheme for Golem
  • Paper describing one of the proposed nanopayment systems for Golem (the one based on lottery).

Programming

Django

• Django documentation
• Django Migrations and How to Manage Conflicts
  • Conflicts between migrations and resolving them: merge, rollback+remigration, manual modification. Data migrations.
• Understanding HTTP content negotiation
  • How Content-Type and Accept headers should be used in communication over HTTP.

Python

• CPython documentation
• In Python, what is the purpose of __slots__ and what are the cases one should avoid this?

Linux and deployment

Linux

• Myths about /dev/urandom
  • Long explanation of the differences between /dev/random and /dev/urandom.
• Extended File Attributes Rock!
  • Tutorial that explains setting and reading extended file attributes in Linux.

Docker

• Docker documentation
• Memory inside Linux containers
  • Explains why free and top do not report memory correctly in Docker containers and why Java applications always need to have explicit memory limits set.

Kubernetes

• Kubernetes docs
  • Concepts
  • Tutorials
  • Reference
• Spinning Up Your First Kubernetes Cluster on GKE
  • Short tutorial with screenshots.
• Kubernetes - Understanding Resources
  • Resource types (memory, CPU), setting resource limits, difference between requests and limits, namespace resource limits.
• Kubernetes Ingress
  • Short article with code examples.
  • Ingress vs LoadBalancer, ingress resources, Traefik.
• The Differences Between Kubernetes and Openshift
• Google Cloud SQL vs Cloud DataStore vs BigTable vs BigQuery vs Spanner
• Using Helm to deploy to Kubernetes

Ansible

• Ansible docs

Shell

• Bash Hackers Wiki > Parameter expansion
  • Reference with extensive examples.
  • Overview of all the syntax variants for referring to variables ($var, ${var}, ${var#pattern} and so on).
• Why not use “which”? What to use then?
  • Use command -v or type instead.
  • History of which, how it works in various shells and its status today.
• The #! magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours

Make

• GNU Make Manual (single page)
  • Extensive manual. Everything you need to know to use Make.
• Rules of Makefiles
  • 6 rules of thumb for creating good Makefiles.
• Recursive Make Considered Harmful
  • Paper that explains why having a single global Makefile leads to a more maintainable build system than having a separate Makefile in each nested subdirectory.
• Implementing non-recursive make

NGINX

• nginx documentation
• Using DNS for Service Discovery with NGINX and NGINX Plus
  • DNS resolution in NGINX, SRV records.
  • Using DNS for service discovery, 5 methods, 2 usable only with NGINX Plus.
• Yii 1.1: X-Sendfile - serve large static files efficiently from web applications
  • Explains the mechanism behind X-Accel-Redirect header. Yii framework is used as an example but the same concepts apply with Django.
• How to Serve Protected Content With Django (Without Bogging Down Your Application Server)
  • Shows how to efficiently serve large files from Django by using X-Accel-Redirect.
  • NGINX and Django code examples.

Redis

• Redis documentation
• Redis’ reliable queue pattern
  • Using Redis as a reliable message queue, BRPOPLPUSH.