A wide mix of topics this week, from learning from incidents to agile auditing and software supply chain tooling to LLMs and more. Enjoy.

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News

Good advice for junior (or really any) engineers working in larger companies; attend retrospectives and spend time learning from incidents.
https://mikelvu.medium.com/how-to-learn-from-incidents-and-propel-your-engineering-career-e9f353f86371

An introduction to Enterprise Contract, a higher level tool for verifying software supply chain artefact details built on top of sigstore and open policy agent.
https://enterprisecontract.dev/posts/introducing-the-enterprise-contract/
https://enterprisecontract.dev/posts/a-taste-of-policies/

A nice introduction to the Wing programming language, designed specifically for cloud development by making cloud services first class primitives in the language itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzqCXrsKWbo

Software audits, of various types, are generally seen as anathema to agile software development. A new book on agile auditing tries to change that perception and this post has a short review.
https://hennyportman.wordpress.com/2023/08/17/review-beyond-agile-auditing/

Measuring the performance of web applications is surprisingly tricky, with lots of nuance between browsers, location and other factors. This post provides a quick introduction.
https://sematext.com/blog/measure-website-speed/

Tools

SBOMit is a new project aiming to extend the SBOM concept to also capture development details like version control usage, build process, unit testing, dependencies used, fuzzing, licence compliance checks, packaging, etc.
https://sbomit.dev/
https://github.com/SBOMit/specification

SQLCoder is a LLM for converting natural language questions to SQL queries. Open source code and weights under a CC BY-SA licence. Lots of interesting data exploration interfaces are coming I feel.
https://github.com/defog-ai/sqlcoder