Surprises for you for our 20th anniversary, plus news from AWS: re:Invent, Microsoft and more.

Hi there,

This week is a special occasion for us, as we're launching our 20th Developer Economics survey! It's a big anniversary - we're celebrating 10 years of research into what really matters to developers! We've prepared numerous pleasant surprises for everyone who wishes to take the survey, from a free virtual goody bag filled with data (and open passes to DeveloperWeek conference, no big deal, you know!), Christmas prize draws, new gear you can win, and more. If you're quick enough and take the survey by December 8th, you'll enter our early bird prize draw where you can win:

• a SitePoint Premium Subscription (sponsored by SitePoint)
• a BaseCode field guide - full kit (sponsored by BaseCode)
• $10 Amazon vouchers, and more!

Dev Resources & Articles

Advent of Code is here! If you've never heard of it before, Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. [ADVENTOFCODE]

Users underestimate level of attacks on home networks. The top five most vulnerable devices in connected homes are, computers, smartphones, networked cameras, networked storage devices, and streaming video devices. Internet of things devices remain a threat, more than four in five consumers (83 percent) would not be 100 percent confident they’d know if one of their non-screen devices -- such as a wireless printer or security camera -- had been hacked. [BETANEWS]

My advice after interviewing 100+ software engineers. Although each company has its unique process, there are common pitfalls people tend to fall. Here is my honest advice on how to avoid them. [MEDIUM]

Comparing iPhone OS 1.0 with iOS 14 using tree maps. When iPhone OS 1.0 was released in 2007, it redefined the smartphone with a limited set of core features. Nowadays iOS 14 contains an incredible amount of components. By looking at them based on their size, we can determine the most important features. [BLOG.TIMAC]

Can you replace your desktop PC with a Raspberry Pi 4? Here’s why I won’t be tossing out my desktop PC anytime soon. [DEBUGGER.MEDIUM]

A DevOps periodic table of critical alert monitoring system integrations. AlertOps | resolve major it incidents & automate real-time operations. [MEDIUM]

8 best free and open source functions-as-a-service. FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) is a category of cloud computing services. It’s a fairly new development that originated from PaaS. FaaS is a cloud computing model that abstracts server management and low-level infrastructure decisions away from developers, but takes it much further than PaaS. [LINUXLINKS]

Industry News

Announcements from AWS re:Invent. Highlights include AWS Lambda now billing in 1ms increments with no minimum execution time, and you can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size. Also, you can now use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to build and test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps. You can check all the announcements here. [AWS]

Developer training sees spike in demand as more people learn to code. The pandemic has sent more people to seek out coding courses as a means of upskilling and future-proofing themselves in times of economic uncertainty. [TECHREPUBLIC]

Microsoft’s Project Latte should bring Android apps to Windows 10. The ability for users to install Android apps locally will likely gain more traction than mirroring from their smartphones. For Android developers, it will open up a market of over one billion Windows 10 devices. [DEVELOPER-TECH]

OpenZFS 2.0 release unifies Linux, BSD and adds tons of new features. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official. [ZDNET]

Google security researcher develops 'zero-click' exploit for iOS flaw. A new patched memory corruption vulnerability in Apple's AWDL protocol can be used to take over iOS devices that are in close proximity to an attacker. [DARKREADING]

Rails 6.1 RC2. The second release candidate for Rails 6.1 has been released and it contains Horizontal Sharding, Multi-DB improvements, Strict Loading, Destroy Associations in Background, Error Objects, and more. [RUBYONRAILS]

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