Coding with Good Taste, A Language that Puts Humans First, and more news

"Good taste" ?coding is possible, and human-first programming is a thing. Read on...

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Coding with “good taste”: Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently riffed on the importance of this approach in a TED interview, and a more rigorous treatment of what it means from a coding perspective is in this Medium article. It amounts to this: Reducing the need to handle edge cases.

New language puts humans first. Eve focuses on the needs of coders rather than machines running their code. It's getting a warm Internet reception — want to try it out? There’s an interactive tutorial here.

Data engineers are so hot, you probably can't hire one: Jake Stein from Stitch read a Hacker News thread so you don’t have to, and teases out the top 3 reasons companies are having trouble recruiting the people who can manipulate Big Data. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover reason No. 1: Money (Of course, it could have been food).

Be very afraid. One way to know you’ve got the proper respect for operability is if you're scared to do things. A little fear is healthy, as explained in this post on why every engineer needs to care about operations.

‘Member shareware? Commander Keen. Wolfenstein 3D. The venerable WinRAR… all programs originally distributed as shareware. The use of shareware as a business model magically vanished a few years ago, and the reason why turns out to be adware. A fascinating history of the shareware business model and a read on what happened to it comes to us from Tedium.

How should you structure an engineering team? If you’re like most engineering managers, the answer may be “random chance” — but, amazingly, scientific research suggests that isn’t the best method. Learn about ways that work and ways that don’t in this summary of the literature.

The annual Grace Hopper Conference brought together 15,000 women to learn from each other and celebrate women in technology. See some of the highlights in this roundup. Speaking of Grace Hopper, she was an incredible engineer — and was also a genius at explaining concepts that are difficult to grok. Watch this video and you’ll have an entirely new appreciation for how long it takes to do things in computing:

Dirty COWs, SQL injection, and reasons why you shouldn’t “Skype and Type” in the Security Corner:

• A security person’s nightmare is users plugging random stuff in to a USB port. Duckhunter is a new daemon that will stop these attacks from working.
• A research paper reveals it's possible to remotely log keystrokes with alarming accuracy based on the sounds sent over VoIP calls. The researchers cleverly titled their paper “Don’t Skype & Type!” (pdf warning)
• The Democratic National Committee has had some high-profile information security issues. How can people be so sure about attributing the attack to any particular entity? Learn about IoCs and other ways to help educate your guesses in this LinkedIn post.
• Need to give someone a primer on how SQL injection works? Ars Technica has you covered with this explainer.
• Want to dive deep into Dirty COW? Check out this step-by-step walkthrough of the exploit and see how it’s fixed.

You may notice a new layout of the roundup this week; we’re continuing to experiment with the best way to deliver this content. If you have feedback, leave a comment!

Cover photo: PeopleImages.com / Getty