TWIL: July 31, 2022

This week I learned a lot of interesting things. Check out Azure App Configuration and Azure Confidential Ledger, two services that many of us know very little about. Also, two interesting articles around Data Lakehouse. How about Figma and Anima? Have you heard about them? Take a look!


Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1804: Passwordless Identity with Eli Holderness
Can you make your application passwordless? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Eli Holderness about implementing passwordless technology. Eli talks about using password managers and adding physical authentication tokens like fido keys. The conversation then digs into all the varieties of passwordless authentication including SMS, Authenticators, and one-time tokens. There are great libraries for implementing all of these technologies – and you’re going to need more than one!

The Azure Podcast

Episode 432: App Config Service
Cale and Sujit discuss the little-known. but very important App Config Service which simplifies configurations for all applications on Azure.

Hanselminutes

Episode 850: Rust for Beginners with Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft and as a Board Director at the Rust Foundation. Rust is a low-level statically-typed multi-paradigm programming language that’s focused on safety and performance. In a world of C and C++, why should you use Rust? Why does Rust shine and what problems does it solve?

Episode 851: Failing Safely with Ramón Huidobro
Ramón Huidobro is a Developer Relations Strategist, Developer Educator and Public Speaker with over a decade of experience in Software Engineering. He talks to Scott about how to learn – and fail – safely and comfortably in public.


Azure Services

What is Azure App Configuration?
Azure App Configuration provides a service to centrally manage application settings and feature flags. Modern programs, especially programs running in a cloud, generally have many components that are distributed in nature. Spreading configuration settings across these components can lead to hard-to-troubleshoot errors during an application deployment. Use App Configuration to store all the settings for your application and secure their accesses in one place.

Azure confidential ledger
Azure confidential ledger provides a managed and decentralized ledger for data entries backed by Blockchain. Maintain data integrity by preventing unauthorized or accidental modification with tamperproof storage. Protect your data at rest, in transit, and in use with hardware-backed secure enclaves used in Azure confidential computing.


Data Lakehouse

Lakes? Warehouses? Lakehouses? A short history of Data Architecture
Interesting article explaining the major data platform archtypes (data lake, data lakehouse and coud-native data warehouse), highlighting their history, industry trends, benefits and limitations.

Why Lakehouse over Data warehouse
Lakehouse is a combination of the best features of a Data Lake and a Data Warehouse. A Data Lake provides highly scalable low cost storage for structured and unstructured data, while a Data Warehouse provides high performance queries on structured data. Lakehouse provides both of the above features. Below I provide four reasons why I believe Lakehouse is what we need to be building going forward rather than a Data warehouse.


Web Development

Anvil
Spin up and deploy a web app in just 5 minutes, using nothing but Python. Anvil’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create beautiful, functional apps without the need for 5 different programming languages. It’s simple, clean and Pythonic: easy enough for beginners, but powerful enough for pros.


Security

How FIDO Works
The FIDO protocols use standard public key cryptography techniques to provide stronger authentication. During registration with an online service, the user’s client device creates a new key pair. It retains the private key and registers the public key with the online service. Authentication is done by the client device proving possession of the private key to the service by signing a challenge. The client’s private keys can be used only after they are unlocked locally on the device by the user. The local unlock is accomplished by a user–friendly and secure action such as swiping a finger, entering a PIN, speaking into a microphone, inserting a second–factor device or pressing a button.


Cool Stuff

Figma
Really cool service to handle all the phases of the design process, from the brainstorming (using the collaboration-focused whiteboarding solution FigJam), to the design, prototyping, and hand off to development.

Anima
Anima’s goal is to create a continuous design-to-code process. As designers and developers ourselves, we understand that by streamlining the handoff process, teams will deliver and innovate 10x faster. The effort behind this powerhouse is huge, and the result is advanced prototyping features and the ability to translate designs into HTML, React, and Vue code, all from Figma, Adobe XD & Sketch.


Have a great week!

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash