GreyNeurons Bookmark Dispatch #4

Agile Wins, ARM Savings, Secure Open Source, and Smarter MySQL — All in One Dispatch

Rajesh K
March 28, 2025

💡 Quick Thought

Developers hate meetings — fair. But if I had to pick just one ritual and one metric to boost delivery, it’d be:

Ritual: Daily standups
Metric: Work In Progress (WIP) per developer — keep it between 1.0 and 1.25

WIP = Total open work items / # of developers

Teams that keep WIP under control ship faster and break less.

💸 Start with AWS Graviton Instances

If you're just getting started with AWS—or looking to cut cloud costs—my first recommendation is simple: go Graviton

They're up to 40% cheaper than x86 EC2, with better performance per dollar. One of the reason they are cheaper is because the graviton processor is designed by Amazon and of course they want to promote it. For most workloads, it's a no-brainer, just make sure your stack is ARM-compatible, and you’re set to save. You can read more about Graviton here.

🦉Words of Wisdom

The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide - perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important.

Fred Brooks

The Open Source Security Index is designed to make it easier to discover high-quality open source security projects. It ranks projects on GitHub using an “Index Score” — a weighted average of key metrics retrieved monthly from GitHub and normalized on a 0–100 scale. You can read more about it here.

🛠️ MySQL on Dedicated Servers: Smarter Defaults

If you're running MySQL on a dedicated server, you might not need to obsess over config tuning anymore. MySQL has long supported automatic configuration adjustments based on detected system resources.

It dynamically sets values like innodb_buffer_pool_size, max_connections, and table_open_cache based on available RAM and CPU

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