I was restlessly looking at some of the topics in Austin area meetups today now that I no longer live in Austin.

Spectre is a "meltdown" vulnerability at the Intel processors that leaves a cache of immediate data in memory available and exposed to an exploiting process that knows how to get at it such as a JavaScript script that runs at a sinister web site. Branch misprediction in which the mircoprocessor is tricked into making some bad assumption at a fork-in-the-road decision point is cornerstone to all this though I don't really understand it. If you type in your password and it gets encrypted, at some point it had to be plain-text right? I think you get yourself off the immediate thread where you typed in your password that you'll be alright. Go-kit is a mircoservices approach for the Go scripting language. The buffalo framework is some rapid-development framework for Go for the web and Pop is the canned database part of it. RPC stands for remote procedure call and gRPC (note: recursive acronym for gRPC Remote Procedure Calls) may be used with a Postgres database to call into/out to a database elsewhere.