We discuss the news (built-in modules, OpenJSFoundation, Lambda School stipends), chat about the internet of JS things, and finish up with one of our favorite segments: shout outs!

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Rod Johnson: I’m not against YAML, just against abuse of YAML. I want to help prevent people abusing YAML and being cruel to themselves and their coworkers in the process. YAML has bitten me once or twice over the years, but I am not repulsed by it as many folks seem to be. YAML’s strength is as a structured data format. Yes, it has issues. Whitespace is a minefield. Its syntax is surprisingly complex. It has gotchas: “Anyone who uses YAML long enough will eventually get burned when attempting to abbreviate Norway.” But YAML is human readable and supports comments: two key benefits that drive its popularity. If JSON supported comments it may have killed YAML by now. But alas… Rod makes a good defense of the format for certain uses.

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Omer Levi Hevroni: When we made the shift to Kubernetes, we wanted to keep our devs independent and put a lot of effort into allowing them to create services rapidly. It all worked like a charm – until they had to handle credentials… The solution they came up with is called Kamus, which is: an open source, GitOps, zero trust, secrets solution for Kubernetes applications. Kamus allows you to seamlessly encrypt secret values and commit them to source control Jump over to the article for more on Kubernetes built-in secrets, an overview of some other alternatives, and a deep-dive on how Kamus works.

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This combined with Pinboard is a nice combo! ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites. … It imports lists of URLs, renders the pages in a headless, authenticated, user-scriptable browser, and then archives the content in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the originals disappear off the internet.

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Google Analytics runs on over 56% of all websites. It’s the backbone of ad-tech across the web. Unfortunately, for site owners like me who just want to learn how people are using their website—while respecting their privacy—there simply aren’t any alternatives that meet all my requirements. So in two days, after a couple dead-ends, I built my own using React, AWS Lambda, and a spreadsheet. This is how. It’s somewhat ironic that the datastore for this project is Google Sheets. That aside, this is a well-done effort and one that I wouldn’t mind adapting for use around these parts.

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Google, Intel, and others have recently been targeting AI at the edge with things like Coral and the Neural Compute Stick, but NVIDIA is taking things a step farther. They just announced the Jetson Nano, which is a $99 computer with 472 GFLOPS of compute performance, an integrated NVIDIA GPU, and a Raspberry Pi form factor. According to NVIDIA: The compute performance, compact footprint, and flexibility of Jetson Nano brings endless possibilities to developers for creating AI-powered devices and embedded systems. And it’s not only for inference (which is the main target of things like Intel’s NCS). The Jetson Nano can also handle AI model training: since Jetson Nano can run the full training frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Caffe, it’s also able to re-train with transfer learning for those who may not have access to another dedicated training machine and are willing to wait longer for results. Check it out! You can pre-order now.

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Nick Janetakis has been using Vim for just over a month, but he’s gotten up to speed pretty quickly and is ready to help you do the same: I think it’s worth writing posts like this while you’re still a semi-beginner because once you’ve been using something for a really long time, it’s easy to forget the details of what helped you out early on.

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If you open source your work to (speculatively) make lots of money… you’re doing it wrong. There are much easier means to that end. But there are plenty of good reasons to do open source for free. Here’s three of them.

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After announcing the program in a tweet, Jack Dorsey followed up with some details: This will be Square’s first open source initiative independent of our business objectives. These folks will focus entirely on what’s best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square’s commercial interests. All resulting work will be open and free. Followed by: Square has taken a lot from the open source community to get us here. We haven’t given enough back. This is a small way to give back, and one that’s aligned with our broader interests: a more accessible global financial system for the internet. Whether you’re a devout Bitcoin hodler or an avid nocoiner, you have to admit this a great way (the greatest?) for corporate entities to support the open source community. Full-time salaries. Not focused on commercial interests. Let’s hope it plays out that way! 🙏

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The intersection of service mesh and distributed tracing is exciting to me. This quick Kubernetes-based tutorial is a great way to see how it works in practice.

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Chris Coyier joins Suz and Jerod to continue the discussion on The Great Divide in front-end-land. We also use this as an opportunity to gush on how much CSS-Tricks has done for the community, get Chris’ perspective on the history of the website, and finish up by sharing some amazing Pens on CodePen.io.

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This is “a list of the biggest datasets for machine learning from across the web.” Filter by category, computer vision, natural language processing, and audio — or by license type, commercial and non-commercial.

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As of March 14, 2019, Google Image Charts API is no longer in service. That’s a shame, because it was a convenient way to easily generate a chart image from a URL. The good news is an open source replacement is ready for service!

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An amazing amount of information in an easily accessible format. Check out the GitHub org for additional versions on CSS, React, interviewing, and more.

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Open source isn’t a charity case. We can’t expect to attract and retain level 10 players into a level 2 opportunity. So why are we treating open source maintainers and contributors like they owe us something and not finding ways to enable them to maximize the rewards they can get for playing the game? Let’s abandon the notion that open source is exclusively charity. In the software industry, we’re normalizing spec work in a way that the design industry successfully rallied against. The narrative around open source is that it’s completely OK—even an expectation—that we’re all doing this for fun and exposure; and that giant companies should get huge publicity credit for throwing peanuts-to-them donations at a small subset of open source projects. There’s nothing wrong with doing stuff for fun and exposure, or making donations, as an option. It becomes a problem when the free work is expected and the donations are seen as enough.

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Built from scratch by dailymotion’s engineering team. A few highlights and principles: Schema First (SDL) Dev experience matters Built on top of asynchio If you need to add a GraphQL API to your Python 3 app, this looks like a good place to start.

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We made a silly joke on Twitter yesterday (this is what Twitter is for, no?) about test doubles and that unfortunate moment when they inevitably surprise you. This prompted Shlomo Kraus to reach out and tell us about Mockshot. In brief: Imagine you could: Never manually write a mock again Have a guarantee that your mocks are always valid Sounds nice! It works by using Jest’s snapshot tests output to generate mocks to be used in other tests. This is purposeful coupling, which seems like it could backfire in the long-run. However, the team behind the library has been using it for over a year and are still singing its praises. For more on their experience creating and using it, read this.

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Lauren Tan: I recently moved my blog from Medium to a self-managed blog built with Gatsby in the open, then deployed on Netlify. After a few weeks of fiddling around, I feel like I’ve landed on something I’m mostly happy with. This is a transition we are 💯 behind. Medium is becoming more reader-hostile all the time. Plus, wouldn’t you rather own your own content on a domain you have control over? Of course you would!

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Clément Delangue, the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.

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There’s lots of good advice here, covering: 🎨 Initial Presentation 💰 Value Proposition 💯 Project Quality 👑 Branding ✈️ Onboarding Methods 🧹 Code Conventions and Infrastructure 📣 Spread the Word 🤑 Funding If you read the Spread the Word section closely you’ll notice Amila is following his own advice. 😉

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This site is a collection of generative music pieces which can be listened to. The term “generative music” has been used especially by Brian Eno to describe music which changes continuously and is created by a system. Such systems often generate music for as long as one is willing to listen. Push play and code away.

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