We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.

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Hey fellow Brain Science fans, this one is for you. I’ve had a relationship with procrastination that’s similar to this headline and, with time, I’ve found that it’s an emotional state, not a permanent personal quality. Quotable: “People procrastinate or avoid aversive tasks to improve their short-term mood at the cost of long-term goals.” TL;DR our unconscious mind is looking to be kind to us, not harm us. By changing the internal narrative, we can adjust our response.

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More news out of today’s GitHub Satellite event, this time from a security angle. The implications of this acquisition from the horse’s mouth: We’re integrating Dependabot directly into GitHub, starting with security fix PRs 👮‍♂️ You can still install Dependabot from the GitHub Marketplace whilst we integrate it into GitHub, but it’s now free of charge 🎁 We’ve doubled the size of Dependabot’s team; expect lots of great improvements over the coming months 👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻 Congrats to Grey, Harry and Philip!

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The news about GitHub Sponsor is making the rounds. This post from Owen Williams highlights how GitHub is listening and putting their money where their mouth is, for the good of all of us. GitHub, it seems, is thriving again. It just showed the fruits of that labor, and what it looks like when a company is participating in the discussion in the open, listening to the developers that know it best. At an event called GitHub Satellite, the company unveiled the biggest set of new features in memory, all designed to address glaring problems the platform has faced for years. They’re designed to help make GitHub a better place to work, and contribute to the open source community as a whole.

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Reakit offers a host of usable React components that strictly follow A11y standards. From tabs and tooltips to forms and buttons. There’s a lot to like here.

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HUGE news coming from GitHub today: We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day. Open source developers build tools for the rest of us. GitHub Sponsors is a new tool to help them succeed, too. 100% of sponsorship money goes to the developers and they’re even matching contributions up to $5k during a developer’s first year! Also, the whole thing is tightly integrated in to GitHub itself: Open source projects can also express their funding models directly from their repositories. When .github/FUNDING.yml is added to a project’s master branch, a new “Sponsor” button will appear at the top of the repository. Clicking the button opens a natively rendered view of the funding models listed in that file. There’s lots to digest here, but at first glance this looks like an amazing addition to the open source ecosystem. 🎉

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Colin Billings is the founder and CEO of Orro where they’ve built the first truly intelligent home lighting system. It knows when you’re in the room, and adjusts the lights automatically for you. But Colin’s path to starting this company wasn’t a straight line. Like most innovative products, Orro has an interesting beginning — after-all, they’re going up against the giants.

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Panelists Mat Ryer and Carmen Andoh are joined by guest panelists Marwan Sulaiman and Aaron Schlesinger to discuss Go modules and the Athens project.

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Fellow Gophers and Go Time fans out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post from Chris Siebenmann. Go has community contributions but it is not a community project. It is Google’s project. This is an unarguable thing, whether you consider it to be good or bad, and it has effects that we need to accept. For example, if you want some significant thing to be accepted into Go, working to build consensus in the community is far less important than persuading the Go core team. In general, it’s extremely clear that the community’s voice doesn’t matter very much for Go’s development, and those of us working with Go outside Google’s walls just have to live with that.

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For the entrepreneurial type: this is a great dive into the fundamentals of product-market fit by @sparkszilla. The whole read is worth it if you’re interested in raising funds in the future. The heart of the article stems from three axiomatic theories: Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success: Rachleff says, “The #1 company-killer is lack of market. When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.” Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success: “The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit.” BPMF and APMF: The lives of startups are divided into two categories, before product-market fit (BPMF) and after product-market fit (APMF). And the Vohra questionnaire to see if you have PMF is one I’ll keep on hand for the future. 👌

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Verrrry interesting: EdgeDB combines the simplicity of a NoSQL database with relational model’s powerful querying, strictness, consistency, and performance. It boasts strongly typed schemas, native GraphQL support, a rich standard library, built-in support for schema migrations, and more.

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At the recent O’Reilly AI Conference in New York City, Chris met up with O’Reilly Chief Data Scientist Ben Lorica, the Program Chair for Strata Data, the AI Conference, and TensorFlow World. O’Reilly’s ‘AI Adoption in the Enterprise’ report had just been released, so naturally Ben and Chris wanted to do a deep dive into enterprise AI adoption to discuss strategy, execution, and implications.

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From Stephen Wolfram himself on his personal blog: Why aren’t you using our technology? It happens far too often. … Sometimes the answer is yes. But too often, there’s an awkward silence, and then they’ll say, “Well, no. Could I?” Here’s the kicker for open source developers… If you’re making a free, open-source system, you can apply for a Free Production License. In the license it says “Open-source projects approved by Wolfram,” which seems like they’re going to maintain a list of approved projects, but Stephan mentioned that they’re still working out the kinks in usage and licensing and they “are committed to providing predictable and straightforward licensing for the long term.”

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Put your brand color(s) in, and get accessible color variations out. An easy way to generate WCAG AA/AAA color pairs based on an existing color.

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Check out this interview from Alanna Irving (Open Source Collective Executive Director) with Henry Zhu sharing the backstory of what went well for Babel to reach financial sustainability. Our ultimate goal was to help the project thrive. My personal goal was to help fund Logan, given he was working on his own time, and I figured that if I ever quit my job I might get funded someday too (which has now happened). I knew we would need some momentum and time for that to be possible, so we decided to make a start. When we first started the Babel Collective, we weren’t even bringing in $1k/month. Slowly we built up to $4k/month, which is when I left my job to focus on Babel. Recently our budget looks a lot bigger thanks to a $100,000 grant from Handshake, which we split out as $10k/month. Once that’s over, the total will be around $20k/month. Also, check out Alanna’s book — Better Work Together

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David Cassel with a nice rundown and analysis of interesting/creative 404s around the web. Maybe this is where geek culture really lives — in the hidden messages left behind by webmasters who were hoping they’d never need to be read.

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A clever hack that is now being investigated by Google’s internal forums. How it works: Google Docs take up 0 bytes of quota in your Google Drive Split up binary files into Google Docs, with base64 encoded text Encoded file is always larger than the original. Base64 encodes binary data to a ratio of about 4:3. A single doc can store ~1 million characters. This is around 710KB of base64 encoded data.

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I missed this good news announced back in March…“We’re putting the band back together.” I’m glad to hear that we can now look forward to more Maintainerati events. …one important thing we learned is that maintainers need to have access to others who are sharing the same experiences, struggles and successes they have while running an open source project. In response to this, GitHub has reached out to some passionate people in the broader maintainers community to help bring some structure and growth to Maintainerati, in the shape of a new core team to run Maintainerati events and organize the community.

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From the Microsoft Edge blog: Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Edge Canary channel for macOS. You can now install preview builds from the Microsoft Edge Insider site for macOS… Anyone out there test drive this yet? Chime in the discussion below to share your thoughts.

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KBall, Emma, and Chris explain some things to each other like we’re five, bring stories of the week, and share some sweet pro tips.

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