We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

David Mark Clements shares tools, techniques, and tips for making high-performance Node.js servers in this super deep post on Smashing Magazine: The surging popularity of Node.js has exposed the need for tooling, techniques and thinking suited to the constraints of server-side JavaScript. When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js. So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose? Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

It's amazing what a little bit of grease can do to the skids. Put this rb file in your $PATH and get ergonomic access to all of Ruby's text processing skills. The very first example sold me: docker ps | rb drop 1 | rb -l split[1]` # ubuntu # postgres

Everyone knows that React is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces — and many users of React choose it because they think it's supported by Facebook. But is it really? That depends on what you mean by React, and what you mean by support. Keenan Szulik writes on the Tidelift blog: Since its release in 2013, React has grown into a proper open source phenomenon ... with more than 100,000 GitHub stars, over 300,000 dependent repositories, and more than 800 contributors. Facebook's contributions to React and the JavaScript ecosystem around it are truly epic — the stuff of legend. But when we dive into the dependencies of the default create-react-app, only 24 of the 1,103 packages come from repositories in Facebook's GitHub organizations. That's less than 3% of the dependencies required to build the "Hello, World" app with create-react-app! So who supports React?

Bryan Helmig writes on the Zapier engineering blog: As startups grow, we need to make tweaks to the way we work. I’ve found this especially true in engineering. As a co-founder and CTO, my own role has changed a lot over the years. My everyday duties and challenges have shifted, and I’ve had to alter my approach multiple times to help the company reach a new level. The growth stage between just the three of us and where we are today was pretty tricky. Read on for the lessons I've learned as I grew as a first time CTO... Hear Bryan's story on Founders Talk this Thursday.

If you're a maintainer who's feeling the burden of your open source software, you have a few options to consider according to Richard Littauer — you can... Onboard more maintainers - spread the burden to more of the community Clearly set expectations - explain your software is provided on an “as is” basis Hire a maintenance company - wait, what?! Is that we've come to? Are we now hiring code maintenance companies to maintain our open source? I'm actually quite interested in the economies around this, so let this post serve as an open invite to Richard to join me on Founders Talk for a discussion on the state of open source maintenance and his lessons learned building Maintainer Mountaineer.

Bloomberg is citing a sell-off of Bitcoin, Ether, and dozens of smaller digital tokens. The "crypto exodus" is happening due to a "sense of panic" hitting crypto investors. It's been a brutal August for Bitcoin and Ether, with Bitcoin touching below $6,000. “The big story in the market today is the huge weakness in Ethereum,” Timothy Tam, chief executive officer of CoinFi said in a phone interview — “Bitcoin has held up relatively well versus Ethereum. It’s still quite weak versus the U.S. dollar.” While cryptocurrencies rallied in July on hopes that a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund would attract new investors, U.S. regulators have yet to sign off on multiple proposals for such a product. The letdown has coincided with growing concern that entrepreneurs who raised crypto-denominated funds via initial coin offerings (ICO) are now cashing out of holdings such as Ether, the token for the Ethereum blockchain that is a popular platform for crypto projects. What do you think? Are you selling, buying, or holding?

Saverio Miroddi explains how to write tab-completion scripts in any language, with an example in Ruby, and how to use them in both Bash and Zsh. As is common with well-received blog posts, it even inspired some open source (for making tab completion scripts trivial).

The purpose of this project is to provide a shortcut to developers and researchers for finding useful resources about Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing. Organized by papers, datasets, courses, books, blogs, tutorials and more...

Do you have documentation? Do you have a documentation content strategy? No?!! If you want to create guides for your software, having a solid content strategy can help you write useful content. This article will walk you through how to develop that strategy, whether you’re an engineer or a technical writer, new to writing documentation or just looking to get more strategic about it.

David Cassel has a great recap of the recent Decentralized Web Summit and what it was all about. It’s a follow-up to a similar event in 2016, though now “People are starting to show real working code and real projects. They’re building whole technology stacks that are more decentralized, in large part fueled by the excitement of the cryptocurrency systems. The altcoins and Bitcoins are proving that interesting and complicated systems are starting to work out there.” Click through for lots of quotes and takeaways. I think Changelog might have to get involved if they do this again next year...

Copy/paste the code in this repo's README into your browser's address bar and you end up with a super minimal CodePen-style editor. Pretty cool, and a bit crazy that you can get so much functionality with just 400 bytes of code...

Abhishek Singh isn't deaf or mute, but that didn't stop him from asking the question: If voice is the future of computing interfaces, what about those who cannot hear or speak? This thought led to a super cool project wherein a computer interprets sign language and speaks the results to a nearby Alexa device. Live demo here and code here.

Mike Bugembe teaches us how to build a culture of data-driven decision making within a company, leverage behavioral economics, and identify high value use cases for AI.

Stack Overflow began be telling their community to "be nice," but over time that proved to not be enough to ensure a safe place for the developer community. Tim Post, Director Of Community Strategy, writes on the Stack Overflow blog: Our CoC is what we call a living document. It’s designed to change over time to ensure that it remains relevant by continuing to meet the needs of our communities. Every six months or so, we plan to find out how folks feel about how things are going by asking both new and experienced users about their recent experiences on the site. Hopefully this change leads to a less toxic experience.

Good news — the next generation of Vue CLI, the standard build toolchain for Vue applications, is here. Evan You writes: Vue CLI 3 is a completely different beast from its previous version. The goal of the rewrite is two-fold: Reduce configuration fatigue of modern frontend tooling, especially when mixing multiple tools together; Incorporate best practices in the toolchain as much as possible so it becomes the default for any Vue app. This means that any Vue CLI 3 project comes with out-of-the-box support most of today's preferred ways to build and ship applications.

Jerod and Suz talk with John Resig about how he's using GraphQL at Khan Academy, some of the mistakes and successes using GraphQL, John's feelings on jQuery, and community Q&A.

You can use this web app as a boilerplate for building your own SaaS product. The app has many common SaaS features, so you can focus on the features that differentiate your product. As with most boilerplates, this is opinionated about its stack, which features: React, Material-UI, Next, MobX, Express, Mongoose, MongoDB, Typescript Here's the full list of features and the live demo.

Max wrote an excellent intro (for his past self) to using the Shell. He covers what it is, common actions, package managers, dotfiles, aliases, and more. Check this out as a refresher, or send it to a friend who needs a nudge in the right direction. ✊

Steven Loria: Stop using unversioned settings files and start storing configuration in environment variables (see The Twelve-Factor App). environs makes it easy to parse environment variables with built-in type-casting and validation. It will even read .env files, which are handy for local development. 💯% agree with using environment variables for configuration. I used to do the .gitignore a Yaml file thang, but nowadays it's all direnv and/or dotenv.

25 excellent pieces of advice from a mostly self-taught software engineer. Numbers 21 (Build projects you love) and 24 (Celebrate your wins) really resonate with me. Plus she finishes the post off with an awesome Sandi Metz quote.