News and podcasts for developers |> Changelog

From zero to thought leader in 6 months

We’re talking with Emma Wedekind about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

codewithoutrules.com

Setting boundaries at your job as a programmer

If you’re not careful your manager and teammates will expect you to be available at all hours, on weekends, and when you’re on vacation. Here are some suggestions on setting boundaries so you don’t set those bad expectations.

iridakos.com

Creating a chat application from scratch with Rails and WebSockets

A nice tut on the nitty gritty of using Action Cable to build a chat app. See also the follow-up post in which Lazarus dockerizes it as well.

blog.plaid.com

Growing our team with retrospectives

From Kira Booth writing on the Plaid blog. …we take an agile-like approach to how we think about process. If our team’s process isn’t working, we talk about it in a retrospective (aka “retro”) and figure out how to change it. Many companies don’t begin retros until they are large and have many processes in place, but we feel that retros are especially valuable at our size and rate of growth. Plaid’s engineering organization is rapidly growing. In the Salt Lake City office where I work, we have plans to grow from 20 to 60 engineers this year. Processes that worked just a few months ago may not work now. A culture of continuous process improvement helps us to stay ahead of growing pains like inefficient collaboration, error-prone coding practices, and interpersonal conflict.

Rollbar – Sponsored

Where are JavaScript errors logged?

Have you ever wondered how and where JavaScript errors are logged? Unlike other web languages, JavaScript was originally a client-side language. As a result, error handling is designed with the client side in mind, rather than the server side. Rather than dealing with log files, rotation, permissions, and all the other fun things that come with server-side languages, JavaScript errors are dealt with inline.

Go Time #82

Hiring and job interviews

Panelists Mat Ryer, Ashley McNamara, Johnny Boursiquot, and Carmen Andoh discuss the process of getting hired, hiring, and job interviews. If people are the most important part of a team, how do we pick who we work with? What’s the process like? How can it better?

simonwillison.net

Running Datasette on Glitch

We talked with Simon Willison about Datasette on The Changelog #296. For the uninitiated, Datasette is an awesome tool for exploring and publishing data, and now you can play with it on Glitch. The worst part of any software project is setting up a development environment. It’s by far the biggest barrier for anyone trying to get started learning to code. I’ve been a developer for more than twenty years and I still feel the pain any time I want to do something new. Glitch is the most promising attempt I’ve ever seen at tackling this problem. This evening I decided to get Datasette running on it. I’m really impressed with how well it works, and I think Glitch provides an excellent environment for experimenting with Datasette and related tools.

CSS-Tricks

Using Netlify functions to send emails with a JAMstack-style site

How do you send email from a JAMstack-style site? Chris Coyer writes on CSS-Tricks: Let’s say you’re rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That’s the whole point of JAMstack. It’s not just static hosting. It’s that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript and APIs. Here’s the setup…

eev.ee

A geometric Rust adventure

I recently ported some math code from C++ to Rust in an attempt to do a cool thing with Doom. Here is my story. Buckle up, because this a #longread. However, it’s worth it because you will be entertained while wading through the mucky-muck of solving what sounds like a simple problem (but isn’t): I have some shapes. I want to find their intersection. Who knows, you might even learn some Rust along the way…

Practical AI #40

Deep Reinforcement Learning

While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it’s one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligence!

Codacy – Sponsored

Why coding standards matter

Have you considered automating your code reviews? As much as you might like coding by yourself, there comes a time when you will have to share your production with others. There’s also the possibility you will have to look at their code — especially working in a team, where second opinions are vital to a great-working product. This is when you’ll realize that not everyone writes their code the same way, and you’ll start to think everyone but you is doing it wrong. Codacy let’s you identify OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, make sure your code quality is standardized across all teams and projects, and get notified in your GitHub pull request comments and Slack workflows.

mockit.netlify.com

A tool to quickly mock out end points, setup delays, and more...

Stop wasting time mocking APIs. MockIt gives you an interface to configure and create REAL mocked end points for your applications.

svelte.dev

Svelte 3: rethinking reactivity

After several months of being just days away, we are over the moon to announce the stable release of Svelte 3. This is a huge release representing hundreds of hours of work by many people in the Svelte community, including invaluable feedback from beta testers who have helped shape the design every step of the way. Lots of folks (myself included) have been eagerly awaiting this release after Rich teed it up on The Changelog #332. We’d love to hear your first impressions!

Opensource.com

Level up command-line playgrounds with WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a powerful tool for bringing command line utilities to the web and giving people the chance to tinker with tools. Yet another excellent use case for Wasm.

github.com

Run VS Code on any server over SSH

sshcode is a CLI to automatically install and run code-server over SSH. It uploads your extensions and settings automatically, so you can seamlessly use remote servers as VS Code hosts. If you have Chrome installed, it opens the browser in app mode. That means there’s no keybind conflicts, address bar, or indication that you’re coding within a browser. It feels just like native VS Code.

JS Party #72

LIVE from React Amsterdam

KBall MC’d a live show at React Amsterdam with a panel of 5 amazing React experts — Kitze, Michel Weststrate, Mike Grabowski, Vladimir Novick, and Andrey Okonetchnikov. It was a great discussion of state management solutions and the future of state management in the front-end.

blog.containo.us

Back to Traefik 2.0 - gigawatts of routing power

There’s a major new version of Traefik in the works: For several months, the maintainer team has been working on a deep refactoring of the codebase to provide the firm foundations for the next iteration of Traefik, and we are ready to share this vision with you. Today, we’re announcing Traefik 2.0 alpha, the edge router built with the future in mind. The new core is here, help us finalize Traefik with the features you want!

github.com

A RESTful API to generate diagrams for your GitHub README

This is basically an API for the (excellent looking) Mermaid.

sizovs.net

Great developers are raised, not hired

This post by Eduards Sizvos is loaded with wisdom: You can escape this crazy hiring race by creating an environment, where experienced developers mentor less experienced developers. Hire for attitude, and teach technical skills. Be the company that says: we are hiring mentoring. This pairs nicely with our mentorship discussion with Emma Wedekind and next week’s Go Time on hiring and job interviews.

github.com

Building a federated alternative to Reddit in Rust

A link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse I still flinch every time someone says “fediverse”, but it took me 7+ years to get used to “tweet”, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually… That aside, lots of neat tech here and I’m always in support of decentralization.

Founders Talk #63

Zero up-front costs for a CS education

What would be the impact on the world if a Computer Science education was available to you completely free of charge until you get a job in that field paying $50,000 or more? That’s the question that drives Austen Allred and the team behind Lambda School. Lambda School is a revolutionary new school that invests in its students and they completely align their interests with their students. Seems like a novel idea, right? But Austen’s path to Silicon Valley was where things began for him, so that’s where we’ll start today’s conversation.