We're on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella's first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

Kevin Ball, Alex Sexton, Nick Nisi, and Christopher Hiller talk all things tooling. Build tooling, linting, formatting, IDEs, and a small tangent on Vim.

Paul Dix, Founder and CTO of InfluxData, writes on the InfluxData blog: I attended and spoke at KubeCon EU. It was a massive event attended by around 4,700 people ... However, I felt there was an underlying problem ... everyone I spoke with was either an operator or an SRE. Where were all the application developers? Aren’t those the people that all this complex infrastructure is supposed to serve? Which raised questions for Paul, like... Is Kubernetes too complex? Will it end up collapsing under the weight of its own complexity? Will it fade away as OpenStack has seemed to since 2014? And Paul walked away from KubeCon EU with this perspective: Application developers would be better served by having a happy path to follow with the tools preselected ... CNCF’s increasing complexity and broader reach might dilute the focus and brand of Kubernetes ... I’m not sure what the answer might be to this or if I’m overblowing it, but from my perspective at the conference, it was like tool porn. Why bother with solving user problems when you can spend your entire career learning about and building new tools for infrastructure?

Matthias Endler shares his Vim experience by looking back after using the venerable text editor for 10 years. Would he go back and learn it all over again? On one side, I would say no. There's a steep learning curve in Vim and seeing all those modern IDEs become better at understanding the user's intent, editing text became way easier and faster in general. On the other side, Vim is the fastest way for me to write down my thoughts and code. As a bonus, it runs on every machine and might well be around in decades to come. In contrast, I don't know if the IntelliJ shortcuts will be relevant in ten years (note: if you read this in the future and ask yourself "What is IntelliJ?", the answer might be no). Definitely click through to read his takeways, too. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that the JS Party panel went deep on Vim (by accident?) for the next episode.

A set of common UI elements with a hand-drawn, sketchy look. These can be used for wireframes, mockups, or just the fun hand-drawn look. Check out the showcase to see all of the components available.

Well, Gatsby is officially a startup! They just announced the formation of Gatsby Inc. and have raised a $3.8M seed round to fund the effort. Wow, congrats Kyle and team. Kyle Matthews writes on the Gatsby blog: I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Gatsby Inc. Based on the open source project Gatsby I founded, Gatsby the company will make feature-rich and blazing-fast websites easier to build and run. What is Gatsby? Gatsby is... a blazing fast static site generator for React.js a powerful and flexible modern website framework that simplifies every step of starting, developing and running websites helps you leverage open source innovations in the React, NPM, and Gatsby communities for your web projects lets you pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, markdown—and any other data source you can imagine compiles and optimizes your site’s code to make your sites lightning fast—even on mobile

Jessie Frazelle: There seems to be some confusion around sandboxing containers as of late, mostly because of the recent launch of gvisor... There is a large amount of ignorance towards the existing defaults to make containers secure. Which is crazy since I have written many blog posts on it and given many talks on the subject. Jessie has been doing the yeoman's work of Linux kernel isolation and making containers secure for awhile now, but much of that work has been overlooked or disregarded by others in the community. I'm on the outside looking in at this situation, so it's tough to call exactly what's going on, but according to Jessie: When you work at a large organization you are surrounded by an echo chamber. So if everyone in the org is saying “containers are not secure,” you are bound to believe it and not research actual facts. That doesn't mean Jessie thinks containers are secure (click through to read her take on that). There's a lot to dig in to here and think about. I'll pull out one last point: I am not trying to throw shade at gvisor but merely clear up some FUD in the world of open source marketing. I truly believe that people choosing projects to use should research into them and not just choose something shiny that came out of Big Corp. Now that's a sentiment I can get behind! Oh, and listen to this related episode of The Changelog if you haven't yet. It's a must-listen for all developers.

If you've been looking for a fun, interactive, deep-dive into Bézier curves, this blog post from Josh Comeau is for you. Also, this is Josh's first post to his new blog, which is also open source on GitHub — so the following is a nice intro for what to expect. The whole reason I started this blog was that I wanted a way to build dynamic, interactive articles that are more effective at sharing and teaching concepts. Unlike with plain text on Medium, this blog is a fully-powered React app, and so I can create and embed interactive elements that help the reader build an intuitive understanding of the subject being presented. These dynamic "flattenable" Bézier curves are a perfect subject for this format, as they have underlying complexity that would be difficult to explain with words alone. And here's what to expect from this post on Bézier curves. In this maiden blog post, we'll go through the basics of working with Bézier curves and SVG in React.js. We'll learn how to build dynamic curves that respond to user input.

Dimitri Fontaine, a PostgreSQL major contributor, has written an awesome blog series on PostgreSQL data types to show how to benefit from the PostgreSQL concept of a data type. The PostgreSQL concept of a data type is more than input validation, a PostgreSQL data type also implements expected behaviors and processing functions. This allows an application developer to rely on PostgreSQL for more complex queries, having the processing happen where the data is — for instance when implementing advanced JOIN operations, then retrieving only the data set that is interesting for the application. The posts in this series were extracted from his book Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development — which teaches SQL to developers so they can replace thousands of lines of code with very simple queries.

This is a lot like Ruby on Rails (even with ActiveSupport & ActiveRecord built-in), but instead of views you have replies. It works for both voice-based and text-based bots and has NLP offerings baked in too. 🍰 The only bummer is that service integrations are currently limited to Facebook Messenger and Twilio SMS. That's pretty normal for a new open source offering, though, and it's a great place to hop in and contribute. ✊

Netflix open sourced their cloud gateway: The Cloud Gateway team at Netflix runs and operates more than 80 clusters of Zuul 2, sending traffic to about 100 (and growing) backend service clusters which amounts to more than 1 million requests per second. Pretty impressive. Click through to get the details of how Zuul 2 works and how they use it inside Netflix. I love when companies who are operating at webscale (😏) share their practices and code with the rest of us.

Eric Holthaus writes for Grist: Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago. It’s expected to double again by the end of the year... And if that happens, Bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands. I can't be the only one paying attention to Bitcoin's rise in energy usage... That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, Bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity... That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

I was perusing this popular VS Code feature request yesterday when I spotted a disturbing trend: more than a dozen comments containing nothing more than a +1

mostly's purpose is to serve as a lightweight, easy-to-comprehend starting point, with a focus on providing a great developer experience while helping you get high quality and maintainable web applications deployed rapidly. It uses Express for the server and React for the client. Worth a look if you're starting up a new web project. I dig this point about it: Nothing is hidden, nothing is magical, and all of the "plumbing" is accessible and simple.

a collection of working, practical examples of using service workers in modern web sites. From caching strategies, to web push, to going offline and optimizing performance; this cookbook is chocked full of great recipes. There's also a comments section at the bottom of each recipe where people are answer the question, "Has it been useful?" Now that's useful!

Vuido makes it possible to create lightweight, native desktop applications using Vue.js. Application using Vuido can run on Windows, OS X and Linux, using native GUI components, and don't require Electron. Emphasis added. Vuido uses libui under the hood to drive its cross-platform GUI components.

Ives van Hoorne is the creator of Codesandbox; an online code editor written completely in React. Although Codesandbox is written in React, it can be used to build applications for any front-end framework.

Efail caused a panic at the disco: ... some researchers in Europe published a paper with the bombshell title “Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels.” There were a lot of researchers on that team but in the hours after release Sebastian Schinzel took the point on Twitter for the group. Oh, my, did the email crypto world blow up. The following are some thoughts that have benefited from a few days for things to settle. Lots of interesting insights here, perhaps most controversially how the EFF's handling of the situation may have done more harm than good in the author's opinion. Also: we could stand to have a renewed appreciation for OpenPGP’s importance to not just email crypto, but the global economy. I can say I definitely have more appreciation for it after reading this than I did before. I hadn't thought about its influence (which is huge) outside of encrypted email.

Hackable and configurable to the core, signale can be used for logging purposes, status reporting, as well as for handling the output rendering process of other node modules and applications.

Want developers of great software to be able to make a living doing it? Want free trials in the App Store? Join The Developers Union! Dear Apple, We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store. Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we'll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.

This checklist covers monitoring, infrastructure, culture, code, and protection. It even helps you focus based on the stage of your company (assuming you are venture backed).