We talk with Chad Hietala about Ember JS, the long history of Ember, how Chad first got involved, his work on the Ember core team, Glimmer, and more.

Paul Kinlan, developer advocate for Chrome and the open web at Google writes: Chrome implemented window.onappinstalled event. It's triggered when a user installs a progressive web app via the Add to Homescreen API or now more importantly via the manual method of Add to Homescreen. This is a very useful addition because it allows you to see engagement on the prompt vs people who use the system banners or menu buttons to install a progressive web app. Now you can track your PWA's install engagement based on the method of install — via the prompt or manually via a custom prompt. Read the docs for more details. Also, make sure you subscribe to JS Party to hear discussions about PWAs and the web platform.

When I first saw this I thought surely they were wrapping some hot new browser API. Nope! For the curious, here's the breakdown of how it works. On a somewhat comical note, the only open issue on the repo is someone challenging the author to do it in just 100 lines...

Straight from the horse's mouth: FoundationDB is a distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware. And: The key-value store supports fully global, cross-row ACID transactions. That's the highest level of data consistency possible. What does this mean for you? Strong consistency makes your application code simpler, your data models more efficient, and your failure modes less surprising. They say it's "actively developed and has years of production use". I wish they'd say exactly how it's being used in production. (Maybe they do and I haven't found it yet?) Also, if you're getting hung up on "key-value store", the vision is much bigger than that.

If software is eating the world, who is writing that software? You are. Hongli Lai, Co-founder & CTO of Phusion gave a talk at his local Amsterdam.rb meetup and shared his thoughts on the impending deadline of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the impact of socially unaware software that's eating our world. ...I feel more and more convinced we (as Phusion and as ‘builders of the web’) have a responsibility to provide a framework for thinking about the ethical implication of our creations. Hongli continues: We've seen companies suffer recently for a lack of that social responsibility (data breaches at Equifax, Facebook, Uber, etc). Public outrage was strong but also burned out quickly as the news cycled. For a while, the same quick fizzle seemed to be happening with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. It's up to us to fight back. That doesn't mean go on twitter and rant, but to actually go an do something. Give a talk in your local area to your developer communities to create with social responsibility in mind.

Laziness is one of the three great virtues of a programmer (laziness, impatience, and hubris) Larry Wall talked about in Programming Perl. The "deep thinking," as they call it, which is always required before even a small issue can be resolved, seriously turns me away from programming. Or did turn me away. Until I started to think differently and encourage myself to be lazy. Here is how. Iteration! It's so freeing to operate on the basis of iteration — knowing that today's version is shipping with flaws that can only be resolved through the feedback loop. In this case, incremental is an alias of iteration. Software development is perfect territory for cutting corners, being lazy and remaining calm, because our work is often discrete and can be very incremental.

A tutorial for adding bash completion to scripts using the bash programmable completion facilities. Why bother? to save users from typing text when it can be auto-completed to help users know what are the available continuations to their commands to prevent errors and improve their experience by hiding or showing options based on what users have already typed I'm a tab-completion junkie, so the more people that know how to do this, the better!

Rachel Andrew: An increasingly common question — now that people are using CSS Grid Layout in production — seems to be “What are the best practices?” The short answer to this question is to use the layout method as defined in the specification. The particular parts of the spec you choose to use, and indeed how you combine Grid with other layout methods such as Flexbox, is down to what works for the patterns you are trying to build and how you and your team want to work. Amazingly educational article. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you want to learn about CSS Grid, Rachel Andrew is the source.

wasm-pack is a tool for assembling and packaging Rust crates that target WebAssembly. These packages can be published to the npm Registry and used alongside other packages. This means you can use them side-by-side with JS and other packages, and in many kind of applications, be it a Node.js server side app, a client-side application bundled by Webpack, or any other sort of application that uses npm dependencies. We're recording a show with Lin Clark today and will definitely ask her all about the progress Mozilla folks have been making on merging the JavaScript and Rust worlds via WebAssembly. Exciting times!

Is Netflix Titus open source yet? Yes. Titus powers critical aspects of the Netflix business, from video streaming, recommendations and machine learning, big data, content encoding, studio technology, internal engineering tools, and other Netflix workloads So, why is Netflix open sourcing Titus? ...we’ve been asked over and over again, “When will you open source Titus?” It was clear that we were discussing ideas, problems, and solutions that resonated with those at a variety of companies, both large and small. We hope that by sharing Titus we are able to help accelerate like-minded teams, and to bring the lessons we’ve learned forward in the container management community. The question is, is it too late for Titus to gain traction in a world where Kubernetes has seemingly already won?

I'm a huge fan of well designed feedback loops. In software creation, feedback loops prove to be one of the most important, often overlooked, artifacts of the development lifecycle. Evelyn Van Kelle writes on the O'Reilly Ideas blog: There is a false dichotomy between full automation and human intervention. Successful quality control combines tool-based measurement with manual review and discussion. At the end of the day, the most effective feedback loops are a mixture of daily best practices, automation, tools, and human intervention.

Like JSFiddle, but for ChordPro chord sheets. I'm no musician, so I'm not embarrassed to say I had to google to learn ChordPro is an ASCII text file format for transcribing songs with chords and lyrics. ChordFiddle is loaded with features and has more coming on the project board. Look under the hood and you'll find two more open source libs: ChordSheetJS and ChordJS.

A cross-platform, open source Slack app that's built for speed?! Shut up and take my money admiration! Wey is written in Node and the UI is powered by the Yue library, which means it's not hitchin' its wagon to Electron. But it does come with a rather large caveat: Do not use this for work, you might miss important messages due to bugs and missing features. Depending on how much you like your job, you might consider that more of a feature than a bug. 😉

How you define success influences how and what you build. With that in mind, Cate Huston set out to learn how we developers do. I started with the Stack Overflow survey. Caveat: I hate it and I think it’s riddled with bias. For example, women make up ~fifty percent of the population, around ~twenty percent of technical roles… and 7.2% of the respondents to this survey. The SO survey is imperfect in many ways, but unfortunately it's also one of the only quantitative datasets we have. Cate also asked her followers on Twitter (which she admits is also riddled with bias): Many of the themes from the Stack Overflow survey showed up here – shipping code, learning and developing, autonomy....Another theme, though, was the theme of impact. People using what was built, benefitting others in some way. That's just a few of her findings. Definitely read the entire piece as it's riddled (😏) with insights. Also check out part 1 in this series.

Chris Coyier: Y'all know about font-display? It's pretty great. It's a CSS property that you can use within @font-face blocks to control how, visually, that font loads. … What do you get from it? The ability to control FOUT and FOIT as is right for your project, two things that both kinda suck in regards to font loading. Font loading strategy is pretty important. It's one of the reasons I searched far and wide to improve the performance of fonts on Brightly Colored. Fortunately, if you're using @font-face, using font-display is as easy as using one line of CSS, and you'll see the performance improvements immediately. Unfortunately, as Chris points out, there's no performant way to get around either FOUT or FOIT.

With support for syntax highlighting, light and dark themes, and a built-in cheat sheet, Regexr has a lot of potential. My question is this: not all regular expression engines are created equally. Which one is this? PCRE??

Yesterday's bearish link about PWAs caused a bit of a stir in our community Slack. Here comes the bull: PWAs are going to be versatile enough and robust enough that they're going to supplant some of the native apps you might have on your phone (or computer) today. I appreciate the caution on display by use of the word "some". Jon may be bullish, but he's not a zealot! Why does he think PWAs will finally get over the hurdle? One acronym: WASM With the ease of install of PWAs and high performance of WASM, I think we're also going to see some Electron apps moving to be PWAs. Great article. Definitely click through and read the whole thing. 💯

Keith J. Grant: For the next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some aspects of HTML5 that maybe haven’t received as much attention as they deserve. As a warm up, I’ll look at some elements from HTML5 that most web developers probably are somewhat familiar with: <main>,<nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and other structural, semantic elements. Even if you already use these elements, you might just learn a few new things along the way (I know I did as I researched this). I really enjoyed this article. I try to be as semantic as possible in my markup, but Keith's post shed light on things I didn't know—especially the impact certain elements can have on accessibility.

For those coming off the heels of The Changelog #292 where we talked with Philipp Krenn about Elasticsearch, you're gonna wanna play around with full text searching your man pages with Elasticsearch. This post covers: Setup an Elasticsearch instance locally Create an index for the data Feed the index with the man pages of the OS Create a search method for full text searching Full text search the man pages

Joel Califa writes on his personal blog about small interface changes to GitHub that have saves millions of developers immeasurable amounts of wasted time and anxiety. One small change can add up to a big win. High frequency actions (such as creating new PRs on GitHub) take place millions of times a day. A given user might go through the same flow several times per week, per day, or even per hour. These flows become a part of their lives. If there is even a slight inefficiency or frustration, it compounds with every use. One confusing moment that takes an extra 5 seconds—repeated multiple times a day in perpetuity—adds up to a lot of anxiety and wasted time. My takeaway? Don't underestimate the impact of seemingly small interface changes!

Judah Gabriel starts this post off with the question "Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!” — and I don't fully disagree, until you think about where your users will come from. The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web. There are many more lessons learned about the process — from creation to submission — but here's the tldr... Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape. (We're planning a deep-dive on PWAs for an upcoming episode of JS Party. Subscribe to be notified.)