News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re back talking to Gergely Orosz — this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market, but more so the flip side, the 180, the not so good tech hiring market, the layoff market and what you can expect. There’s a lot of FUD out there, so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what’s really going on, and what to really expect. Maybe more so, how to keep your job or find a new job. We come to this topic with great compassion and great understanding, so please…there is a community here for you. There’s a lot of people in our Slack. Call it your home, it’s free to join and everyone is welcome.

There are some big AI-related controversies swirling, and it’s time we talk about them. A lawsuit has been filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI related to Copilot code suggestions, and many people have been disturbed by the output of Meta AI’s Galactica model. Does Copilot violate open source licenses? Does Galactica output dangerous science-related content? In this episode, we dive into the controversies and risks, and we discuss the benefits of these technologies.

Ruby 3.1 adds a new core class called Data to represent simple immutable value objects. The Data class helps define simple classes for value-alike objects that can be extended with custom methods.

While the Data class is not meant to be used directly, it can be used as a base class for creating custom value objects. The Data class is similar to Struct, but the key difference being that it is immutable.

In its heyday, most Rubyists wouldn’t touch immutability with a ten-foot pole. Times, they are a changin’…

Learning C was quite difficult for Tom M. Thankfully for us, along the way he collected summaries, signposts, and advice for these broader points that made his journey with C and other compiled languages easier. So, if you’re on a similar journey, this page will serve you well on your way.

Heroku’s free plans officially reach EOL, Swyx explains the mixed reaction to Stable Diffusion 2.0, a real Twitter SRE explains how it continues to stay up even with ~80% gone, Tyler Cipriani tells us about one of Git’s coolest, most unloved features & we chat with Joel Lord about brewing beer with IoT & JavaSCript at All Things Open 2022.

Oh, and help make this year’s state of the “log” episode awesome by lending your voice!

Multithreaded, cross-platform, reliable & written in Rust.

If you’ve ever had to split a string into sentences, you may have reached for a naive regular expression:

'Hello! How are you?'.split(/[.!?]/);

Instead of giving yourself two problems, Stefan Judis says maybe reach for Intl.Segmenter, which he shows is quite sophisticated and supported everywhere but Firefox.

Debbie O’Brien –Senior Program Manager at Microsoft– joins Amal & Nick for a deep-dive on Playwright, an automation library for cross-browser end-to-end testing. Along the way, we learn why Microsoft decided to fork Puppeteer, Playwright’s unique value proposition, cool features like auto-waiting & the trace viewer, how it compares to Cypress & a lot more.

If you don’t have time to fill out the entire survey… at least skip down to the “Resources” ~> “Podcasts” section and help someone dethrone those rascals over at Syntax. I think it might be JS Party’s time, y’all…

Matt Welsh:

I hesitated writing this post, because I don’t want to start, or get into, a holy war over programming languages. (Just to get the flame bait out of the way, Visual Basic is the best language ever!) But I’ve had a number of people ask me about my experience with Rust and whether they should pick up Rust for their projects. So, I’d like to share some of the pros and cons that I see of using Rust in a startup setting, where moving fast and scaling teams is really important.

The learning curve and hiring difficulties seem to be the major culprits, in Matt’s experience.

Nishant Roy, Engineering Manager at Pinterest Ads, joins Johnny & Jon to detail how they’ve managed to continue shipping quality software from startup through hypergrowth all the way to IPO. Prepare to learn a lot about Pinterest’s integration and deployment pipeline, observability stack, Go-based services and more.

A team without a proven observability strategy will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolded. This post describes a battle-proven strategy for ensuring full observability coverage.

Why another file manager? I wanted something simple and minimalistic. Something to help me with faster navigation in the filesystem; a cd and ls replacement. So I build “llama”. It allows for quick navigation with fuzzy searching. cd integration is quite simple. And you can open vim right from the llama. That’s it. As simple and dumb as a llama.

For our last 2022 Kaizen episode, we went all out:

• 💪 @jerod outdid himself in the number of improvements shipped between Kaizens
• 🕺 A few of our listeners contributed → prompted us to create a new contributing guide
• 🗺 We now have a new infrastructure diagram

All of this, and a whole lot more, is captured as GitHub discussion 🐙 changelog.com#433. If you want to see everything that we improved, that is a great companion to this episode.

An interesting idea from Gustav Westling…

One of the things that I like to do in my projects, is to make the git history as linear as possible.

Usually this means to rebase commits onto the main branch, but it can also mean to only allow merges in one direction, from feature branches into main, never the other way around. It kind of depends on the project.

Today I’m taking this one step further, and I’m introducing a new concept: extremely linear git history.

With our extremely linear history, the first commit in a repo hash a hash that starts with 0000000, the second commit is 0000001, the third is 0000002, and so on!

How he accomplishes this is perhaps even more interesting (and hacky!)

I recently discovered an awesome tool called Coolify that calls itself an open-source Netlify or Heroku alternative that can be self-hosted. Gave it a whirl for my own personal projects and loved it, so I thought I’d share.

Kate Monica and the team at Tremendous have been doing this high-documentation, low-meeting work culture for awhile now, so she wrote up five discrete benefits that they’ve seen as a result of it.

In a tweet, of all places:

Come to @tumblr. We’ll add activitypub for interconnect. Don’t stress.

This is exactly the kind of adoption necessary for the Fediverse to really take off. its_happening.gif?

Matthew Tejo:

Twitter supposedly lost around 80% of its work force. What ever the real number is, there are whole teams with out engineers on it now. Yet, the website goes on and the tweets keep coming. This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat. I’d like to explain my little corner of Twitter (though it wasn’t so little) and some of the work that went on that kept this thing running.

This is a detailed post about Twitter’s caching system that Matthew and others built while working there, and it’s brilliantly summed up by commenter Johnny Manu40:

When everything works fine, they wonder why they hired you. When everything stops working, they wonder why they hired you. I.T. in a nutshell.

Christoffer Ekeroth:

I’ve become convinced that “little languages”—small languages designed to solve very specific problems—are the future of programming, particularly after reading Gabriella Gonzalez’s The end of history for programming and watching Alan Kay’s Programming and Scaling talk.

Examples of “little languages” include SQL and regular expressions. In the old days we called these DSLs, but the author argues that term has become overloaded and I have a hard time disagreeing with that.

Matt Healy says your next smart device is a $30 Kindle, Changelog sets up an instance as Mastodon takes off, Anurag Bhagsain puts OpenAI’s GPT-3 in your CLI, Kirill Rogovoy argues that no architecture is better than bad architecture & we talk to Mish Manners at All Things Open 2022.