We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly an alternative Twitter, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

Gervasio Marchand: While working on Taut (aka BetterSlack) I noticed that a browser extension could do lots and lots of harm. On this article, I explain how the only way to browse safely is to completely avoid them (or to be really really involved in managing them). If you're thinking, "But open source!" click through and see what Gervasio has to say about that. He also includes some examples of extensions that went rogue or were hacked and how one could abuse the system.

Nikita Prokopov has been programming for 15 years and has become quite frustrated with the industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence in software — to the point of depression. Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. Nikita cites some examples: ...our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage(s) struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games and watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok? Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row. We put virtual machines inside Linux, and then we put Docker inside virtual machines, simply because nobody was able to clean up the mess that most programs, languages, and their environment produce. We cover shit with blankets just not to deal with it. “Single binary” is still a HUGE selling point for Go, for example. No mess == success. Do you share in Nikita's position? Sure, be frustrated with performance (cause we all want, "go faster!"), but do you agree with his points beyond that? If so, read this and consider supporting him on Patreon.

Darin Wilson: In his keynote at ElixirConf last week, Chris McCord announced a new feature for the Phoenix web framework that caused many jaws to hit the floor, and had the hall buzzing when the talk was over. The new feature, tentatively called “LiveView”, allows developers to add dynamic, client-side interactions to web pages, using code that runs in Elixir on the server. What exactly is a LiveView, though? We don't really know yet as this is an ongoing project and no code has been released yet. But as near as I can tell, a LiveView is lot like a React component running in a GenServer – it even has a render function! And with the EEx sigil (which I didn’t know was a thing) the code feels a lot like JSX I am unreasonably excited to see what becomes of this. 

An amazing panel of AI innovators joined us at the O'Reilly AI conference to answer the most pressing AI questions from Quora. We also discussed trends in the industry and some exciting new advances in FPGA hardware.

Yegor applies a kitchen metaphor to code: The kitchen is clean when there is no dirt in the oven. But if its electric panel speaks French, I can’t use the kitchen. Even if it’s perfectly clean. It’s not clear how to use it—that’s why it’s useless. Sounds good to me, but how do you know if your code is actually clean and clear? He provides a heuristic: If a stranger can modify your code and fix a bug in less than an hour, it is maintainable. The entire post is well worth a read.

I did not see this coming. Linus Torvalds, writing to the Linux Kernel mailing list: I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely. I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately. Introspection is hard, especially when you don't like what you see after staring yourself in the mirror. Cheers to him for owning up to mistreating others and attempting to change. Here's hoping he follows through. 🤞

it's exciting to see Cloudflare bridging the gap between IPFS and the traditional web. Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway is an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. For those who want a deep dive into IPFS check out the show we did with Juan Benet – The Changelog #204.

You should plan 10 minutes and read this story from Emily Freeman. Here are some highlights I enjoyed hearing her speak about. On growing up and being poor... Because I was poor, I was nothing. On why she's in tech... Life, in many ways, is a write-only database. On being a house-wife... I felt like a failure. I was clever, I had worked hard and yet there I was again — worth nothing. On being a mom... Giving birth was the first time I felt truly powerful. On learning... Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Just visit web-riimote.herokuapp.com on a laptop/desktop AND a smartphone. Your smartphone will be the controller and your laptop/desktop will be the main display. You don't have to install an app or anything. Pretty cool! Video demo here.

Covers both client-side and server-side development. Available in Chinese and English.

twa is a shell script that audits a given website using nothing but bash, awk, curl, and nc. Throw it in your $PATH and see how your site(s) security stacks up. (Note: requires Bash 4 which is not packaged with macOS because licensing. You can upgrade Bash via homebrew. Learn more here.)

David dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.

Looks-wise, this is an exact design clone too. Hope that doesn't get anyone who uses this "as is" in any trouble with the real Medium. This project is a fork of a Medium clone which began as Ken Hibino's personal side project to learn Rails and React. I upgraded and refactored parts of the Rails app and integrated Dante2 wysiwyg editor. If you're looking for commentary around the project or Rails, check Hacker News.

I like how this post tries to answer questions on why remote companies need to openly acknowledge the mental health challenges of remote work. Amir Salihefendic writes on Ambition & Balance from Doist: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace and what we’re doing about it... In contrast to a traditional office, remote work puts much more focus on output — what did you get done — rather than input — how many hours did you spend doing it. There's a sense of personal responsibility to get "enough" done that can lead people to keep themselves working long past the point of optimal productivity.

This is the battle cry that started the Open Container Initiative. But in reality, are/was multi-cloud and vendor lock-in true concerns for software teams? Tyler Treat writes on his personal blog: We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap. Outside of appeasing a few major retailers who might not be too keen on stuff running in Amazon data centers, I can think of few reasons why multi-cloud should be a priority for organizations of any scale.

KBall interviews with Michael Chan, Juan Pablo Buriticá and Julián David Duque, and Tim Doherty at JSConf.US. Conversations about the importance of DRY code, the metaphors we use for software, JavaScript communities across Latin America, how to advocate for modern tech stacks in large companies, and fostering mentorship.

Here's a bonus segment from episode #57 of Founders Talk with David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. Check the feed for the full length episode (later today). We talked about sales in the full length episode, but this BONUS segment is a completely isolated conversation that's not included in the full length episode — so don't gloss over this thinking it's just a teaser.

I talked with Bryan Helmig about this on Founders Talk #55. He's the co-founder and CTO of a "remote only" company, so that means engineering as well. Yes, you read that right — remote only. Maria Gutierrez (VP of Engineering at FreeAgent), writes on the GitPrime blog: When your company’s headquarters are outside of one of the major tech hubs, you’ll likely hit a point where you realize you simply cannot hire enough developers to work in the main office. A lot of companies need to start considering distributed candidates in order to build the quality crews they need. And if you want those distributed engineers to be successful members of your team for a long time, you’ll need to follow certain best practices right from the get-go. For some, going distributed is a choice. For others, it's a necessity to survive. Which side of the line does your organization stand on this subject?

What a difference a few years makes. In 2015, a LinkedIn snapshot of what it calls the skills gap—a mismatch between the skills workers have and the skills employers seek—showed a national surplus in the United States of people with data science skills; as of August 2018, LinkedIn data shows a dramatic shortage. It's a good time to be alive a Practical AI listener. 😉

Umi is based on routing, supports next.js-like conventional routing, and various advanced routing functions, such as routing-level on-demand loading. Then with a complete plugin system, covering every life cycle from source code to build product, umi is able to support various functional extensions and business needs, currently umi have almost 50+ plugins in both community and inside company.