In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Ovilia. Hailing from Shanghai, China, Ovilia is an up-and-coming developer who contributes to Apache ECharts, maintains Polyvia, which does very cool low-poly image and video processing, and has a sweet personal website, too. This episode with Ovilia continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

read more

NanoNeuron is an over-simplified version of the Neuron concept from Neural Networks. NanoNeuron is trained to convert temperature values from Celsius to Fahrenheit. The NanoNeuron.js code example contains 7 simple JavaScript functions (which touches on model prediction, cost calculation, forward/backwards propagation, and training) that will give you a feeling of how machines can actually “learn”. No 3rd-party libraries, no external data-sets or dependencies, only pure and simple JavaScript functions. This is not a complete guide to machine learning. Just a primer.

read more

The copyright battle that’s been going on since 2010 between these two tech giants will finally reach its conclusion at the highest court in the land. Google will have just 30 minutes to present its case; Oracle will have 30 minutes to respond… The two tech giants have agreed to the following filing schedule: January 6, 2020 – Google will submit its brief (i.e. argument why they should prevail). February 12, 2020 - Oracle will submit its response brief. March 13, 2020 - Google will file a reply to Oracle’s brief addressing any opposing points raised. If Google wins, the case is finally closed. If Oracle wins, the damages will be calculated by a California jury. Estimated damages in this case are in the $8-9 billion range.

read more

ES Modules are unflagged in Node 13. What does this mean? Can we use them yet? We chat with Mikeal, our resident expert, and find out.

read more

This is, effectively, an HTTP API on top of MaxMind’s free geoip-lite database. If you’re doing anything serious with ip-to-geolocation, I’d advise self-hosting the database, but for small side projects and the like, this is an easy way to get up and rolling.

read more

This story comes from Ars Technica, not The Onion: In June 2017, Adams drove Hopkins to the domain-name owner’s house “and provided Hopkins with a demand note, which contained instructions for transferring the domain to Adams’ GoDaddy account,” the DOJ said. The heist didn’t go as planned, and both the domain-name owner and Hopkins ended up suffering gunshot wounds. Can you imagine transferring a domain name at gun point?

read more

Jack Dorsey: Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. Color me surprised and impressed. My first thought was, “why create something brand new when smart people have been working on open standards for a long time already?” Then I read on: For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide. Verrry interesting, indeed. What do you think will come of all this?

read more

Press was created as a proof-of-concept for exploring Kotlin Multiplatform, as well as the author’s frustration from the lack of minimal markdown note taking apps that work on all platforms, especially Android and macOS. If you relate to either of these reasons, Press is looking for contributors. Markdown editors are the new Twitter clients.

read more

Manuel Vila, writing for freeCodeCamp: In this article, I introduce the concept of “unified architecture” that dramatically simplifies the development of full-stack applications. Indeed, this architecture unifies the six physical layers (data access, backend model, API server, API client, frontend model, and user interface) usually seen in “well-designed” applications into one single logical layer. It is like going from a 3D world to a 2D world. Everything gets a lot easier. That “unified architecture” manifests itself as Liaison, which we linked to last week and it caused some… controversy discussion. In this article, Manuel explains why Liaison is different than similar RPC things that came before it. Interesting stuff, to say the least.

read more

This is like JS Fiddle, but for SQL. Pick from MySQL, Postgres, or SQLite. Then load up some queries, run them, and share with others. Super cool 👍

read more

DockerSlim promises a lot: docker-slim will optimize and secure your containers by understanding your application and what it needs using various analysis techniques. It will throw away what you don’t need reducing the attack surface for your container. What if you need some of those extra things to debug your container? You can use dedicated debugging side-car containers for that. Their minification examples are impressive…

read more

A nice side-by-side comparison of a simple todo app built with both frameworks. If you’ve experimented with these tools, you’ll probably find this article too elementary to be useful, but if either is unfamiliar to you, definitely give it a read.

read more

Ronald Marrero is a software developer working on NASA’s Artemis program, which aims at landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. How Ron got here is a fascinating story, starting at UCF and winding its way through the Florida Space Institute, working with NASA’s Swamp Works team, and building an open source excavation robot. On this episode Ron tells us how it all went down and shares what he learned along the way.

read more

While many of us writing our year-end wrap-ups, Matt Asay saunters into the room, kindly requests that we “hold his beer”, and proceeds to write his decade-end wrap-up. We’re about to conclude another decade of open source, and what a long, strange trip it has been. Reading back through predictions made in 2009, no one had the foggiest clue that GitHub would change software development forever (and for everyone), or that Microsoft would go from open source pariah to the world’s largest contributor, or a host of other dramatic changes that became the new normal during a decade that was anything but normal. We are all open sourcerors now as we round out the decade. Let’s look back at some of the most significant open source innovations that got us here.

read more

The Orbital Widget Toolkit is a multi platform (G)UI toolkit for building scalable user interfaces with the programming language Rust. It’s based on the Entity Component System Pattern and provides a functional-reactive like API. Built by the Redox team, but super cross-platform. It even runs on the web with plans for iOS and Android.

read more

Go was designed with concurrency in mind. That’s why we have language primitives like goroutines, channels, wait groups, and mutexes. They’re very powerful when used correctly, but they can be very complicated if used unwisely. Roberto Clapis joins the team once again to drop async wisdom in your ears. Don’t worry, we do it in serial. 😉

read more

I love everything about this: the creativity, the engineering, the relentless desire to be as lazy as humanly possible. Chris automated 100% of this process, from content creation to social interactions to the sales pitch. A must-read.

read more

Imagine an infinitely generated world that you could explore endlessly, continually finding entirely new content and adventures. What if you could also choose any action you can think of instead of being limited by the imagination of the developers who created the game? Built with OpenAI’s GPT-2 model. First of its kind. Want a primer? Check out Practical AI #32,

read more

SpaCy is awesome for NLP! It’s easy to use, has widespread adoption, is open source, and integrates the latest language models. Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal (core developers of spaCy and co-founders of Explosion) join us to discuss the history of the project, its capabilities, and the latest trends in NLP. We also dig into the practicalities of taking NLP workflows to production. You don’t want to miss this episode!

read more

The Xfce desktop has a specific, self-stated goal: to be fast on a system with low resources while being visually appealing and user-friendly. It’s been the de facto choice for lightweight Linux distributions (or remixes) for years and is often cited by its fans as a desktop that provides just enough to be useful, but never so much as to be a burden. I’ve never used Xfce myself, but I’ve heard plenty of my fellow devs sings its praises over the years.

read more

I like the why behind Matestack: Implementing two separate systems (backend-api, frontend-app) is a pain: Two different code bases, two repositories to maintain, two different deployment schedules, two test environments, two everything… Being a small dev team, we decided not to adopt this modern web development complexity and decided to create… Matestack! If you have 30 minutes and want an easy button to learn all about it, Jonas Jabari gave a talk on it at Ruby Unconf 2019.

read more