We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

Node.js just hit 1,024,716,169 downloads and is now officially a part of the three comma club. In the last few years, we’ve seen incredible success with Node.js not just within backend development, but with cross-platform and desktop applications. The technology goes beyond simply an application platform but is used for rapid experimentation with corporate data, application modernization, and IoT solutions.

Would you fire your top contributor — someone with a deep understanding of your product’s architecture and a ton of domain-specific knowledge? Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton writes on the freeCodeCamp blog about this exact scenario... “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F#@$ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” He declared this in front of the product design team, developers, management, and pre-launch customers. One of our project sponsors had the temerity to ask when the problem crippling our product would be fixed. No one gets a pass on being a jerk. I personally subscribe to the "no asshole rule," and do my best to purge the assholes as soon as possible. The sooner the better, for everyone. Have you heard of the book on the subject? Here's why Robert Sutton wrote 'The No Asshole Rule'

We were just talking about this on this week's JS Party! A new Chrome feature dubbed “Blink LazyLoad” is designed to dramatically improve performance by deferring the load of below-the-fold images and third party iFrames. Ben Schwarz has a nice overview of the feature and how you can use it today in Chrome Canary (behind two feature flags).

Error handling in an asynchronous language works in a unique way and presents many challenges, some unexpected. There are seven main error handling patterns in Node.js. Let's briefly check them all. I'm not sure if this post serves to demystify all of these techniques, but it's definitely a nice, quick overview of the different patterns.

Jerod, Nick, KBall, and Chris pre-party for JSConf by testing out some brand new segment ideas: Story of the Week, What the WHAT... WG, and Protip Time. What do you think of these segments? Like 'em? Love 'em? Not sure why we even? Please let us know!

This was announced in late March, but I missed it back then so maybe you did too. Our goal was to more easily enable anyone to explore the health of the web as a whole. Not just data-mining SQL gurus or statisticians, but everyone with a vested interest in the state of the web. An excellent goal, indeed. How did they do? Well, they added a bunch of awesome reports and consolidated traffic data between mobile and desktop devices. If you hadn't bookmarked this site previously, now is the time.

autocomplete, subscriptions and GraphiQL. Also a dead-simple universal javascript GraphQL client.

Bryan Helmig, Wade Foster, and Mike Knoop started Zapier in 2011 as a side hustle. They ultimately applied to Y Combinator, twice. And this year they hit $35 Million dollars in annual revenue. I talked with Bryan Helmig (CTO) through the backstory of starting this company, being 100% distributed, the flexibility as well as the constraints of being remote-only, how they reached product market fit, growth, scaling their teams, and how they bring everyone together for company wide retreats.

Twitter is at it again making controversial changes restricting how the developer community can use their APIs to develop 3rd party Twitter clients. Sarah Perez reports on TechCrunch: Twitter is breaking users' favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific by shutting off APIs these apps relied on. Worse still, is that Twitter isn't taking full responsibility for its decisions. In a company email it shared today, Twitter cited "technical and business constraints" that it can no longer ignore as being the reason behind the APIs' shutdown. This change sparked the #BreakingMyTwitter hashtag

Looking for inspiration to improve the look and feel of your product? Take clues from popular video games to create engaging user experiences for web and mobile. Wow, I was a bit skeptical of this article from the headline alone, but it has some superb insights in to game-inspired design interactions we can build in to our apps.

Do you want more contributors and maintainers on your project? Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew (macOS package manager), writes on his personal blog: Here are a a few guidelines in thinking about this: Most contributors were users first (“scratching your own itch”: most people start contributing to an open source project to solve a problem they are experiencing) Most maintainers were a contributor and user first (people don’t just jump into maintaining a project without helping to build it first) Maintainers cannot do a good job without remaining a user (to maintain context, passion and empathy) Combined, these start to look a bit like a sales funnel. People have to travel through each stage and there’s a fairly hefty drop-off at each one. Also check out ~> Open source maintainers owe you nothing

uses a built-in Marionette through remote protocol no Selenium WebDriver is needed works with Headless mode compatible subset of Puppeteer API Very much a WIP. 🚧

If we get rid of the concept of "model objects", then there should be very little (almost zero) space for procedural code/algorithms in our codebase, since each object is a component that has its well-defined place in the bigger picture. The following question arises: where does the "business logic" go? The answer is: business logic should be visible in how objects are wrapping/composing each other, rather than being visible in a 200 LoC method of some "service" class.

Resources to help you get started quickly with Apollo. Whether you’re experimenting with GraphQL or running Apollo in production, we want to make every developer’s journey as smooth as possible. This is why we’re releasing two new resources to help you along the way: the GraphQL Glossary and an FAQ guide! 🚀

David Mark Clements shares tools, techniques, and tips for making high-performance Node.js servers in this super deep post on Smashing Magazine: The surging popularity of Node.js has exposed the need for tooling, techniques and thinking suited to the constraints of server-side JavaScript. When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js. So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose? Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

It's amazing what a little bit of grease can do to the skids. Put this rb file in your $PATH and get ergonomic access to all of Ruby's text processing skills. The very first example sold me: docker ps | rb drop 1 | rb -l split[1]` # ubuntu # postgres

Everyone knows that React is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces — and many users of React choose it because they think it's supported by Facebook. But is it really? That depends on what you mean by React, and what you mean by support. Keenan Szulik writes on the Tidelift blog: Since its release in 2013, React has grown into a proper open source phenomenon ... with more than 100,000 GitHub stars, over 300,000 dependent repositories, and more than 800 contributors. Facebook's contributions to React and the JavaScript ecosystem around it are truly epic — the stuff of legend. But when we dive into the dependencies of the default create-react-app, only 24 of the 1,103 packages come from repositories in Facebook's GitHub organizations. That's less than 3% of the dependencies required to build the "Hello, World" app with create-react-app! So who supports React?

Bryan Helmig writes on the Zapier engineering blog: As startups grow, we need to make tweaks to the way we work. I’ve found this especially true in engineering. As a co-founder and CTO, my own role has changed a lot over the years. My everyday duties and challenges have shifted, and I’ve had to alter my approach multiple times to help the company reach a new level. The growth stage between just the three of us and where we are today was pretty tricky. Read on for the lessons I've learned as I grew as a first time CTO... Hear Bryan's story on Founders Talk this Thursday.

If you're a maintainer who's feeling the burden of your open source software, you have a few options to consider according to Richard Littauer — you can... Onboard more maintainers - spread the burden to more of the community Clearly set expectations - explain your software is provided on an “as is” basis Hire a maintenance company - wait, what?! Is that we've come to? Are we now hiring code maintenance companies to maintain our open source? I'm actually quite interested in the economies around this, so let this post serve as an open invite to Richard to join me on Founders Talk for a discussion on the state of open source maintenance and his lessons learned building Maintainer Mountaineer.

Bloomberg is citing a sell-off of Bitcoin, Ether, and dozens of smaller digital tokens. The "crypto exodus" is happening due to a "sense of panic" hitting crypto investors. It's been a brutal August for Bitcoin and Ether, with Bitcoin touching below $6,000. “The big story in the market today is the huge weakness in Ethereum,” Timothy Tam, chief executive officer of CoinFi said in a phone interview — “Bitcoin has held up relatively well versus Ethereum. It’s still quite weak versus the U.S. dollar.” While cryptocurrencies rallied in July on hopes that a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund would attract new investors, U.S. regulators have yet to sign off on multiple proposals for such a product. The letdown has coincided with growing concern that entrepreneurs who raised crypto-denominated funds via initial coin offerings (ICO) are now cashing out of holdings such as Ether, the token for the Ethereum blockchain that is a popular platform for crypto projects. What do you think? Are you selling, buying, or holding?