Plausible creators Uku Täht and Marko Saric join the show to talk about their open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We talk through the backstory of the project, why it’s open source, the details behind a few viral blog posts Marko shared to bring in a ton of new interest to the project, why privacy matters in web analytics, how they prioritize building new features, the technical details behind their no cookie light-weight JavaScript approach, and their thoughts on a server-side option.

Lea Verou shared this story of using Javascript for the first time…

Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions, cryptic errors, and lack of proper feedback. And I don’t feel I did a good job communicating the frustration he went through in the one hour or so until he gave up.

It went a bit like this…

This comes from the just-announced Supabase, which is “an open source alternative to Firebase”. Oh, and if you’re thinking NOTIFY is good enough… maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

There’s a new speed test in town…

With many people being forced to work from home, there’s increased load on consumer ISPs. You may be asking yourself: how well is my ISP performing with even more traffic? Today we’re announcing the general availability of speed.cloudflare.com, a way to gain meaningful insights into exactly how well your network is performing.

We’ve seen a massive shift from users accessing the Internet from busy office districts to spread out urban areas. Although there are a slew of speed testing tools out there, none of them give you precise insights into how they came to those measurements and how they map to real-world performance.

Tobias Uhlig:

Neo is based on top of ES8 and uses the latest ES features as long as they can run directly inside the browser. This is one of the major design goals: the dev mode can run inside a browser without needing any JS related builds or transpilations. Instead of using any kind of templates, persistent JSON structures are in place. The combinations of these concepts lead to a pretty amazing performance and adds new possibilities for scaling to the UI area.

I haven’t seen any benchmarks or examples where using Neo produces extreme performance, but conceptually it makes sense that moving computationally expensive things to background threads would keep your UI thread snappy.

there are a lot of AWS services available. And I do mean: a LOT. Currently, there are 163 (!) different services that are available from the Amazon Dashboard, each with their own way of working, difficulties, catches and best practises.

What follows is one-line descriptions of all 163 AWS services. MSK? Kafka as a service. Amazon Connect? AWS call center platform. And so on.

On the heels of NVIDIA’s latest announcements, Daniel and Chris explore how the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture evolves the high-performance computing (HPC) landscape for artificial intelligence. After investigating the new specifications of the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU, Chris and Daniel turn their attention to the data center with the NVIDIA DGX A100, and then finish their journey at “the edge” with the NVIDIA EGX A100 and the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX.

Dmitri Popov:

digiKam is the cornerstone of my photographic workflow. This powerful and versatile photo management application has all the tools and features necessary for transferring, organizing, processing, and managing photos, RAW files, and videos. But even though digiKam can handle practically any photographic task you throw at it, there is still room for optimizing and improving parts of the Linux-based photographic workflow.

Go Binaries is an on-demand binary server, allowing non-Go users to quickly install tools written in Go without installing go itself, and removing the burden of cross-compiling and uploading dozens of binaries for every command-line you write.

Matt Mullenweg:

The two main theses of my professional career have been that distributed is the future of work, and that open source is the future of technology and innovation.

On the distributed front, the future of work has been arriving quickly. This week, a wave of companies representing over $800B in market capitalization announced they’re embracing distributed work beyond what’s required by the pandemic…

Change happens slowly, then all at once.

There are few people on Earth that have been thinking about this longer (and more deeply) than Matt.

We’re bringing Brain Science backstage — Mireille puts on her interviewer hat for a deep dive into Adam’s backstory. When and how did he get involved with podcasting? How did he get in to software development? When did he get his first shot at leadership? How did he learn about sales? Why is he so curious?

Nick and Jerod welcome Dojo’s Matt Gadd to the show to catch us up on what’s changed with the framework since episode #25, what’s coming in version 7, and to defend Nick’s comment that if you like React you just might like Dojo better.

It’ll mirror user interactions across 30+ devices and give you a single element inspector so you can make and inspect changes in one fell swoop. (Built with Electron.)

Looks interesting. Would you use this?

Searches a curated subset of the web: official docs and community-driven sources. No JS, cookies, tracking, external requests or data collecting.

There’s lots of feedback from Rakhim (the creator) and commentary on Lobsters too.

This thread from Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) on Twitter…talks about digital by default, a unified work experience, WFH setup, empathy, company culture, change, and silver linings.

As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.

Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup.

He goes on to say…

We haven’t figured this whole thing out. There is a lot of change ahead, but that is what we’re good at. “Thrive on change” is written on our (now digital) walls for a reason.

Itamar Turner-Trauring:

Even if you job is secure now, who knows what the future holds? Especially these days, it helps to be prepared. Learn some quick techniques to help make your future job search easier: knowing more people, upgrading your skills, getting public evidence of your skills, plus fallback planning for peace of mind.

Johnny and Jon are joined by Denise to talk about her role at GitHub and what the community and safety team does to help open source project creators and contributors, GoCon Canada and the role of organizing a conference, and more.

The best satire hits close to $HOME:

As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, the $FAMOUS_COMPANY backend has historically been developed in $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE and architected on top of $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK. To suit our unique needs, we designed and open-sourced $AN_ENGINEER_TOOK_A_MYTHOLOGY_CLASS, a highly-available, just-in-time compiler for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE.

Pairs nicely with this tweet of ours from a few months back.

High expectations for performance in both life and work are common, but what do you do when you get stuck and you’re not able to achieve the results you desire? In this episode, Mireille and Adam talk through the different aspects of perfectionism and ways in which is can be adaptive and helpful and other ways in which it poses additional challenges. What happens when we avoid the possibility of failure as opposed to simply having high standards for our performance? How can we begin to focus on healthy striving as opposed to reaching for perfection?

Dan Norris shared nine reasons why business ideas fail. This coupled with this recent advice from Tim Ferriss on being a specialist or a generalist is golden 💰

The startup community likes to glorify failure but I don’t. Failing sucks. Failing slow sucks infinitely more. That’s why it’s OK sometimes to give up, to free you up to move onto an idea that could bring you something that the startup community doesn’t talk about near as much: actual fulfillment and success.

Here is a list of things to look out for when things might be set for failure. These are based on my failures and the failures I’ve seen around my circles (mostly self-funded online business folk).

Every 10 years there is a changing of the guard in JavaScript. I think we have just started a period of accelerated change that could in future be regarded as the Third Age of JavaScript.