On this special re-broadcast of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy Larson (freeCodeCamp’s founder) interviewed Adam and Jerod in the ultimate Backstage episode to celebrate a decade of conversations, news, and community here at Changelog. Yes, this month we turn 10 years old! We go deep into our origin stories, our history as a company, becoming and being a leader, the backstory of our branding, our music from Breakmaster Cylinder, and where we might be heading in the future.

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Crater is free for life with all of the below features catered towards the freelance and small business community. This looks really polished. It even has a React Native-based mobile app. That’s a lot!

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Mireille and Adam discuss key aspects of mental health and what it looks like to manage our own mental well-being. What are the key ingredients to managing it? How do our relationships and boundaries impact it? Are sleep, food, and activity really that important? We talk through these questions and more to better understand mental health and the ways in which we contribute to our well being.

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Reports of Ruby’s death are greatly exaggerated.

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Supports C, C++, Java, and Python. Connects to pretty much every editor out there. Cross-platform, runs locally so you don’t have to trust your code to a 3rd party. I’d love to see more languages supported…

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I’m not a big fan of Intercom-style chat widgets, but with how many of them I see out there I might literally be the only person in that camp. That being said, if you’re on the market for (what looks like) a bare bones implementation of that functionality that you can keep 100% 1st party, maybe give Chatwoot a try.

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Our friends at CSS Tricks are doing an awesome year-end series where they ask builders they admire the question, “What about building websites has you interested this year?” and each person writes a post about it. What gets Sameera Kapila excited resonates with me: I realize we’re moving from a place where we’re not just sharing what we have, we’re working to build and improve on what others have built. And then sharing that, and the cycle continues. In a way, we’ve been doing this all along but it feels more noticeable now. In a way, we’re not just building websites, but building and iterating the way we build websites, and that is exciting.

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Imagine YouTube without all the cruft. That’s Invidious in a nutshell. Audio-only mode, no ads, no need to create a Google account to save subscriptions, no JS to play videos, etc. Also, it’s written in Crystal. I don’t get to type that too often. This is so good, I wonder how long it will be around…

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Gone are the days when we developers were too shy/humble/introverted to promote our warez with the confidence and vigor necessary to draw a crowd. In fact, we may be experiencing an over-correction. Some of us are selling a bit too hard at times. With that in mind, here’s some help translating between how developers describe our software and what we might actually be thinking. 😉

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There’s a lot of hype about knowledge graphs and AI-methods for building or using them, but what exactly is a knowledge graph? How is it different from a database or other data store? How can I build my own knowledge graph? James Fletcher from Grakn Labs helps us understand knowledge graphs in general and some practical steps towards creating your own. He also discusses graph neural networks and the future of graph-augmented methods.

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LocalStack looks like an excellent way to develop & test your serverless apps without leaving your local host. It appears they are basically mocking 20+ AWS services which is undoubtedly a lot of work and I would expect to be error prone. Is anybody out there using LocalStack on the regular and can let us know if it actually works as advertised?

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This is a short introduction on methods that use neural networks in an offensive manner (bug hunting, shellcode obfuscation, etc.) and how to exploit neural networks found in the wild (information extraction, malware injection, backdooring, etc.).

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Being a leader is tough and leads to burn-out at least once or maybe even a few times. But why? If you’ve been building, leading, or maintaining open source, then this post from Alex Ellis should be on your “to read” list. In this post I want to introduce the reader to five pressures that I have encountered over the past five years of building, leading, and maintaining Open Source Software (OSS) with community. This essay is primarily about being a leader in Open Source, but I believe it applies outside of technology too. My aim is to foster understanding and empathy between contributors, community members, users, and maintainers. I would also like for maintainers and leaders in Open Source to feel a sense of solidarity in their shared burden.

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Quickly view and search notifications, mark notifications as read (or unsubscribe entirely), add comments to issues (and more) all from the warm glow of your trusty terminal.

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Today we have a very special show for you – we’re talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But, on today’s episode we catch up with Quincy on all things freeCodeCamp.

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One question I ask a lot of folks I interview is what $PROJECT_X looks like three to five (sometimes 10) years from now. Very few people answer that question without some hemming and hawing. Enter Andy Pavlo, Associate Professor of Databaseology at Carnegie Mellon, throwing his hat in the ring on the future of databases 50 years (!) from now: The role of humans as database administrators will cease to exist. These future systems will be too complex for a human to reason about. DBMSs will finally be completely autonomous and self-healing. Again, the tighter coupling between programming frameworks and DBMSs will allow the system to make better decisions on how to organize data, provision resources, and optimize execution than human-generated planning. That is just one of roughly eight things Andy predicts. Fun to think about, if nothing else.

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I probably understood ~60% of the data htop exposes. After reading this extremely thorough post, I understand a lot more. The section on load average is pure gold.

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Design systems are taking the tech industry by storm, but what exactly are they? Do you even need one? This week we’re talking all things design systems. We’ll chat about component libraries and style guides, companies who are building design systems, and more!

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We all know Postgres is a great relational database (you do know that, don’t you?). When it comes time for a pub/sub solution, however, we often reach for Kafka, Redis, or RabbitMQ. But did you know that Postgres is pretty well suited as a persistent pub/sub server as well? There are very few use cases where you’d need a dedicated pub/sub server like Kafka. Postgres can easily handle 10,000 insertions per second, and it can be tuned to even higher numbers. It’s rarely a mistake to start with Postgres and then switch out the most performance critical parts of your system when the time comes. Check the linked article for how they use Postgres in this fashion and a nice list of other benefits. For my money, the fact that I’m not adding another moving part to my infrastructure is reason enough to start with Postgres and go from there.

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Cory Doctorow goes deep into Usenet’s history and uncovers a sage decision by the “backbone cabal” which may help us improve the web’s (currently centralized) state: Restoring adversarial interoperability will allow future companies, co-operatives and tinkerers to go beyond the comfort zones of the winners of the previous rounds of the game – so that it ceases to be a winner-take-all affair, and instead becomes the kind of dynamic place where a backbone cabal can have total control one year, and be sidelined the next.

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The RadVPN doesn’t need any central point as it connects to other nodes directly (full mesh) it has built-in router that helps packets to route to the appropriate destinations. Linux only at the moment.

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