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.

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?

Saverio Miroddi explains how to write tab-completion scripts in any language, with an example in Ruby, and how to use them in both Bash and Zsh. As is common with well-received blog posts, it even inspired some open source (for making tab completion scripts trivial).

The purpose of this project is to provide a shortcut to developers and researchers for finding useful resources about Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing. Organized by papers, datasets, courses, books, blogs, tutorials and more...

Do you have documentation? Do you have a documentation content strategy? No?!! If you want to create guides for your software, having a solid content strategy can help you write useful content. This article will walk you through how to develop that strategy, whether you’re an engineer or a technical writer, new to writing documentation or just looking to get more strategic about it.

David Cassel has a great recap of the recent Decentralized Web Summit and what it was all about. It’s a follow-up to a similar event in 2016, though now “People are starting to show real working code and real projects. They’re building whole technology stacks that are more decentralized, in large part fueled by the excitement of the cryptocurrency systems. The altcoins and Bitcoins are proving that interesting and complicated systems are starting to work out there.” Click through for lots of quotes and takeaways. I think Changelog might have to get involved if they do this again next year...

Copy/paste the code in this repo's README into your browser's address bar and you end up with a super minimal CodePen-style editor. Pretty cool, and a bit crazy that you can get so much functionality with just 400 bytes of code...

Abhishek Singh isn't deaf or mute, but that didn't stop him from asking the question: If voice is the future of computing interfaces, what about those who cannot hear or speak? This thought led to a super cool project wherein a computer interprets sign language and speaks the results to a nearby Alexa device. Live demo here and code here.

Mike Bugembe teaches us how to build a culture of data-driven decision making within a company, leverage behavioral economics, and identify high value use cases for AI.

Stack Overflow began be telling their community to "be nice," but over time that proved to not be enough to ensure a safe place for the developer community. Tim Post, Director Of Community Strategy, writes on the Stack Overflow blog: Our CoC is what we call a living document. It’s designed to change over time to ensure that it remains relevant by continuing to meet the needs of our communities. Every six months or so, we plan to find out how folks feel about how things are going by asking both new and experienced users about their recent experiences on the site. Hopefully this change leads to a less toxic experience.