Maxime Vaillancourt joined us to talk about Shopify’s massive storefront rewrite from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a completely new implementation written in Ruby. It’s a fairly well known opinion that rewrites are “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make” and generally something “you should never do.” But Maxime and the team at Shopify have proved successful in their efforts in this massive storefront rewrite and today’s conversation covers all the details.

Use it to discover markdown files, read documentation directly on the command line and stash markdown files to your own private collection so you can read them anywhere. Glow will find local markdown files in subdirectories or a local Git repository.

By the way, all data stashed is encrypted end-to-end: only you can decrypt it

It’s amazing what p01 has done with MONOSPACE– winner of this year’s Assembly 1kb competition:

For MONOSPACE, the main inspiration came from plot writers and flip dots displays like the ones in train stations. After experimenting with speech synthesis in previous productions in 1kb and 256 bytes, I wanted to break the fourth wall. Another thing dear to me was to mimic a handheld camera that slightly shakes and goes out focus to increase the immersion in this monospace world.

View here. Interact here.

Chris Toomey shares a good idea (especially for read-heavy apps) around how you can do scheduled maintenance without taking your entire app offline (ie – Heroku’s maintenance page).

His solution is Rails-specific, but the general concept applies to any web app with similar use-case.

FooBar |> defmodule([{:do, (
  a
  |> foo()
  |> def([{:do, a |> Kernel.<(0) |> if([{:do, a |> bar(-1)}, {:else, a |> bar(1)}])}])

  a |> bar(b) |> defp([{:do, a |> Kernel.*(b) |> IO.inspect()}])
)}])

I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more |>s.

Gleb Bahmutov, PhD joins the show for a fun conversation around end-to-end testing. We get the skinny on Cypress, find out how it’s structured as both an open source library and a SaaS business, tease apart the various types of tests you may (or may not) want to have, and share a lot of laughs along the way.

Plaintext storage, git-backed, Markdown formatting, and all in a single script. 👌

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

This started as a response to the “accidental complexity of many existing tools”, which I definitely felt when I tried the Serverless framework awhile back.

Can’t find a job working in Go? Perhaps introducing your current team to Go is the solution. In this episode we talk about how Go was introduced at different organizations, potential pitfalls that may sabotage your efforts, some advice on how to convince your team and CTO to use Go and more.

We software developers are already pretty good at googling things, but “dorking” (a new term to me, and a perfect one at that) covers more ground than merely programmer problems.

It’s the use of search engines to find very specific data, such as webpages, emails, coupons, secrets, etc.

We asked Devon about where bounties might fit in to GitHub Sponsors when we had her on The Changelog and most of what she said then is reflected in this post, but fleshed out and explained in greater detail.

GitHub open sourced this long-lived private project. Learn about the why and how in this post…

Last week we open sourced all of GitHub’s product documentation, along with the Node.js web application that powers it. Check out our new public repository at github.com/github/docs.

This post tells the story of why we wanted to open source the docs, what tools we built and open sourced along the way, and how we worked to make the project welcoming to external contributors.

And if you’re wondering what ML Ops is…

With Machine Learning Model Operationalization Management (MLOps), we want to provide an end-to-end machine learning development process to design, build and manage reproducible, testable, and evolvable ML-powered software.

If you missed this exchange between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at the recent Jamstack Conf, read this to get the tldr. Here’s a section of the conversation to focus on…

Public debate kicked off at the end of August, with Mullenweg telling reporter Richard MacManus: “Jamstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it…”

“I don’t think the era of WordPress is over,” Mullenweg added. “I think we’re going to reach over 50 per cent market share in the next few years.”

This is not so much to do with architecture, but rather because users love software-as-a-service, whereas Jamstack is about custom development. There is not yet a Jamstack equivalent to the likes of Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, all mentioned as growing businesses.

WordPress and Jamstack are not completely in opposition. “I still think WordPress can play a really important role in the future ecosystem,” said Biilmann. The pattern he said he sees is WordPress used as a headless service, with developers “completely being in control of the front end layer.”

8 common security issues when using Docker and how to avoid them. Here’s a sampler:

Avoid curl bashing

Pulling stuff from internet and piping it into a shell is as bad as it could be. Unfortunately it’s a widespread solution to streamline installations of software.

The risk is the same framed for supply chain attacks and it boils down to trust. If you really have to curl bash, do it right…

People (mostly Scientists, but not only) are excited about Julia. Like, really excited. Why? A few reasons that might not be obvious to run of the mill software developers.

The Julia community is unified by something else, as well: a shared delight in the magical (this word cropped up more than once) power of Julia to facilitate collaboration and code reuse.

This Ars piece is a great read if you’re curious about Julia or if you simply dig programming languages and learning about new/interesting ones.

Project Fonos is open-source telecommunications for the cloud. This repository assembles the various components needed to deploy a telephony system. It helps VoIP integrators quickly deploy new networks and include value-added services such as Programmable Voice, Messaging, and Video.

I sincerely love the audacity on display when open source hackers sit down, roll up their sleeves, and compete with publicly traded companies. 💪

From reading through the README, this seems like a nice balance between a full-blown ORM and hand-rolling all your own SQL. For example, this point from the The mapper function is the SELECT clause. section:

In sq whatever you SELECT is automatically mapped. This means you just have to write your query, execute it and if there were no errors, the data is already in your Go variables. No iterating rows, no specifying column scan order, no error checking three times. Write your query, run it, you’re done.

To handle complex authorization policies, a system should handle both points of view efficiently and naturally, in this post we’ll show how we aimed to do that when building oso, an open-source policy engine for authorization.

A quick post by Drew DeVault on why he believes software must be robust, reliable, stable, and simple.

Suju Rajan from LinkedIn joined us to talk about how they are operationalizing state-of-the-art AI at LinkedIn. She sheds light on how AI can and is being used in recruiting, and she weaves in some great explanations of how graph-structured data, personalization, and representation learning can be applied to LinkedIn’s candidate search problem. Suju is passionate about helping people deal with machine learning technical debt, and that gives this episode a good dose of practicality.