News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

It surprises me that when people think of “software that brings about the singularity” they think of text models, or of RL agents. But they sneer at decision tree boosting and the like as boring algorithms for boring problems.

To me, this seems counter-intuitive, and the fact that most people researching ML are interested in subjects like vision and language is flabbergasting. For one, because getting anywhere productive in these fields is really hard, for another, because their usefulness seems relatively minimal.

With the constant demands of work and life we often don’t take much time to ensure that we’re maintaining ourselves. In this third episode of the maintenance series, Kris is joined by co-host Natalie, along with Ian Lopshire to discuss the ways in which we can maintain ourselves in this busy and chaotic world.

The business context for a rent versus buy dichotomy was first introduced to me by Adam a few years back. It has since then proven very useful as a tool for thinking about the relationship people have to their jobs/companies.

In this post, Cate Huston does an excellent job laying it all out, including which things are generally rented, and which things are generally bought.

Thinking about career decisions this way, you can consider different tradeoffs and options that work best for you at any given time… My question is: are you making those choices mindfully? And do they work for the life and career you want?

Hummingbot integrates cryptocurrency trading on both centralized exchanges and decentralized protocols. It allows users to run a client that executes customized, automated trading strategies for cryptocurrencies.

We created Hummingbot to promote decentralized market-making: enabling members of the community to contribute to the liquidity and trading efficiency in cryptocurrency markets.

There are many arbitrage opportunities between centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance (which often have high liquidity) and decentralized exchanges like Loopring and Terra (which thus far rarely have high liquidity).

If you have the financial stomach for it, Hummingbot could help you take advantage of these opportunities while providing liquidity to the decentralized markets.

Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.

Martin Tournoij lays out a bunch of ways he finds zsh more compelling than bash.

There are many more things. I’m not going to list them all here. None of this is new; much (if not all?) of this has around for 20 years, if not longer. I don’t know why bash is the de-facto default, or why people spend time on complex solutions to work around bash problems when zsh solves them. I guess because Linux used a lot of GNU stuff and bash was came with it, and GNU stuff was (and is) using bash. Not a very good reason, certainly not one 30 years later.

This week Gerhard is talking with Arnaud Porterie, founder of EchoesHQ, a new utility that measures and communicates engineering activity.

They start by re-creating the 60 seconds Y Combinator pitch, and then shift focus to what it was like to get EchoesHQ off the ground. Next, they tackle something which is always on Gerhard’s mind: Why is it important to connect our daily engineering activity to intent?

Before EchoesHQ, Arnaud used to run the core team and the open source project at Docker, and combined with other engineering leadership roles that he held for over a decade, he kept encountering misalignment that was preventing organisations from making meaningful progress. Let’s hear why EchoesHQ might just be a great way of addressing this.

If you have a library dependency that your application relies upon, and you’re afraid to (or for whatever reason will not) peek under the covers and grok its source code… you should not be using that piece of software.

A friendly reminder to only point this tool at websites you own/operate. 😎

This is the first episode in a special series we are calling the “Spotlight on AI in Africa”. To kick things off, Joyce and Mutembesa from Makerere University’s AI Lab join us to talk about their amazing work in computer vision, natural language processing, and data collection. Their lab seeks out problems that matter in African communities, pairs those problems with appropriate data/tools, and works with the end users to ensure that solutions create real value.

Łukasz Langa was tasked by the PSF to look at the state of CPython as an active software development project.

What are people working on? Which standard libraries require most work? Who are the active experts behind which libraries? Those were just some of the questions asked by the Foundation. In this post I’m looking into our Git repository history and our Github PR data to find answers.

Follow along as Łukasz explains how they gathered the data, analyzed it, and got answers to the questions above.

Of all the principles of software engineering which has fallen by the wayside in the modern “move fast and break things” mentality of assholes modern software developers, reliability is perhaps the most neglected, along with its cousin, robustness. Almost all software that users encounter in $CURRENTYEAR is straight-up broken, and often badly.

A scathing rant by Drew DeVault, but it comes with sage advice on how we move forward from here:

You must prioritize simplicity. You and I are not smart enough to be clever, so don’t try. As the old saying goes, there are two kinds of programs: those simple enough to obviously have no bugs, and those complicated enough to have no obvious bugs. It is by no means easier to make the simpler kind, in fact, it’s much more difficult. However, the simpler the system is, the easier it is to reason about all of its states and edge cases. You do not need a JavaScript-powered custom textbox widget. YOU DO NOT NEED A JAVASCRIPT-POWERED CUSTOM TEXTBOX WIDGET.

A curated list of awesome internet services that normally you would have to register for, but due to clever approaches on the part of the service you can use without registering, creating an account and filling endless forms.

Sometimes you just want want some help getting stuff done, but you don’t want to sign up for yet another web service. These sites/services have all figured out how to help you get that done.

Shawn (swyx) Wang lays out Cloudflare’s strategy to disrupt the cloud from the outside in:

While the tech industry is used to come-from-below disruption, and the software industry is increasingly grasping class-for-the-masses atomic concepts, I believe Cloudflare is writing a new playbook that is the little-guy counterpart of the embrace, extend, extinguish model used by Microsoft.

Smashing Mag always delivers on these epic reference-style posts packed with knowledge:

Writing CSS has probably never been more fun and exciting than it is today. In this post we’ll take a look at common problems and use cases we all have to face in our work and how to solve them with modern CSS.

This page is built by the Nomad folks, so keep that in mind when reading through the comparison;

Kubernetes is an orchestration system for containers originally designed by Google, now governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and developed by Google, Red Hat, and many others. Kubernetes and Nomad support similar core use cases for application deployment and management, but they differ in a few key ways. Kubernetes aims to provide all the features needed to run Linux container-based applications including cluster management, scheduling, service discovery, monitoring, secrets management and more. Nomad only aims to focus on cluster management and scheduling and is designed with the Unix philosophy of having a small scope while composing with tools like Consul for service discovery/service mesh and Vault for secret management.

I’m just excited to see strong competition in this space, and had never heard of Nomad prior to today. If you’ve used it and have experience/opinions, I’d love to hear ’em!

Matteo Collina, Ph.D takes us to school on all things Node, Fastify, and Pino. We start with his journey into the Node community, how he got started in open source, and his experience as a member of Node’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We then nerd out about middleware architecture, data structures and logs (yes, logs), and of course, we dive into what makes Fastify so darn fast and how Pino was the precursor project.

On April 30th, 2021, I rickrolled my high school district. Not just my school but the entirety of Township High School District 214. It’s the second-largest high school district in Illinois, consisting of 6 different schools with over 11,000 enrolled students.

Who doesn’t like a good rickroll story? This one’s replete with screencaps and video footage

How much faster is it? See Timing. If the branch is currently checked out, then 10x is a reasonable estimate. If the branch is not checked out, then it’s even faster.

Is performance the only added feature? git move also offers several other quality-of-life improvements over git rebase. For example, it can move entire subtrees, not just branches. See the git move documentation for more information.

git move is part of the git-branchless suite. Cool stuff.

eBPF (7 years old) is a sandbox that can run code inside the linux kernel. It started as a technology to build firewalls, and has evolved over time to include a range of new features.

The panel discuss the origins of eBPF and how it works, as well as dig into some real-world use cases. While eBPF programs themselves aren’t written in Go (more like C), we will hear about how you can communicate with eBPF programs from your Go code.