News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re back at All Things Open 2022 covering the hallway track. Up first is Shivay Lamba and he’s schooling us on all things server-side WASM. It’s the new hotness. After that, we talk with Yishai Beeri, CTO of LinearB about the world of code review, PR queues, AI developers, and making human developers more efficient, and happier. And last, we talk with Guy Martin from NVIDIA about what’s going on in the Industrial Metaverse. He shares details about an open source project developed by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (USD) and what they’re doing with NVIDIA Omniverse.

Simon Willison is using this year’s Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn Rust.

He’s using Copilot to help him with syntax/snippets via comment-driven prompting. He’s using ChatGPT as a study partner by asking it questions about how to do things in Rust. Is it working?

So far I think this is working really well.

I feel like I’m beginning to get a good mental model of how Rust works, and a lot of the basic syntax is beginning to embed itself into my muscle memory.

The real test is going to be if I can first make it to day 25 (with no prior Advent of Code experience I don’t know how much the increasing difficulty level will interfere with my learning) and then if I can actually write a useful Rust program after that without any assistance from these AI models.

And honestly, the other big benefit here is that this is simply a lot of fun. I’m finding interacting with AIs in this way—as an actual exercise, not just to try them out—is deeply satisfying and intellectually stimulating.

This might be an early glimpse into the future of AI-assisted learning…

Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” campaign is so successful we’re starting to see it copy/pasted to various other social networks. This GitHub version is by a 3rd-party, though, so they have a lot of API limitations to work around. It’s a cool service, but be prepared to see “Incomplete Data. Please refresh later to finish loading.”

Jonas Degrave builds a virtual machine inside ChatGPT, Advent of Code 2022 is in full swing, Mat Ryer impersonates Liam Neeson as web developer, Luca Hammer’s Fedifinder project helps you join the Fediverse & we chat with Brian (BDougie) Douglas about Open Sauced at All Things Open 2022.

Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git, with bridges

I love the idea of having your bug repo right there inside your code repo. The terminal UI is a nice touch!

Loren describes the differences between gRPC and GraphQL and summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of each. They give a rule of thumb (GraphQL for client-server and gRPC for server-to-server) and note cases in which you might want to make exceptions to the rule.

When choosing between pixels and rems in CSS, you should almost always use rems. It’s a simple rule to follow. This article explains why.

Thomas Steiner (Web Developer Advocate at Google) joins Amal & Nick to talk about Project Fugu – an effort to close gaps in the web’s capabilities enabling new classes of applications to run on the web.

Mat Ryer has a very particular set of skills… 🤣

This looks like an interesting framework for everything error-related. The core handles the usual tasks (wrapping errors, creating classes, etc.) and plugins offer more advanced use cases (serialization, CLI errors, logging, etc.).

This awesome list clocs in at ~1500 lines and has been maintained for six years now. It could use some help in the podcasts section, though…

That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous test coverage, or to take arms against a sea of bugs…

In today’s episode, we have the pleasure of two guests: Whitney Lee, Staff Technical Advocate at VMware, the one behind the ⚡️ Enlightning episodes, and Mauricio Salatino, which you already know from 🎧 shipit.show/41 on Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes.

The two of them gave the most amazing KubeCon NA Keynote last month: What a RUSH! Let’s Deploy Straight to Production!

So how do we create an Internal Development Platform that enables anyone on the team to deploy straight to production with the confidence that everything will just work?

Robert Laszczak does a good job defending/explaining many gophers’ position on frameworks:

Go frameworks exist, but none provides a feature set like frameworks from other languages. This won’t change soon.

You may think that it’s because the Go ecosystem is younger. But there is a more important factor. Go is built around the Unix Philosophy…

Burnout has reportedly reached a critical point in the software developer circle since the onset of the Covid-19 health crisis. A recent study by Haystack Analytics, a company specializing in productivity of engineers, found that 83% of software developers suffer from burnout. The main reasons given by the latter to explain this exhaustion are high workload (47%), process inefficiency (31%) and lack of clarity of objectives and targets (29%).

That few?! 😏

Jake Lazaroff spent the last few months learning Tailwind with an open mind and he’s ready to share his opinion of the popular CSS framework:

Tailwind is commonly described as “utility classes”, but that’s a bit of an understatement. It’s essentially a small language you write in the class attributes of your HTML that compiles to a combination of CSS rules and selectors — an abstraction over CSS. But all abstractions leak, and Tailwind is very leaky.

When an abstraction leaks, it means you still have to be aware of (and sometimes deeply so) the underlying layer that’s being abstracted. In this case, Jake is saying that you still need to know CSS to use Tailwind and lays out a few scenarios in which this is the case.

This might be unfair to Tailwind. To my knowledge, the team has never promoted it as a CSS replacement. At its core, it really is just a set of class names that apply styles. But even after working with it for months, there’s still a mental translation layer between “Tailwind CSS” and “real CSS”.

There are some big AI-related controversies swirling, and it’s time we talk about them. A lawsuit has been filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI related to Copilot code suggestions, and many people have been disturbed by the output of Meta AI’s Galactica model. Does Copilot violate open source licenses? Does Galactica output dangerous science-related content? In this episode, we dive into the controversies and risks, and we discuss the benefits of these technologies.

Ruby 3.1 adds a new core class called Data to represent simple immutable value objects. The Data class helps define simple classes for value-alike objects that can be extended with custom methods.

While the Data class is not meant to be used directly, it can be used as a base class for creating custom value objects. The Data class is similar to Struct, but the key difference being that it is immutable.

In its heyday, most Rubyists wouldn’t touch immutability with a ten-foot pole. Times, they are a changin’…

Learning C was quite difficult for Tom M. Thankfully for us, along the way he collected summaries, signposts, and advice for these broader points that made his journey with C and other compiled languages easier. So, if you’re on a similar journey, this page will serve you well on your way.

Heroku’s free plans officially reach EOL, Swyx explains the mixed reaction to Stable Diffusion 2.0, a real Twitter SRE explains how it continues to stay up even with ~80% gone, Tyler Cipriani tells us about one of Git’s coolest, most unloved features & we chat with Joel Lord about brewing beer with IoT & JavaSCript at All Things Open 2022.

Oh, and help make this year’s state of the “log” episode awesome by lending your voice!

Multithreaded, cross-platform, reliable & written in Rust.