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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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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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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Did you miss GitHub Universe this year? We did too, but we have an insider giving us all the details to share with you so you can stay productive, but not miss out. This is a summary of what was announced at GitHub Universe 2019. Shanku Niyogi shared a full-length write up on the GitHub Blog with more details and links.

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How do you know if your Kubernetes cluster is production-ready? If you’re a beginner, it’s hard to tell what you’re missing. The subject is soo vast and it’s easy to lose sight on what’s the right path to production. And even if you’re an expert, remembering all networking, storage, cluster, and application development best practices is impossible. There are so many. Here is a curated a list of best practices for Kubernetes that helps you drive your roadmap to production. Check things off the list and keep track as you go. ✅

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Our mission is to combine the raw stats and trends of the HTTP Archive with the expertise of the web community. The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. It is comprised of 20 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution. There’s so much to digest here. 85 contributors! Quite an achievement and one that I’m excited to dig in to.

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Collin Dellow: If you love Graphviz but hate its 1990s aesthetics, you might find this tool handy. It’s great for documenting workflows and designs in a way that prompts people to consider it a work-in-progress that’s open for collaboration and discussion. Built with RoughJS and (or at least inspired by) viz.js.

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Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat are forming a “Bytecode Alliance”, which is described as: a new industry partnership coming together to forge WebAssembly’s outside-the-browser future by collaborating on implementing standards and proposing new ones. Their aim: We have a vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. And based on advances rapidly emerging in the WebAssembly community, we believe we can make this vision real. Security seems to be at the dead center of this alliance. Click through for an in-depth rundown of why this is a problem and what they plan to do about it. Also, some awesome code cartoons from Lin Clark (I assume).

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Go Time panelist Mat Ryer joins Jerod to talk through the pros and cons of GraphQL vs REST for a future Changelog API. There’s also a fair bit of language chat around Go and JavaScript, a section on Machine Learning, and some inside baseball on where Go Time is heading.

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From Erik Kennedy who shared some tactical design advice for developers — this awesome visual guide covers the primary differences between designing for iOS and Android, including navigation, UI controls, typography, app icons, and more. If you’re designing both an iOS and an Android (Material Design) version of an app, this guide is your new best friend 😎. We’re going to cover the most relevant differences between iOS and Android for UX/UI designers. If you’ve created an app on one platform, this is most of what you need to know to “translate” it for the other platform.

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Excellent work coming from Microsoft’s VIDA research group This new version of SandDance has been rebuilt from scratch with the goal of being modular, extensible, and embeddable into your custom applications.

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In this episode we talk with Ramya Rao about code editors and language servers. We share our thoughts on which editor we use, why we use it, and why we’d switch. We also discuss what a language server is and why it matters in connecting editors and the languages they support. We also dive into various ways to be effective with VS Code including shortcuts, plugins, and more.

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With 35k+ stars, I might be the last one to the party on this awesome repo. It is the largest compilation, and it is growing every week - currently, more than 80 best practices, style guides, and architectural tips are presented. New issues and pull requests are created every day to keep this live book updated. We’d love to see you contributing here, whether that is fixing code mistakes, helping with translations, or suggesting brilliant new ideas.

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Everyone is talking about it. OpenAI trained a pair of neural nets that enable a robot hand to solve a Rubik’s cube. That is super dope! The results have also generated a lot of commentary and controversy, mainly related to the way in which the results were represented on OpenAI’s blog. We dig into all of this in on today’s Fully Connected episode, and we point you to a few places where you can learn more about reinforcement learning.

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What you see is what you paste. No WYSIWIG, no formatting pasted from the web, and no features you don’t need or want. GitHub sync is still in-progress, but this repo is worth a ⭐️ in the meantime.

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Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and the founder of FindCollabs (a place to find collaborators for open source software) joined the show to talk about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. We talk at length about his new project FindCollabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to collaborate with, the importance of reputation and ratings systems, and his invite to this audience to check out what he’s doing and get involved.

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