Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you’ve never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you have to listen to this show!

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There’s a lot of wisdom in this post alongside some opinions that I find myself nodding along with: My strategy for dealing with the absurd pace of change in web development has been as follows: ignore 99% of it and see if it goes away. While we cover (and talk about) new technologies on a daily basis here at Changelog, that doesn’t mean we adopt everything that hits our radar. Given the hype cycle, it works pretty well. Mongo isn’t exciting anymore, Angular 1 is dead, CoffeeScript is obsolete, I haven’t heard a word about Meteor since it launched… These are all specific technologies. But what about the Single Page App pattern in general? Back in the early days of SPAs, some people argued that it would be faster to only pass the data you need as JSON than to render whole pages. Nearly a decade later, this is almost never true. He goes on to explain how he’s building a side project SPA-style and all the repercussions of that decision. Really insightful stuff here, please do click through and read for yourself.

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Daniel Oberhaus, writing for Vice Motherboard: Heartbleed wasn’t an isolated example of developer burnout and lack of funding, but an outgrowth of a systemic disease that had been festering in the open source software community for years. Identifying the symptoms and causes of this disease was the easy part; finding a cure is more difficult. It’s not enough to just throw more money at the open source community, however. Increased funding creates its own problems in terms of how that money is distributed and what the organizations supplying the funding demand in return. If you’re wondering how we got here in open source, this report is an excellent read on the subject.

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You may recall Erik from episode #333 of The Changelog. In this video, he does a great job describing his decision making process so you can learn how to apply a similar thought process.

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Gervasio Marchand lays out all the ways in which Slack’s threads feature is lacking. Then he goes one to describe why his browser extension, Refined, makes threads better.

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User flows tools, prototyping tools, font tools, animation tools, all the design tools!

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KBall picks the brains of 4 of the speakers at JSConf Hawai’i to investigate the future of JavaScript and Web Development.

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As of today, Amazon announced the cancelation of its plans to build one of their corporate campuses in New York City. This decision, “comes after facing an unexpectedly fierce backlash from some lawmakers and unions.” Their concerns stem from the idea that a tech giant does not deserve nearly $3 billion dollars in government incentives. This move from Amazon was expected to create more than 25,000 jobs in the city. To lure Amazon, [New York] city and state officials had offered the company one of the largest-ever incentive packages in exchange for a much larger return in jobs and tax revenue. “Like a petulant child, Amazon insists on getting its way or takes its ball and leaves,” said Mr. Gianaris, a Democrat, whose district includes Long Island City. “The only thing that happened here is that a community that was going to be profoundly affected by their presence started asking questions.” This coverage from J. David Goodman on The New York Times also includes a statement released by Amazon.

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From the GitHub blog: With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress. Now when you open a pull request, a dropdown arrow appears next to the “Create pull request” button. Toggle the dropdown arrow whenever you want to create a draft instead. Finally. No more titling “[WIP]” and co-workers still asking you whether your pull request is ready to review. GitHub is killing it right now.

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I’ve been a developer for 13 years, and for the life of me, I can’t remember the syntax for amending commits or even reversing them. Thank goodness for a page like this which I’ve bookmarked for easy reference when (inevitably) I make a mistake.

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Ernesto Falcon, writing for the EFF: [wireless carriers] are only trying to focus our attention on 5G to try to distract us from their willful failure to invest in a proven ultrafast option for many Americans: fiber to the home, or FTTH. He goes on to break down why 5G won’t solve many of our (USA) problems and why it’s better to ignore the hype and ask why we’re falling behind other areas of the world.

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This project aims to collect bizarre (but “legal”) Swift programs that the commmunity produces. Like esoteric programming languages, but for weird or nonsensical shit we can do in Swift that actually compiles. For fun purposes only. Compiling some open source goodness just for the fun of it. Avant-garde!

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You can install swc (the speedy web compiler) from npm just like you’re used to, which will download a pre-built binary. That only works on mac (x64)/linux (x86_64)/win32-x64. For other environments, you’ll need the Rust nightly build. Supports ES 2019, JSX, and TypeScript out of the box. You might want to jump straight to the migrating from Babel section. 😉

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Chris sat down with Marta Martinez-Cámara and Miranda Kreković to learn how GirlsCoding.org is inspiring 9–16-year-old girls to learn about computer science. The site is successfully empowering young women to recognize computer science as a valid career choice through hands-on workshops, role models, and by smashing prevalent gender stereotypes. This is an episode that you’ll want to listen to with your daughter!

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Perhaps because many free software coders have been outsiders and rebels, less attention is paid to the use of open source in government departments than in other contexts. But it’s an important battleground, not least because there are special dynamics at play and lots of good reasons to require open-source software. Public money should produce public code, full stop. That doesn’t seem controversial to me, but it’s definitely easier to say than it is to execute.

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The repositories of distributions such as Debian and Nixpkgs are among the largest collections of open source (and some unfree) software. They are complex systems that connect and organize many interdependent packages. Is it possible to capture the large scale features of such a repository in an image? Are there common design choices of the contributors? Did they lead to any emergent structure? This work resulted in some beautiful (and interesting) visualizations. Here’s a sneak peak 👇

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Solid tutorial on Service Workers: You can think of the service worker as someone who sits between the client and server and all the requests that are made to the server pass through the service worker. Basically, a middle man. Since all the request pass through the service worker, it is capable to intercept these requests on the fly.

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ESLint began as a side project 6 years ago and has grown into the most popular JavaScript linter in the world with over 6.5 million npm downloads every week. In short, we’ve realized that in order for ESLint to continue to grow and evolve, we need to get more organized and set up a way to fund ESLint’s development going forward. Today, we are happy to announce the ESLint Collective on Open Collective. Support ’em if you got ’em

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This is slightly off-topic from my usual loggings, but it’s just so freakin’ hacker that I had to share it with you. He calls himself, Hand Solo. Watch to the end to see him playing electronic music with his nubbin’. 🤯

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Jack Conte, the founder of Patreon, said the following in a report from Brandon Gomez on cnbc.com regarding Patreon’s sustainability as it relates to their recent rapid growth: The reality is Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business. This thread from Dan Olson on Twitter is worth reading. It started off with this Tweet: I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but Patreon is about to eat itself. Or, more specifically, the investors who demand geometric growth are about to demand Patreon eat itself. I take particular interest in their revenue which is estimated at $55M versus the $107M of venture capital raised and how that relates to sustainability and the choices founders make on their journey to succeed and/or survive.

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Use dynamic prop based styles with the React bindings and have them transpiled to CSS variables automatically. Great productivity with source maps and linting support. When it comes to web frameworks: ("build-time").wired? && ("run-time").tired?

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