News and podcasts for developers

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we’ve officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it’s also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

We’re longtime users of Action Mailer and wanted something similar for our TypeScript/React apps. We didn’t find anything, so we decided to build Mailing.

We added some features that we would’ve liked in Action Mailer, like a mobile toggle (with hotkeys), and the ability to send a test email from the browser while developing. We went all in on MJML so that we (almost) never have to think about email clients or nested tables :)

Plays well with the popular JS web frameworks, too. Demo video here.

Tammer Saleh, founder of Super Orbital, a tiny team of exceptional Kubernetes engineers and teachers, is joining us today to talk about what is cool in the Cloud Native world. Yes, it’s the same Tammer that we had the pleasure of on shipit.show/31 - Is Kubernetes a platform?

In today’s episode, we also cover two great blog posts:

1. Zero to GitOps: Terraform and the AWS EKS Blueprints project by Sean Kane
2. Hunting Down an Intermittent Failure in Cilium by James McShane

We wrap up with ✨ The Cool Wall of Cloud Native ✨

This code is experimental (as you might imagine), but it’s full functional. It doesn’t implement all the Airplay protocols, but quite a few!

Mike Melanson gives props to the language many of us (myself included) enjoy lampooning:

While Java may have hit some hiccups earlier in its life, nowadays the language and its greater ecosystem have picked up the pace to meet the needs of the future in a variety of ways. In fact, it never really went anywhere: Companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Zoom all employ Java across their vast codebases. Not to mention much of the high-scale data infrastructure over the past decade has been powered by Java, with the language serving as the backbone for the likes of Apache Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark.

You’ll have to read the article to see how he backs up statements like this one:

After nearly 30 years of Java, you might expect the language to be showing some signs of wear and tear, but nothing could be further from the truth. Java in 2022 is not a language in decline, but rather a language preparing for the effervescent future of software development.

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment, and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Daniel and Chris delve into protein folding, and explore the implications of this revolutionary and hugely impactful application of AI.

Ralf Jung has been thinking about semantics of Rust… a lot:

The purpose of MiniRust is to describe the semantics of an interesting fragment of Rust in a way that is both precise and understandable to as many people as possible… Specifically, MiniRust is specified by a reference interpreter that describes the step-by-step process of executing a MiniRust program, including checking at each step whether the program has Undefined Behavior.

Source code here.

Daily stand-ups are a classic example of learned helplessness. We all know they’re useless, but we tell ourselves “that’s just how things are” and do nothing about it.

Lucas provides a set of five symptoms that indicate you’re doing stand-ups wrong and says if your team hits at least three of the five, your stand-ups are useless.

But, instead of just telling you to stop doing them (like I probably would), he provides a bunch of solid advice on how to make them useful again.

We add episode chapters to the website, KubeSail sells a PiBox, Nima Badizadegan wants you to use one big server, Gergeloy Orosz details oncall compensation across the software industry, Greg Kogan isn’t impressed with how swamped you are at work, a dashboard template built on Bootstrap & Charm releases a CLI tool for shell scripts.

The story of Kells is an inspiring one, to say the least!

I started this game back in 2020 as a fun little side-project to pass the time during the pandemic with lots of help from my son. Back then we didn’t even expect it to be playable, never mind it turning into a real game with 100+ levels and being released on Steam/PC. But even after that milestone, I never dreamed my son and I would be able to play it together around the TV on our favourite console!

Clojure is often lauded, but you don’t see too many teams actually using it to build production systems. “Why Clojure?” is what the Penpot team gets asked the most, so they lay their reasoning out in this article. The TLDR:

Though it is not a mainstream language, Clojure was the right language for Penpot to choose because of its key features: stability, backwards compatibility, and syntactic abstraction.

Pulls data from many sources. Built with Go. Demo video here.

AngularJS creator Miško Hevery has a new web framework he wants to tell us about, but he’s not pitching just another framework, but with different DX. He says that Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he’s here to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG.

This is Adam and Jerod’s pre-show call before hooking up with Chris Coyier to record episode 500 of The Changelog. We’ve been doing these off and on for awhile now. We hang out for 30ish minutes before the show begins and ship that conversation as a bonus for our Changelog++ members.

We’re doing this one different. You don’t hit a round number like this very often. So, here it is. A standalone Backstage episode. Thanks for listening and here’s to the next 500! 🥂

Meta just released a stable version of their new documentation static-site-generator, after a 4 years alpha/beta period. It allows you to focus on content and just write Markdown files. Based on Node.js, React and MDX. Powering many docs sites including React-Native, Supabase, Redux, Tauri, Electron, Courier, Ionic, Figma, Prettier, Babel…

Michael Guarino lays out how the engineering team at Plural brought K8s to the browser for their users:

Overall, we had a ton of fun building this feature. It allowed us to delve into an often unexplored area of the Kubernetes API, which I am honestly happy that we got to explore. This project also took an unexpected turn in its use of tmux and exposed us to a genuinely mind-blowing project in xtermjs (I’m shocked the community had the patience to write a full shell in javascript!).

Our today’s guest spent 4 days building a feature for his side project so that we could ship it together on Ship It!, while recording. The feature is called rave mode, and the context is Bass, an interpreted functional scripting language written in Go, riffing on the ideas of Kernel & Clojure. When the local build runs, you can now press r to synchronise the beats of your currently playing Spotify track with the build output. For a demo, see bass v0.9.0 release.

Please welcome Alex Suraci, a.k.a. vito, the creator of Concourse CI and Bass.

This episode is dedicated to the late John Shutt, the creator of Kernel.

Your ideas continue in Bass.

Thank you for getting them out into the world.

Our award winning worthy survey game show is back, this time Mat Ryer hosts it live on stage at GopherCon Europe 2022!

Go Time’s Natalie Pistunovich joins forces with Ronna Steinberg & Robert Burke to battle it out with V Körbes, Tamir Bahar & Konrad Richie. Let’s see who can better guess what the GopherCon Europe gophers had to say!

This is an attempt to build a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot. It uses the SalesForce CodeGen models inside of NVIDIA’s Triton Inference Server with the FasterTransformer backend.

Once you get it all set up, you can point VS Code’s Copilot plugin at it!

Don’t stress, we all break production. These are the tips I wished I had. Not which framework to learn, or how to ace that programming interview (all useful!), but what to expect when you land your first software job.

Suraj Pillai, singing fzf’s praises:

I’m a CLI junkie, addicted to Vim motions, and never miss an opportunity to bring those two in to any part of my workflow. Naturally, I love to geek out about command line utilities and am always on the lookout for the next tool that can improve my productivity or just make CLI more fun to use. I can confidently say that Fzf is one of the handful of tools I’ve discovered over the years that has done both and has,thus, significantly improved the quality of my command line life.