News and podcasts for developers

This week on The Changelog we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely.

Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases.

There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden).

When are microservices a good idea? Avery Pennarun shared a complete walk-through of modules, monoliths, and microservices.

Can systems design answer the microservices question? Yes, but you might not like the answers. First, we’ll need some history…

Michael Irogoyen:

Continued use of icon fonts is a detriment to your visitors and a time-sink for you. By replacing your existing icon font implementation with SVG icons, you’re helping people utilizing assistive technologies, improving the quality, clarity, and reliability of your icons, and reducing your time to maintain legacy assets.

He makes a compelling case.

In theory, trademarks protect freedom. In practice, trademarks prevent abuse.

Neither the terms “Open Source” nor “Free Software” are themselves trademarked, which unfortunately allows anyone to use them to describe anything – companies regularly exploit this to undermine public understanding of the freedoms which the words originally conveyed. This is why we are using trademarks early and often in Lightmeter — to avoid problems for users and ourselves later on.

Miroslav Nikolov:

I want to tell you the real story behind an ambitious two-month project my team completed, with a huge impact on our organization. A very stressful, challenging, and full of surprises journey, marked by developers being the leaders. I intend to reveal why things went bad and how with a proper smart set of decisions the front-end team managed to navigate its boat.

Stick around to the end for his best practices summary.

This week on Founders Talk I’m joined by John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.

Browser extensions are cool until you need to set up one.

extension-create helps you develop cross-browser extensions with built-in support for module imports/exports, auto-reload, and more.

Cezar describes it as create-react-app, but for browser extensions.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel discuss low code / no code development, GPU jargon, plus more data leakage issues. They also share some really cool new learning opportunities for leveling up your AI/ML game!

Today we are pleased to announce Total Cookie Protection, a major privacy advance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

You gotta love to see it. 👏

Sometimes you can’t make an informed decision because you don’t even know what should factor in to that decision. Shekhar Gulati is here to help provide those factors and he even produced this handy decision matrix for you.

Fatih Arslan takes you through his journey to bring dark mode to his macOS terminal apps.

With Jam you can create audio rooms that can be used for panel discussions, jam sessions, free flowing conversations, debates, theatre plays, musicals and more. The only limit is your imagination.

The README has an excellent feature comparison to help you decide if Jam is right for you. They also have a PRIVACY file, which is nice to see.

Go Time’s Mat Ryer breaks out the acoustic for all the Generics haters out there:

A musical message for #golang​ people thinking of leaving because the Go Generics proposal was official accepted. (Spoof of You’ll Be Back from Hamilton.)

If you like this, you’ll be happy to hear we conned invited Mat on to JS Party this week and threatened him asked him to create some jingles for our regular segments. If you don’t like it, please travel back in time and skip that last sentence.

Eric Normand (long-time FP advocate and author of Grokking Simplicity) joins Jerod and KBall for a deep conversation about Functional Programming in JavaScript. Eric teaches us what FP is all about, details the functional side of JS, and reviews the good/bad/ugly of React.

Oh, and join us in the #jsparty channel of our community slack where we’re giving away three FREE e-book copies of Eric’s new book! 🎁

Dan Lorenc, from Google’s Infrastructure Security Team:

Software written in unsafe languages often contains hard-to-catch bugs that can result in severe security vulnerabilities, and we take these issues seriously at Google. That’s why we’re expanding our collaboration with the Internet Security Research Group to support the reimplementation of critical open-source software in memory-safe languages.

Notice he said “expanding our collaboration”, which must mean they’ve been doing this for a bit, but I wasn’t aware of the effort? An uplifting trend, regardless. Work is well underway:

The new Rust-based HTTP and TLS backends for curl and now this new TLS library for Apache httpd are an important starting point in this overall effort. These codebases sit at the gateway to the internet and their security is critical in the protection of data for millions of users worldwide.

UsTaxes is an open source tax filing application that can be used to file the Federal 1040 form. It is different from paid tax preparation software in that it protects user privacy and is provided for free. It is available in both web and desktop formats.

The coolest thing about this (in addition to it being free-as-in-beer) is that it stores all data in the browser only, so your personal info never leaves your computer.

WIP Alert: You shouldn’t use it file your taxes for the 2020 / 2021 tax season, but it’s a great time to get involved and help this software become production-ready for the next go-around.

As it turns out, most of what we hear about “talent” in the software industry is just plain wrong and based on naive and deprecated models if not outright self delusions.

The author goes on to explain how talent is multi-dimensional, isn’t static, and isn’t linear… then concludes by ruminating on these questions:

If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong, what does it say about our hiring and management practices? what do managers even mean when they set out to hire “good developers” given that their goodness cannot be measured and is highly volatile?

Related: I shared an Unpopular Opinion on my recent Go Time appearance (though Kris Brandow is convinced it will be actually popular) in this area of thought: I believe a primary trait shared by successful software developers is stubbornness. Not talent/intellect necessarily, but that downright refusal to give up until a solution is found. Listen in starting here and let me know if you agree or disagree in the discussion.

Daniel Stenberg and tfw your open source code (curl) is used by a malicious hacker (seemingly, it’s hard to tell for sure) to attack someone and effectively destroy their business (and life, by extension) and then said victim turns around and threatens your life in a completely unprovoked email. Tragic in every sense. Sorry you had endure this, Daniel.

Documentation. You can treat it as a dictionary or reference manual that you look up things in when you get stuck during your day-to-day work OR (and this is where things get interesting) you can immerse yourself in a subject, domain, or technology by deeply and purposefully consuming its manuals cover-to-cover to develop expertise, not just passing familiarity.

In this episode we pull in perspectives and anecdotes from beginners and veterans alike to understand the impact of RTFM deeply. Also Sweet Filepath O’ Mine?!?!

Play the game for yourself then read the blog post all about it.

Connor Ward:

Before React, there was Angular and before that, there was jQuery – all frameworks that have fallen by the wayside. It’s just a matter of time before something comes along and takes the mantle as the new hotness. Or so they say.

I’m not so sure. In fact, I think React will be with us for many years to come.

He sites React Native’s success as one reason React will remain relevant, amongst others. I’m not so sure.

I believe React The Idea (uni-directional data flow through declarative component trees) is here to stay, but I’m not so convinced that React The Software won’t be soon replaced like its predecessors were.