News and podcasts for developers

Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.

Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.

Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

Matthew Gerstman:

I’ve been tasked with leading frontend. As a result, I’ve been teaching a whole lot of people about the web.

Knowing where we came from can help us figure out where we should go. It’s also a mountain of technical debt, and we’re collectively building on top of it.

Forgive me if I skip the wonderful stories of Macromedia Flash, Java in the browser, or whatever other detour you can think of. While those were important to development of the web, most of us will never run into them again.

The first Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) spec was released in 1993 as a way to represent web pages, then documents….

A sweeping history (replete with screen shots) that ends with a peek into the potential future.

You’ve probably seen many of these commands hit Changelog News over the years, but now you can see them all again in one hand-curated place. Who knows, maybe one or two will be new to you. I hadn’t heard of curlie previously, which looks like a nice merging of cur and httpie.

Prestige rivals rich HTTP clients such as Postman and Insomnia by being… less rich. BUT. All you have to do is fire it up in your browser and type out some plain text. So straight forward!

A quick list of 23 skills for varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond. My favorites from the list are How to listen to other engineers’ ideas without feeling threatened (#10) and How to pick your battles (#18) .

Everyone else’s favorite, according to the top highlight, is How to get someone promoted (#19).

William Falcon wants AI practitioners to spend more time on model development, and less time on engineering. PyTorch Lightning is a lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research that lets you train on multiple-GPUs, TPUs, CPUs and even in 16-bit precision without changing your code! In this episode, we dig deep into Lightning, how it works, and what it is enabling. William also discusses the Grid AI platform (built on top of PyTorch Lightning). This platform lets you seamlessly train 100s of Machine Learning models on the cloud from your laptop.

When it comes to scaling, we might need to think about:

• data storage, if we store more and more data and it becomes expensive or slow working with them
• fast INSERTs and UPDATES for write-heavy workloads
• making SELECT queries faster because of their complexity or because they need to query huge amounts of data
• concurrency if we have many clients interacting with the database

In this article, I will present some basic ideas and starting points on scaling traditional SQL databases.

WWDC21 wasn’t the most exciting Apple keynote ever (especially for those of us hoping for some new hardware), but there were a lot of software things announced. Apple continues to iterate on Swift, and the new 5.5 beta has some really cool stuff in it. InfoQ has the rundown on its two flagship improvements.

Don Watkins:

Mark Van Doren said, “the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” I saw that play out in this classroom using open source tools. More students need opportunities like this to help them gain a quality education. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a great form factor for teaching and learning.

Such a cool program that’d be easy to reproduce in your local library.

Tanner joins Nick to talk about his projects, react-query and react table, and discuss scratching your own itch in a maintainable way with open source.

OldOS is a testament to the days of yesteryear, showcasing what iOS once was ten years ago. The ethos of the app is to merge the technologies of today with a pixel-perfect recreation of the user experience of the past. The vast majority of apps in OldOS are fully functional — meaning they seamlessly integrate with the data on your phone to deliver a live, emulator-esque experience. What does this mean? Well, you can play your music in iPod, get directions in Maps, surf the web in Safari, view the current weather in Weather, and much more.

This is quite the undertaking!

Part of the goal with OldOS is to enable anyone to understand how iOS works and demonstrate just how powerful SwiftUI truly is. For that reason, the entire app will soon be open-sourced — enabling developers to learn about, modify, and add to the app. I thought building this over my last six or so months in high school and sharing it with the world would be a fun and productive endeavor.

It looks like there’s a build available today, but it’s not open source yet so I’m going out on a limb by linking it up now. I’ve +1’d a request for screenshots, which would be a great addition to the repo while we wait for code.

This bold statement starts a long Twitter thread by Brantly Millegan:

“Sign-In w/ Ethereum” is the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. Not just an idea, it’s already the norm for web3 & will spread.

This idea was the most interesting/exciting thing for me that came out of our NFT talk with Mikeal Rogers. Could cryptocurrency be the carrot that attracts the masses to obtain a public/private key pair and be financially incentivized to secure it? If so, this makes for a far superior global identity system to anything previous.

For this to happen, I think mainstream browsers will have to build crypto wallets into them. Plugins and extensions like MetaMask are probably asking too much of people. What do you think? Feasible? Likely? Why or why not?

This episode was recorded live from GopherCon Europe 2021!

Natalie & Mat host three amazing devs who gave talks that showcase using Go in unusual ways: Dr. Joakim Kennedy is tracking Go in malware, Mathilde Raynal is building quantum-resistant cryptography algorithms, and Preslav Rachev is creating digital art.

We hear from our speakers how they got into Go, how they made the choice to use Go for their unusual use case, and how it compares to other languages for their specific needs.

We also chat about conference talks, submissions and public speaking - how to start, good practices, and tips they collected along the way.

Every commit is a gift, seriously. One of the best ways to show your appreciation for a gift is by a sincere and thoughtful thank you.

So, in honor of Maintainer Week we encourage you to thank a maintainer who has improved your life with their open source gift to the world.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

Miroslav Nikolov:

You may not be a project manager. Perhaps you are a developer who likes to code and solve technical challenges. The organizational matter is something you care less about. After all, your company is likely relying on some agile methods and there are product owners and/or SCRUM masters to handle the process. You just need to build new features.

While that’s true you have to sometimes get out of your comfort zone.

When we had Adam Wathan on JS Party, I asked him if anybody besides the Tailwind team were working on component libraries. He said yes, but didn’t name any off the top of his head. Well, add DaisyUI to the list.

Your HTML doesn’t need to be messy. DaisyUI adds component classes to Tailwind CSS. Classes like btn, card, etc… No need to deal with hundreds of utility classes.

No script dependencies. 2KB gzipped. Worth a look.

Adam and Jerod sit down to answer a listener question (Hi, Alex! 👋) about how we podcast. Not how we create podcasts, but how we consume podcasts. Along the way we share an update on our comments feature, discuss the Apple Podcasts rollout debacle (and how it affected us launching Ship It!), and give a few personal recommendations of podcasts we’re listening to.

LJ Miranda:

When I first saw “Avengers: Endgame” in theaters, I noticed that their time travel rule is quite similar to the Git branching model. Referred to as the time heist, our heroes travelled through time to recover the stones…

I had to truncate that pull quote to avoid Avengers spoilers. If you’ve seen the movie (or don’t care about getting spoiled) there’s some good Git knowledge to be gained from this analogy.

Chris and Daniel sit down to chat about some exciting new AI developments including wav2vec-u (an unsupervised speech recognition model) and meta-learning (a new book about “How To Learn Deep Learning And Thrive In The Digital World”). Along the way they discuss engineering skills for AI developers and strategies for launching AI initiatives in established companies.

Althttpd is a simple webserver that has run the sqlite.org website since 2004. Althttpd strives for simplicity, security, and low resource usage.

As of 2018, the althttpd instance for sqlite.org answers about 500,000 HTTP requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 50GB of content per day (about 4.6 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average on this machine normally stays around 0.1 or 0.2. About 19% of the HTTP requests are CGI to various Fossil source-code repositories.

Richard has a knack for creating simple, high quality tools. When we did our (now legendary) show with him back in 2016, he was quite keen on coming back at some point to discuss Fossil. Should we make that happen?