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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Stephanie knows her stuff when it comes to creating developer-focused content. If you’re in devrel (or want your thoughts/opinions to impact your fellow devs), this is a must-read. Don’t make these mistakes!

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inlets combines a reverse proxy and websocket tunnels to expose your internal and development endpoints to the public Internet via an exit-node. An exit-node may be a 5-10 USD VPS or any other computer with an IPv4 IP address. You may be wondering why this project needs to exist, since many like it have come before. The author addresses that right up front: Similar tools such as ngrok or Argo Tunnel from Cloudflare are closed-source, have limits built-in, can work out expensive and have limited support for arm/arm64. Ngrok is also often banned by corporate firewall policies meaning it can be unusable. Other open-source tunnel tools are designed to only set up a static tunnel. inlets aims to dynamically bind and discover your local services to DNS entries with automated TLS certificates to a public IP address over its websocket tunnel.

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While at Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chris had an inspiring conversation with Anna Bethke, Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. Anna reveals how she started the AI for Social Good program at Intel, and goes on to share the positive impact this program has had - from stopping animal poachers, to helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Through this AI for Social Good program, Intel clearly demonstrates how a for-profit business can effectively use AI to make the world a better place for us all.

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Craig Kerstiens: I’ve learned a lot of skills over the course of my career, but no technical skill more useful than SQL. SQL stands out to me as the most valuable skill for a few reasons: It is valuable across different roles and disciplines Learning it once doesn’t really require re-learning You seem like a superhero. You seem extra powerful when you know it because of the amount of people that aren’t fluent I tend to agree. I still use (and sometimes love) ORMs and database libraries while building apps, but the more I’ve learned SQL over the years, the more I appreciate it for what it is. Craig drills into each of his 3 points above in this excellent post.

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Those of you following AI related things on Twitter have probably been overwhelmed with commentary about OpenAI’s new GPT-2 language model, which is “Too Dangerous to Make Public” (according to Wired’s interpretation of OpenAI’s statements). Is this discussion frustrating or confusing for you? Well, Ryan Lowe from McGill University has published a nice response article. He discusses the model and results in general, but also gives some perspective on the ethical implication and where the AI community should go from here. According to Lowe: “The machine learning community really, really needs to start talking openly about our standards for ethical research release”

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Have you ever seen someone write something to the effect of “I would use Go, but I need generics”? Perhaps we can infer from this that many of the people who are pining after generics in Go are not, in fact, Go users. The inertia of “what I’m used to” comes to a violent stop when they try to use Go. People affected by this frustration interpret it as a problem with Go, that Go is missing some crucial feature - such as generics. But this lack of features is itself a feature, not a bug.

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Congrats to all of Mocha’s contributors on what looks like a huge release!

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Well, it depends. But the good news is Jason Etcovitch (Engineer at GitHub) examines the pros and cons of each and where they fit. He even shared a comparison table to help determine which to choose. Should your next automation tool be built in GitHub Actions or as a separate service with Probot? Since GitHub announced the beta release of GitHub Actions in October 2018, there’s been a new excitement around building automation - and that’s awesome! But I wanted to take a look at the various pros and cons of GitHub Actions and Probot, where each excels and where each might not be the best tool for the job. Click through and scroll to the bottom of the post if all you care about is the comparison.

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You might be on the fence with CSS-in-JS — especially after hearing from Rich Harris about Svelte on The Changelog #332. Max Stoiber writing on his personal blog with his take on the matter: Primarily, CSS-in-JS boosts my confidence. I can add, change and delete CSS without any unexpected consequences. My changes to the styling of a component will not affect anything else. If I delete a component, I delete its CSS too. No more append-only stylesheets!

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🎟 Get yer tickets for React Amsterdam, the biggest React conference in the world! We’re excited to collaborate with this awesome conf to bring you a live recording of JS Party from the event stage. Trust me, that FOMO you’re experiencing right now is very real 😉

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This is notable/different because it uses descriptive HTML rather than semantic CSS classes: <grid columns=8> <c></c> <c span=3>3</c> <c></c> <c span=7-8>7-8</c> <c span=2+2>2+2</c> <c span=5-8>5-8</c> <c span=1-4>1-4</c> <c span=6..>6..</c> <c span=2..>2..</c> <c span=4..>4..</c> <c span=1-2>1-2</c> <c span=4-5>4-5</c> </grid>

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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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