News and podcasts for developers

This week Elixir creator José Valim joins Jerod and Practical AI’s Daniel Whitenack to discuss Numerical Elixir, his new project that’s bringing Elixir into the world of machine learning. We discuss why José chose this as his next direction, the team’s layered approach, influences and collaborators on this effort, and their awesome collaborative notebook project that’s built on Phoenix LiveView.

A nice primer on the many aspects of building full-text search, such as: data preparation, indexing, searching, term frequency, and computing relevance. It’s amazing what 150 lines of code can get done…

There are obvious upsides to pair programming. This post from Nat Bennett shares both the ups and the downs of pairing all day for years…

So I paired all day, most days, for about five years. This had a lot of upsides, far more than I can list here. There’s a standard list of benefits and drawbacks to pairing that you might be familiar with, but the impact of pairing, especially pairing that much, goes much deeper than its impact on the code, on the particular work the team delivers that week.

Nat goes on to share when pairing took more than it gave for them.

Pairing requires being vulnerable, to another human being, for hours at a time. Intimacy, both physical and mental. I had to share space, decisions, thought processes, and often feelings with this person. … This never stopped being draining.
…
Over time, over years, pairing wore me down. Took a little bit more each day than I could recover. Until my life was working, and recovering from work, and then working some more.

Ad-hoc conversations with you Carlos, Chico, Katie, Rahul & Shay were my favourite. They would not have happened was it not for your Happy Hour / AMA sessions Priyanka. And then there is the soul of the conference: the speakers.

After working as a software engineer for 20 years, it’s still exciting to see how the results of your work become alive and you still feel yourself as a kid at that moment :)

Stripe Atlas has a wide array of guides to running an internet business that are totally open and free for everyone. This guide, written by Dr. Sherry Walling (a clinical psychologist), on “managing founder stress” covers everything from running smart (not just hard), coping with chronic stress, mastering the ups and downs, and a reminder that as a founder you are not alone.

If you like this guide, then you’ll probably be a fan of my podcast Founders Talk too.

Bash is great, but when it comes to writing scripts, people usually choose a more convenient programming language. JavaScript is a perfect choice, but standard Node.js library requires additional hassle before using. zx package provides useful wrappers around child_process, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults.

I wouldn’t say JavaScript is a perfect choice for this kind of scripting, but it’s definitely a suitable one (especially if it’s the language you already know well). Here’s what scripting looks like with zx:

#!/usr/bin/env zx

await $`cat package.json | grep name`

let branch = await $`git branch --show-current`
await $`dep deploy --branch=${branch}`

await Promise.all([
  $`sleep 1; echo 1`,
  $`sleep 2; echo 2`,
  $`sleep 3; echo 3`,
])

let name = 'foo bar'
await $`mkdir /tmp/${name}`

Top-level await sure makes things nicer. (Deno supports this out of the box, btw.)

The benefits of such a setup are numerous, especially for small sites and side projects:

Hosting a static website is much easier than a “real” server - there’s many free and reliable options (like GitHub, GitLab Pages, Netlify, etc), and it scales to basically infinity without any effort.

The how is also super interesting:

So how do you use a database on a static file hoster? Firstly, SQLite (written in C) is compiled to WebAssembly. SQLite can be compiled with emscripten without any modifications, and the sql.js library is a thin JS wrapper around the wasm code.

There’s more to the story, and the resulting solution is also open source.

Paul Bakaus from Google Web Creators joins Amal, Nick, & Jerod to talk about this new initiative to promote, educate, and equip people to create on the web.

Along the way we discuss Web Stories, AMP, RSS, Google Reader, and more, of course. Join us: for a more dope web!

Mark Eriksen:

Many great Phoenix LiveView examples exist. They often show the ease and power of LiveView but stop at multiple browsers talking to a single web server. I wanted to go further and create a fully clustered, globally distributed, privately networked, secure application. What’s more, I wanted to have fun doing it.

So I set out to see if I could create a fully distributed, clustered, privately networked, global game server system. Spoiler Alert: I did.

I like the way he frames his experience. He says the most remarkable thing about it is not what he built, it’s what he didn’t need to build in order to accomplish his goal.

Paul Graham on preposterous sounding ideas and how easy they are to dismiss:

Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they’re proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.

Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to be interesting. When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed. There’s something like an efficient market here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct, have the biggest effect.

I’m not a big ideas guy. Never have been. Adam is, though. And I freely admit that many of his ideas sound preposterous to me at first. But I’ve learned over the years to hear him out, because he’s usually on to something, even if it’s not fully-formed yet. And it turns out I’m pretty good at taking partially-formed ideas and helping firm them up. This is one of the reasons why we make a good team.

Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those who’ve tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help them, you’ll probably learn something in the process.

Perspectives from both the workshop leaders perspective, as well as the workshop participants. What are some top tips, things to watch out for, and ways to innovate and keep your participants engaged, especially in the remote world we are now living in.

The motivation for building Slidev:

I always found myself spending too much time styling and layouting slides when using apps like PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides. Whenever I need to share code snippets, I would also need to use other tools to generate the highlighted code as images over and over again.

So as a frontend developer, why not solve it the way that fits better with what I am good at?

Looks slick: themeable, hackable, and you write your slides in Markdown. 👌

ClearURLs is an add-on based on the new WebExtensions technology and is optimized for Firefox and Chrome based browsers.

This extension will automatically remove tracking elements from URLs to help protect your privacy when browse through the Internet, which is regularly updated by us and can be found here.

Wormhole lets you share files with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires. So you can keep what you share private and make sure your stuff doesn’t stay online forever.

Our #1 goal is speed – you should be able to get a share link in less than 2 seconds with the absolute minimum number of clicks.

That’s why Wormhole supports instant file streaming. There’s no need to wait for your files to finish uploading before you can copy the link and send it to your recipient. The recipient can start downloading even before the files have finished uploading.

Wormhole uses super fast peer-to-peer transfer to send files directly to the recipient when possible. This improves speed and security – especially when transferring files over a local network, like when you just want to get a file from your phone onto your computer.

In addition, Wormhole stores your encrypted files on cloud servers for 24 hours so the share link will keep working for your recipient even after you close the Wormhole site.

This comes from Mike Bostock (D3.js) who knows a thing or two about visualizing data in the browser.

It has a concise and (hopefully) memorable API to foster fluency — and plenty of examples to learn from and copy-paste.

Smart home data is complicated. There are all kinds of devices, and they are in many different combinations, geographies, configurations, etc. This complicated data situation is further exacerbated during a pandemic when time series data seems to be filled with anomalies. Evan Welbourne joins us to discuss how Amazon is synthesizing this disparate data into functionality for the next generation of smart homes. He discusses the challenges of working with smart home technology, and he describes how they developed their latest feature called “hunches.”

This repository offers a collection of services with great free tiers for developers on a budget. Because not everyone has 20$ per month to spend on app or database hosting for every single side-project.

Nowadays, a lot of services are offering really good free tier more than enough for testing small apps and even put them in production. They are just waiting to be used by you.

I got a kick out of their FTDD acronym: Free Tier Driven Development

This article provides an in-depth view and comparison on modern regular expression engines. Hyperscan and RE2 come out on top and offer great scalability for large scale regex applications.

In the wake of recent events at Basecamp (and DHH’s continued involvement with Ruby on Rails), many have questioned the governance process for Rails. This post from “The Rails Team” is meant to “clarify how the team is structured,” and how they operate.

…no one on the Core team, or their employers, have sole control over the framework or community. There is no individual or subset of individuals who have power to enact policies unilaterally in the Rails community spaces that we operate (for example on issues, pull requests, or the forum).

Thanks to Muhammad Raza for sharing some of his favorite command line one liners to make his workflow productive and more efficient.

As a regular Linux user, I have been using commandline extensively to perform daily tasks such as creating files, navigating through directories, moving files and editing files using vim.