News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re talking about mainframes with Cameron Seay, Adjunct Professor at East Carolina University and a member of the Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project. If you’ve been curious about mainframes, this show will be a great guide.

Cameron explains exactly what a mainframe is and how it’s different from the cloud. We talk COBOL and the state of education and opportunities around that language. We cover the state-of-the-art in mainframe land, System Z, Linux on mainframes, and more.

Ole Bulbuk & Sandor Szücs join Natalie to discuss the ins & outs of long-term code maintenance. What does it take to maintain a codebase for a decade or more? How do you plan for that? What about inheriting a codebase for the long term? Oh, and (how) can AI help?

Manage your resume as structured data, in a modular fashion, within the comfort of your code editor, rendered your way and out of word processors. Here’s a quick 3 minute demo.

I love a good “I built a thing and here is how I built that thing” post, especially when it’s penned by someone like Chris who’s sure to keep you entertained along the way.

Wouldn’t it be neat to have aggregated data (for a website, daily email, push alert, etc) of kids events in our surrounding area so we know about them right away?

— My wife, possibly salty we missed out on Bluey Live tickets in Portland

Chip Huyen:

When we actively hire, our startup gets 150 - 200 applications each month. I read every single one of them. Sometimes, I’d talk to a candidate and see that what we perceived as their strongest aspects actually weren’t included in their resume. Occasionally, a candidate would tell me that they didn’t expect their resume to still be screened by humans – had they known, they would have written their resume differently.

The resume evaluation process is pretty much a black box for most candidates. And it is so because few hiring managers have publicly discussed this. I thought I should start the conversation.

Chip’s team mostly hires for infra and ML roles, so some of the advice here will be catered towards those positions. Still, if you’re on the job market you’d be well-served by spending 15-20 minutes reading this post and tweaking your resume where applicable.

Last September, at the 🇨🇭 Swiss Cloud Native Day, Florian Forster, co-founder & CEO of ZITADEL, talked about why they switched to serverless containers. ZITADEL has a really interesting workload that is both CPU intensive and latency sensitive. On top of this, their users are global, and traffic is bursty. Florian talks about how they evaluated AWS, GCP & Azure before they settled on the platform that met their requirements.

This post introduces the concept of durable execution, which is used by Stripe, Netflix, Coinbase, Snap, and many others to solve a wide range of problems in distributed systems. Then it shows how simple it is to write durable code in Node.

I’m currently working at a top tier investment bank as a software engineer. I’m an insignificant cog in a machine that skims the cream from the milk. I’m earning the most money I’ve ever made and yet I’m the least fulfilled I’ve ever been.

Right now in the UK and across the world, things are uncertain. Companies are laying workers off, there’s a cost of living and energy crisis. I’m excruciatingly lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to develop the skillset I’ve got. In times like these every signal is telling me to stay on the path I’m on, enjoying the comfort and safety of a high paying job.

I’m not going to listen. I’m quitting and I’m leaving this place. I’ll see you in the mountains.

After this post blew up, Seán wrote a follow-up on what quitting the rat race means to him.

Run displayplacer list to print your current layout’s args so you can create profiles for scripting/hotkeys with Automator, BetterTouchTool, etc.

The creators of this new Nix resource thought the existing Nix docs were a bit difficult to navigate for beginners and believe flakes are the future of Nix and wanted to introduce more people to them early in the learning process.

Creating and sharing reproducible development environments for AI experiments and production systems is a huge pain. You have all sorts of weird dependencies, and then you have to deal with GPUs and NVIDIA drivers on top of all that! brev.dev is attempting to mitigate this pain and create delightful GPU dev environments. Now that sounds practical!

Yup, that Neon. Congrats to Nikita and team for this big win.

Databases and web apps go together like peanut butter and jelly. In a word, they’re inseparable. And despite all the amazing innovations in NoSQL data stores, often a good old relational database is the most reliable tool for the job.

We want to make it completely seamless to develop applications that need databases on Replit. Starting today, you can create and instantly begin to use PostgreSQL databases from within the Replit workspace.

The fine print.

Under the hood, this product is powered by our friends at Neon who have created a lightning-fast serverless database. The database will go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity. Most clients should handle the reconnection seamlessly.

Inspired by NES.css

Fred K. Schott joins the party again to discuss all the new and fun changes in Astro 2. Nick and KBall dig in on what’s new, what’s exciting, and what to expect from the framework built around content.

Max Countryman wrote up a framework for prioritizing tech debt, shadcn builds a copy/paste-able UI component library in public, Justin Etheredge shares 20 things he’s learned in his 20 years as a software engineer, Jacob Stopak’s git-sim lets you easily visualize git operations without affecting your repo & Mattias Wadman implemented jq in jq.

Ruby on Jets allows you to create and deploy serverless services with ease, and to seamlessly glue AWS services together with the most beautiful dynamic language: Ruby. It includes everything you need to build an API and deploy it to AWS Lambda. Jets leverages the power of Ruby to make serverless joyful for everyone.

I’m not (yet) big on serverless things, but if I were, I’d love to run some Ruby code there.

This is a Pythonic wrapper around stable diffusion with image editing by InstructPix2Pix. The four images featured below (top) are generated by the following command:

imagine "a scenic landscape" "a photo of a dog" "photo of a fruit bowl" "portrait photo of a freckled woman"

Then they are edited (bottom) with the following commands:

>> aimg edit scenic_landscape.jpg "make it winter" --prompt-strength 20
>> aimg edit dog.jpg "make the dog red" --prompt-strength 5
>> aimg edit bowl_of_fruit.jpg "replace the fruit with strawberries"
>> aimg edit freckled_woman.jpg "make her a cyborg" --prompt-strength 13

This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.

Jerod & the gang analyze the State of JS 2022 survey results, play a wicked game of HeadLIES & share some Pro Tips to help you live your best dev life.

Lars is big on Elixir. Think apps that scale really well, tend to be monolithic, and have one of the most mature deployment models: self-contained releases & built-in hot code reloading. In episode 7, Gerhard talked to Lars about “Why Kubernetes”. There is a follow-up YouTube stream that showed how to automate deploys for an Elixir app using K3s & ArgoCD.

More than a year later, how does Lars think about running applications in production? What does simple & straightforward mean to him? Gerhard’s favourite: what is “human scale deployments”?