We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly an alternative Twitter, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.

Do you have packagephobia? Maybe you should... If you don't, you just might after using this tool: Package Phobia reports the size of an npm package before you install it. This is useful for inspecting potential dependencies or devDependencies without using up precious disk space or waiting minutes for npm install. Ain't nobody got time for dat.

Brad Armstrong lays it all out there about how to transition from an engineer to a manager: There are decades of books and thousands of blogs dedicated to trying to answer these questions, so I‘m not here to pretend that I’ve got the secret to success. But I do know a few ways that I’m pretty sure can guarantee you’ll fail. He takes you through 8 easy steps to failure. I'll disappoint you now and spoil that step 1 is to keep coding 😱

Suz, Jerod, Nick and KBall talk about cringeworthy mistakes and failures they (and the community!) have experienced with JavaScript. They also give advice to themselves as if they were just starting out today in the JavaScript industry.

Botwiki looks like a cool place to find inspiration for your next bot. They even have a Random Bot URL, kinda like StumbleUpon for bots!

Betteridge's law of headlines declares: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." But first, let's see what CJ Chilvers has to say (emphasis mine): We’re just numb to the Buzzfeed-ification of podcasts, even (especially?) in outlets like NPR. Then came popular YouTuber CGPGrey (one my favorite podcasters) and his Project Cyclops. In short, this is a well-known, well-liked podcaster who is now advising people to stop listening to podcasts. He has promised to stop listening himself as well — he will only create. Nothing against any of the people involved in this article, but all of it feels like an overreaction. If you feel that a podcast is wasting your time or that it's not the quality production you want, the solution is simple: unsubscribe. You don't go and start a movement calling for everyone to stop listening to podcasts. That's just — as Jerod Santo put it when we were chatting about this story — asinine. In further irony, GCPGrey still wants you to listen to the podcast he's creating, obviously.

Gervasio Marchand: While working on Taut (aka BetterSlack) I noticed that a browser extension could do lots and lots of harm. On this article, I explain how the only way to browse safely is to completely avoid them (or to be really really involved in managing them). If you're thinking, "But open source!" click through and see what Gervasio has to say about that. He also includes some examples of extensions that went rogue or were hacked and how one could abuse the system.

Nikita Prokopov has been programming for 15 years and has become quite frustrated with the industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence in software — to the point of depression. Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. Nikita cites some examples: ...our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage(s) struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games and watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok? Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row. We put virtual machines inside Linux, and then we put Docker inside virtual machines, simply because nobody was able to clean up the mess that most programs, languages, and their environment produce. We cover shit with blankets just not to deal with it. “Single binary” is still a HUGE selling point for Go, for example. No mess == success. Do you share in Nikita's position? Sure, be frustrated with performance (cause we all want, "go faster!"), but do you agree with his points beyond that? If so, read this and consider supporting him on Patreon.

Darin Wilson: In his keynote at ElixirConf last week, Chris McCord announced a new feature for the Phoenix web framework that caused many jaws to hit the floor, and had the hall buzzing when the talk was over. The new feature, tentatively called “LiveView”, allows developers to add dynamic, client-side interactions to web pages, using code that runs in Elixir on the server. What exactly is a LiveView, though? We don't really know yet as this is an ongoing project and no code has been released yet. But as near as I can tell, a LiveView is lot like a React component running in a GenServer – it even has a render function! And with the EEx sigil (which I didn’t know was a thing) the code feels a lot like JSX I am unreasonably excited to see what becomes of this. 

An amazing panel of AI innovators joined us at the O'Reilly AI conference to answer the most pressing AI questions from Quora. We also discussed trends in the industry and some exciting new advances in FPGA hardware.

Yegor applies a kitchen metaphor to code: The kitchen is clean when there is no dirt in the oven. But if its electric panel speaks French, I can’t use the kitchen. Even if it’s perfectly clean. It’s not clear how to use it—that’s why it’s useless. Sounds good to me, but how do you know if your code is actually clean and clear? He provides a heuristic: If a stranger can modify your code and fix a bug in less than an hour, it is maintainable. The entire post is well worth a read.

I did not see this coming. Linus Torvalds, writing to the Linux Kernel mailing list: I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely. I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately. Introspection is hard, especially when you don't like what you see after staring yourself in the mirror. Cheers to him for owning up to mistreating others and attempting to change. Here's hoping he follows through. 🤞

it's exciting to see Cloudflare bridging the gap between IPFS and the traditional web. Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway is an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. For those who want a deep dive into IPFS check out the show we did with Juan Benet – The Changelog #204.

You should plan 10 minutes and read this story from Emily Freeman. Here are some highlights I enjoyed hearing her speak about. On growing up and being poor... Because I was poor, I was nothing. On why she's in tech... Life, in many ways, is a write-only database. On being a house-wife... I felt like a failure. I was clever, I had worked hard and yet there I was again — worth nothing. On being a mom... Giving birth was the first time I felt truly powerful. On learning... Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Just visit web-riimote.herokuapp.com on a laptop/desktop AND a smartphone. Your smartphone will be the controller and your laptop/desktop will be the main display. You don't have to install an app or anything. Pretty cool! Video demo here.

Covers both client-side and server-side development. Available in Chinese and English.

twa is a shell script that audits a given website using nothing but bash, awk, curl, and nc. Throw it in your $PATH and see how your site(s) security stacks up. (Note: requires Bash 4 which is not packaged with macOS because licensing. You can upgrade Bash via homebrew. Learn more here.)

David dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.

Looks-wise, this is an exact design clone too. Hope that doesn't get anyone who uses this "as is" in any trouble with the real Medium. This project is a fork of a Medium clone which began as Ken Hibino's personal side project to learn Rails and React. I upgraded and refactored parts of the Rails app and integrated Dante2 wysiwyg editor. If you're looking for commentary around the project or Rails, check Hacker News.

I like how this post tries to answer questions on why remote companies need to openly acknowledge the mental health challenges of remote work. Amir Salihefendic writes on Ambition & Balance from Doist: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace and what we’re doing about it... In contrast to a traditional office, remote work puts much more focus on output — what did you get done — rather than input — how many hours did you spend doing it. There's a sense of personal responsibility to get "enough" done that can lead people to keep themselves working long past the point of optimal productivity.