Jerod is joined by Chris and Desmond (co-hosts of the ElixirTalk podcast) to catch up on what’s moving and shaking in the Elixir and Phoenix communities. We discuss what’s attractive about Elixir, what it means to have the language finalized, why folks are so excited by Phoenix LiveView, the ambitious new Lumen project that’s bringing Elixir to WebAssembly, and more.

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KBall, Jerod, and Divya dig deep into how we learn. We look into how to choose what to learn, techniques for learning, and a set of respective resources.

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Turns out one of our asset caching best practices (content hashes in filenames + far-future expiry) has a serious flaws in it: In practice, changes to one of your source files almost always invalidates more than one of your output files—and this happens because you’ve added revision hashes to your filenames. Philip goes on to explain why this happens and then proposes 3 possible solutions. Good stuff 👌

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There’s probably nothing life-changing in here for those of us deep in the open source world, but I thought this was worth sharing just in case someone in your life could use a primer on what open source is all about and how to get involved. Have you ever wondered how the open source world exists thanks to the contribution of thousands of people all over the world? Is there a way to learn the skills to contribute at maximum, or to improve it?

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Did you know QWERTY was created in 1878?! I didn’t until I read this interesting piece by Yaron Wittenstein about how he found a new keyboard layout called Colemak that is much less RSI-inducing than QWERTY. QWERTY typing never felt elegant for me. If always felt like something just isn’t right. Typing is supposed to be fun, and with Colemak it’s much more fun. The motivation wasn’t to type faster than QWERTY but to make typing more fun and less effortless.

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Mat is joined by Peter Bourgon, Kat Zień, and Ben Johnson to talk about application design in Go — principles, trade-offs, common mistakes, patterns, and the things you should consider when it comes to application design.

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Muon is a lightweight alternative to Electron written in Golang in about ~300 LoC, using Ultralight instead of Chromium. Ultralight is a cross-platform WebKit rewrite using the GPU to target embeded desktop applications that resulted in a fast, lightweight, and low-memory HTML UI solution that blends the power of Chromium with the small footprint of Native UI. Between this, NodeGui, and Catalina’s support for React Native, Electron is getting squeezed on all sides.

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n8n (a numeronym for “nodemation”) is a node-based workflow automation tool. The reason for the square quotes around “open source” is because it has a Commons Clause attached to its Apache 2.0 license, which means you can do anything you want with the source code except make money with it. Since n8n itself is built on open source tech such as TypeScript and Vue.js, this is a nice touch by the author in the FAQ: As n8n itself depends on and uses a lot of other Open Source projects it is only fair and in our interest to also help them. So it is planed to contribute a certain percentage of revenue/profit every month to these projects. How much exactly is not decided yet.

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If I had to pick one engineering team to write up how they make (and keep) Rails running fast, it’d be Shopify’s. What a treat! Part of Shopify’s success with Ruby on Rails is an emphasis on writing fast code. But, how do you really write fast code? Largely, that’s context sensitive to the problem you’re trying to solve. Let’s talk about a few ways to start writing faster code in Active Record, Rails, and Ruby.

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Tyler Hall: I completely realize and wholeheartedly own-up to the fact that I’m a geek and a Mac power user above and beyond what normal muggles will ever experience, nonetheless, this is the first-run experience I was greeted to this afternoon after upgrading to Catalina. I’m sure Catalina will be worth it in the end, but I’m going to sit this one out for a bit until the dust settles.

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Colin Lecher reporting for The Verge: Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 730, which makes it a crime to distribute audio or video that gives a false, damaging impression of a politician’s words or actions. While the word “deepfake” doesn’t appear in the legislation, the bill clearly takes aim at doctored works. Lawmakers have raised concerns recently that distorted deepfake videos, like a slowed video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appeared over the summer, could be used to influence elections in the future. This is the first (but likely not the last) piece of legislation aimed at fighting the potential impact of GANs Gone Wild. It’ll be interesting to watch this game play out. I think the only long-term, sustainable solution will emerge from the same arena where the problem began: technological advances.

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Have you ever created a Kubernetes cluster and wondered what type of worker nodes you should use? For example, if you’re on AWS, should you use many small and cheap t2.micro instances, or some few powerful m5.xlarge instances? This article discusses the pros and cons of using different worker node sizes in your cluster.

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Liran Tal: I wrote this tiny module thing that allows you to quickly check if a website is running vulnerable JS libs straight from the terminal. You’d be surprised how many websites are still running old and vulnerable versions of jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular and others. Use it responsibly ;-)

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With Hydra, you can compose your configuration dynamically, enabling you to easily get the perfect configuration for each run. You can override everything from the command line, which makes experimentation fast, and removes the need to maintain multiple similar configuration files.

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Want to hear two of the top leaders in open source talk about their differing philosophies on open source and the modern web? The other week I ended up going back and forth in tweets with David Heinemeier Hansson, it wasn’t going anywhere but he graciously invited me to their podcast and we were able to expand the discussion in a way I found really refreshing and mind-opening. DHH and I have philosophies around work and open source that I believe overlap 95% or more, so… Here’s the Twitter conversation that started this debate on the Rework podcast.

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Chris and Daniel talk with Keith Lynn, AlphaPilot Program Manager at Lockheed Martin. AlphaPilot is an open innovation challenge, developing artificial intelligence for high-speed racing drones, created through a partnership between Lockheed Martin and The Drone Racing League (DRL). AlphaPilot challenged university teams from around the world to design AI capable of flying a drone without any human intervention or navigational pre-programming. Autonomous drones will race head-to-head through complex, three-dimensional tracks in DRL’s new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit. The winning team could win up to $2 million in prizes. Keith shares the incredible story of how AlphaPilot got started, just prior to its debut race in Orlando, which will be broadcast on NBC Sports.

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Vue-next is in “pre-alpha” condition, but the team has achieved most of the architectural goals and new features planned, so the source is now public on GitHub. No word yet on when they expect Vue 3 to be officially released, but you can at least dig in to what they’ve got so far!

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This game looks like the perfect way to get my kids coding without them knowing that I’m getting them coding. The automation is via a drag-n-drop scratch-like interface (is it Scratch?), so it should be easy for anyone to do. Bot Land is available on all mobile platforms as well as the web. (!)

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What if you could have an Electron-like app framework without the Chromium dependency and resulting performance woes? Well, now you can. NodeGui is a Qt5-powered, cross-platform, native app GUI framework for JavaScript with CSS-like styling. In this episode, Jerod and Nick sit down with Atul –author of NodeGUI and NodeGUI React– to learn about this exciting framework. We ask him a zillion and one questions about it.

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While this study was focused on “entrepreneurs”, I would say the function of sleep applies to all humans and can be expended to “creators” at large — or anyone who is in an position of trading sleep for progress. We’re exploring this very topic on an upcoming episode of Brain Science. Subscribe if you haven’t already! In our paper we investigated fundamental functions required of a founder in the early stages of a new venture’s lifecycle: the generation of new venture ideas and the formation of beliefs about a new venture’s potential. In a series of three interrelated studies, we show that entrepreneurs who shortchange sleep analyze business opportunities differently than their well-rested counterparts, and even differently than their well-rested selves.

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