Russel Goldenberg & Caitlyn Ralph from The Pudding join Amelia & Nick to talk about how they create data-driven, interactive articles, how the team works on both The Pudding’s data journalism articles and Polygraph’s client work. We also dive into how the team works with contractors and how the company manages itself using a Holocratic method.

Chris Fidao:

I’ve been using AWS “professionally” since about 2015. In that time, I’ve made lots of mistakes.

Other than occasionally deleting production data, the mistakes all arose from ignorance - there’s so much to know about AWS that it’s easy to miss something important.

Here’s a collection of the most commonly missed things when using AWS with Laravel Forge!

Learning from your mistakes is powerful. Learning from other people’s mistakes can be just as powerful without the major drawback of, you know, feeling all that pain!

This week Emile Vauge, founder & CEO of Traefik, joins Gerhard to share a story that started as a solution to a 2000 microservices challenge, the real-world implications of shipping many times a day for years, and the difficulties of sustaining an inclusive and healthy open-source community while building a product company.

Working every day on keeping the open-source community in sync with the core team was an important lesson. The second learning was around big changes between major versions.

The journey from Travis CI to Circle CI, then to Semaphore CI and eventually GitHub Actions is an interesting one. The automation tools inspired by the Mymirca ant colony is a fascinating idea, executed well. There is more to discover in the episode.

At the moment, there is only a dozen emoji sets, most of them from big tech companies. These emoji are visually adapted to the respective appearance of their software platforms. In addition, the usage rights are often very restrictive (e.g. the terms of use of Apple’s emoji).

That is why we have developed OpenMoji as the first open source and independent emoji system to date. When designing the OpenMoji system, we have developed visual guidelines that are not linked to a specific branding. In addition, our goal was to design emojis that integrate well in combination with text.

A collaboration of 60+ students and 3 professors from HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd.

Natalie sits down with Go book authors Bill Kennedy & Sau Sheong Chang to discuss the ins and outs of writing (and reading) books about Go!

Wise words from Rach Smith:

What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively. My success so far has nothing to do with the fact I know React instead of Vue, or have experience with AWS and not Azure. What has contributed to my success is the willingness to learn new tools as the need arises.

The author of this site handed a neural network brief text descriptions of a bunch of movies and let it generate image that represent each. Read how he did it or just have fun trying to guess the movie titles from the images. Harder than I thought it’d be!

In this article, three experts discuss some of the key findings of the State of Technical Debt 2021 report including the impact of technical debt on engineering teams, the pros and cons of dealing with maintenance work continuously, the future of technical debt, and what each engineering teams can do to communicate the importance of dealing with technical debt to leadership.

Remember, not all tech debt is bad, but even good tech debt has its ramifications. Solid insights here.

Here’s how Tom Payne describes his project:

chezmoi is a popular dotfile manager (currently over 4.5K stars on GitHub and increasing quickly). chezmoi helps you get your prefered environment synchronized across multiple machines (e.g. your home desktop, your work laptop, and a temporary development container in the cloud) while easily coping with differences from machine to machine and keeping all your secrets safe either with your password manager or encryption. Using chezmoi feels very much like using git (and indeed it builds on git). chezmoi is easy to install, quick to start with, runs everywhere, and scales from managing a handful of files on one machine to complex multi-machine set-ups with hundreds of dotfiles and plugins.

Getting a new machine set up looks like:

$ sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- init --apply <github-username>

My dotfiles “manager” is just a combination of git clone and setup.sh, but if I used many machines I’d probably reach for something more robust like this. If you’re already using a manager for yours, here’s a comparison guide of how chezmoi stacks up to other popular options.

Any AI play that lacks an underlying data strategy is doomed to fail, and a big part of any data strategy is labeling. Michael, from Label Studio, joins us in this episode to discuss how the industry’s perception of data labeling is shifting. We cover open source tooling, validating labels, and integrating ML/AI models in the labeling loop.

A (short) must-read piece from rachelbythebay:

“Everyone knows” that code is something you type into a computer, that gets interpreted by a computer, and is run by a computer. But that’s not really the end of it. Before that, it’s being “run” on whoever’s working on it. After that, it’s “running” on whoever’s digging into it to fix a bug or add some feature.

You can throw all kinds of wicked, nasty, complicated, Klein-bottle-wannabe tricks into code and the computer will shrug and slog on through it.

Try feeding that same mess to a human and you will have a variety of problems. We see them every day, and, unfortunately, we /create/ them every day.

This is phoboslab’s entry in this year’s JS 13k Games competition. Stunning what you can accomplish with so little. View the source right here and play the game (desktop only) right here.

I read about KDL (pronounced “cuddle”) over the weekend. Color me impressed!

Kat (and others) put a lot of thought into this.

KDL is a document language with xml-like semantics that looks like you’re invoking a bunch of CLI commands! It’s meant to be used both as a serialization format and a configuration language, much like JSON, YAML, or XML.

Check out the FAQ for all the common objections (like why not YAML or TOML or ETC) as well as a note about the XKCD comic you’re probably thinking about. Here’s hoping it catches on. 🤞

Chris Coyier on some of the new(ish) CSS compilers (such as Assembler) and how they’re flipping the script:

The popular Tailwind framework supports it. It kind of flips the mental model of Tailwind on its head, to me. Rather than providing a huge pile of CSS utility classes to use — then “purging” what is unused — it only creates what it needs to begin with.

The latest Phoenix release ditches webpack and npm for esbuild and… nothing?

Of course, these are just the defaults — docs for Elixir’s esbuild clearly state that NPM is still supported and you can always pass --no-assets and do things 100% your way. But it’s easy to underestimate the power of defaults, especially those that cover area outside of target audience’s expertise — which is the case of Phoenix devs and JS bundlers.

In this post, the author lays out how they stitched together an esbuild + npm setup that will likely scale alongside the frontend of your application. I will surely be trying this setup on our app over the next few weeks and might even video it if you’re interested in going along for the ride.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.”

After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com.

On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.

This looks great for those of us who haven’t memorized the command-line flags yet.

Migrating off jQuery? So was Sachin Neravath:

Most of the projects use only 15% to 20% or less than 30% of the jquery methods And in most of the cases, I didn’t want to support all the edge cases or legacy browsers. The hardest part was finding the jQuery methods in the existing project and writing the alternative vanilla js methods without making much changes in the codebase. So I wrote this library which automatically finds jquery methods in any particular JavaScript file and generates readable, chainable vanilla js alternatives. This can also be useful if you want to generate your own utility methods similar to jQuery.

Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that’ll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!

Amazon EKS Anywhere is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables you to easily create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises with your own virtual machines. It brings a consistent AWS management experience to your data center, building on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro, the same distribution of Kubernetes that powers EKS on AWS. Its goal is to include full lifecycle management of multiple Kubernetes clusters that are capable of operating completely independently of any AWS services.