Changelog

Ned Batchelder: if you want someone to do something, you have to give them a compelling reason to do it, and you have to make it as easy as possible for them to do it. That is, you need to have good answers to Why? and How? Let’s look at the Why and How model as it applies to corporations funding open source. They don’t do it because the answers to Why and How are really bad right now. I interviewed Ned for an upcoming maintainer-focused series of The Changelog. He’s been in the game a long time and has a lot of interesting things to say.

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Usually it is much faster to read through some bullet points instead of watching a 50 min session video. Then if you find something interesting you can still watch it. As I said on Backstage after the keynote, I’m particularly interested in the Sign in with Apple details.

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Troy Hunt: It’s time for HIBP to grow up. It’s time to go from that one guy doing what he can in his available time to a better-resourced and better-funded structure that’s able to do way more than what I ever could on my own. HIBP is an international treasure, IMHO. It’s pretty cool to see how it has transformed Troy’s life along the way: HIBP may only be less than 6 years old, but it’s the culmination of a life’s work. I still have these vivid memories stretching back to the mid-90’s when I first started building software for the web and had a dream of creating something big; “Isn’t it amazing that I can sit here at home and write code that could have a real impact on the world one day”

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Interpreting complicated models is a hot topic. How can we trust and manage AI models that we can’t explain? In this episode, Janis Klaise, a data scientist with Seldon, joins us to talk about model interpretation and Seldon’s new open source project called Alibi. Janis also gives some of his thoughts on production ML/AI and how Seldon is addresses related problems.

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A simple, searchable website that tracks End of Life dates! File this under “things I didn’t know I wanted but now can’t live without”. Contribute by opening a PR on GitHub.

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André Staltz collected data from OpenCollective and GitHub so he could get some numbers behind his questions around the sustainability of donations in open source. The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold. Read his full piece to learn about his collection methodology and read his full analysis of the findings.

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A great example of how good accessibility practices are often actually good usability practices for all. While the problems highlighted are most impactful on those who have challenges, I found every single alternative suggested improved usability for me as well. Author Raghavendra Peri states: According to the research conducted by Nielsen, it is not best practice to have a placeholder in the form field from a user experience perspective. This is because many users are confused by placeholders. In particular, people with cognitive disabilities tend to have issues understanding placeholder text because they think it is pre-populated text and will try to submit the form without entering their specific information. TL;DR Don’t use placeholders! But for examples of what else to do, read this article.

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A fascinating review of Dat and the Beaker Browser after building a decentralized Muxtape clone called Duxtape. Here’s a taste: The roots of ‘view source’ live on, in an incredibly realized form. (In Beaker, you can right-click on Duxtape and ‘view source’ for the entire app. You can do this for your mixtapes, too. Question: When was the last time you inspected the code hosting your Webmail, your blog, your photo storage? Related question: When was the first time?) It’s hard to see a world where apps like this get mainstream adoption. On the other hand, what other choices do we have? 🤔

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KBall, Divya, and Nick get together with Chris Ferdinandi to talk about vanilla JavaScript, best resources for learning, and our favorite vanilla JavaScript tips, tricks and APIs.

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CSS Grid is a wonderfully powerful technology, making possible incredibly complex and interesting layouts with fractions of the effort of older tools. But with great power comes great responsibility, for it is now also very easy to shoot the accessibility of your site in the foot. Author Rachel Andrew: I think this is something we sorely need to address at a CSS level. We need to provide a way to allow the tab and reading order to follow the visual order. Source order is a good default, if you are taking advantage of normal flow, a lot of the time following the source is exactly what you want. However not always, not at every breakpoint. If we don’t give people a solution for this, we will end up with a mess.

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We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS. We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.

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Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell the things they make. Since 2011 Gumroad has sent over $200 million dollars to creators. That’s a big number. Sahil’s ambitions lead him to believe that Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, have hundreds of employees, and eventually IPO. That didn’t happen. …we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It’s euphoric when things are going your way — and suffocating when they’re not. And we weren’t doubling fast enough to raise the $15M+ Series B we were looking for to grow the team. For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20 percent growth should have been a red flag. But at the time, I thought it was okay… We talk through Sahil’s journey with Gumroad, why it failed to meet his goals, the path he’s on today and the things he now values…but to understand why Gumroad didn’t live up to his expectations, we really have to understand the backstory of Gumroad.

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Fascinating read through covering historical context for accessibility and assistive technologies as well as diving into the way we do accessibility in the web today. According to author Be Birchall this article aims to shift your perspective by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design. We’ll see how designing for different sets of abilities leads to insight and innovation. I’ll also shed some light on how the history of browsers and HTML is intertwined with the history of assistive technology.

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From basic to advanced: test how well you know JavaScript, refresh your knowledge a bit, or prepare for your coding interview! 💪 🚀 Nice use of the the <details> element to hide the answers from view until you’re ready for them.

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Here’s some hard-earned experience on how to validate an email address. If you listened to JS Party #39, then you already know this. If you think I’m about to hand the best regex you’ve ever seen…

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nannou is a collection of code aimed at making it easy for artists to express themselves with simple, fast, reliable, portable code. Whether working on a 12-month installation or a 5 minute sketch, this framework aims to give artists easy access to the tools they need.

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it comes with convenient features such as autocomplete suggestion and gesture typing keyboard. It is useful for quickly troubleshooting server problems on the go, or in your bed in the middle of the night. If you occassionally use the SSH app on your phone, you may want to give Swell.sh a try!

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There’s a lot of CSS love & hate that flows around online, and one of the key reasons it is so polarizing is that it takes a different mental model than most other programming. Author Max Böck has put together a list of some of the items that go into that mental model: For most people who write CSS professionally, the mindset just comes naturally after a while. Many developers have that “aha!” moment when things finally start to click. It’s not just about knowing all the technical details, it’s more about a general sense of the ideas behind the language. I tried to list some of these here.

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Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and guest panelist Egon Elbre discuss what they build, why, and how they do it. Everybody has their own unique process for getting things done, so today we’re going to learn about them. Too often processes get in the way and slow things down. How do we look for signs of those slow downs? How do we create a space where people are free to discuss their thoughts and struggles?

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Learn from other people’s fail stories. This is a compiled list of public Kubernetes failure stories. Why? Kubernetes is a fairly complex system with many moving parts. Its ecosystem is constantly evolving and adding even more layers (service mesh, …) to the mix. Considering this environment, we don’t hear enough real-world horror stories to learn from each other! This compilation of failure stories should make it easier for people dealing with Kubernetes operations (SRE, Ops, platform/infrastructure teams) to learn from others and reduce the unknown unknowns of running Kubernetes in production. For more information, see the blog post.

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