Changelog

Is Netflix Titus open source yet? Yes. Titus powers critical aspects of the Netflix business, from video streaming, recommendations and machine learning, big data, content encoding, studio technology, internal engineering tools, and other Netflix workloads So, why is Netflix open sourcing Titus? ...we’ve been asked over and over again, “When will you open source Titus?” It was clear that we were discussing ideas, problems, and solutions that resonated with those at a variety of companies, both large and small. We hope that by sharing Titus we are able to help accelerate like-minded teams, and to bring the lessons we’ve learned forward in the container management community. The question is, is it too late for Titus to gain traction in a world where Kubernetes has seemingly already won?

I'm a huge fan of well designed feedback loops. In software creation, feedback loops prove to be one of the most important, often overlooked, artifacts of the development lifecycle. Evelyn Van Kelle writes on the O'Reilly Ideas blog: There is a false dichotomy between full automation and human intervention. Successful quality control combines tool-based measurement with manual review and discussion. At the end of the day, the most effective feedback loops are a mixture of daily best practices, automation, tools, and human intervention.

Like JSFiddle, but for ChordPro chord sheets. I'm no musician, so I'm not embarrassed to say I had to google to learn ChordPro is an ASCII text file format for transcribing songs with chords and lyrics. ChordFiddle is loaded with features and has more coming on the project board. Look under the hood and you'll find two more open source libs: ChordSheetJS and ChordJS.

A cross-platform, open source Slack app that's built for speed?! Shut up and take my money admiration! Wey is written in Node and the UI is powered by the Yue library, which means it's not hitchin' its wagon to Electron. But it does come with a rather large caveat: Do not use this for work, you might miss important messages due to bugs and missing features. Depending on how much you like your job, you might consider that more of a feature than a bug. 😉

How you define success influences how and what you build. With that in mind, Cate Huston set out to learn how we developers do. I started with the Stack Overflow survey. Caveat: I hate it and I think it’s riddled with bias. For example, women make up ~fifty percent of the population, around ~twenty percent of technical roles… and 7.2% of the respondents to this survey. The SO survey is imperfect in many ways, but unfortunately it's also one of the only quantitative datasets we have. Cate also asked her followers on Twitter (which she admits is also riddled with bias): Many of the themes from the Stack Overflow survey showed up here – shipping code, learning and developing, autonomy....Another theme, though, was the theme of impact. People using what was built, benefitting others in some way. That's just a few of her findings. Definitely read the entire piece as it's riddled (😏) with insights. Also check out part 1 in this series.

We talk with Chad Hietala about Ember JS, the long history of Ember, how Chad first got involved, his work on the Ember core team, Glimmer, and more.

Chris Coyier: Y'all know about font-display? It's pretty great. It's a CSS property that you can use within @font-face blocks to control how, visually, that font loads. … What do you get from it? The ability to control FOUT and FOIT as is right for your project, two things that both kinda suck in regards to font loading. Font loading strategy is pretty important. It's one of the reasons I searched far and wide to improve the performance of fonts on Brightly Colored. Fortunately, if you're using @font-face, using font-display is as easy as using one line of CSS, and you'll see the performance improvements immediately. Unfortunately, as Chris points out, there's no performant way to get around either FOUT or FOIT.

Yesterday's bearish link about PWAs caused a bit of a stir in our community Slack. Here comes the bull: PWAs are going to be versatile enough and robust enough that they're going to supplant some of the native apps you might have on your phone (or computer) today. I appreciate the caution on display by use of the word "some". Jon may be bullish, but he's not a zealot! Why does he think PWAs will finally get over the hurdle? One acronym: WASM With the ease of install of PWAs and high performance of WASM, I think we're also going to see some Electron apps moving to be PWAs. Great article. Definitely click through and read the whole thing. 💯

Keith J. Grant: For the next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some aspects of HTML5 that maybe haven’t received as much attention as they deserve. As a warm up, I’ll look at some elements from HTML5 that most web developers probably are somewhat familiar with: <main>,<nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and other structural, semantic elements. Even if you already use these elements, you might just learn a few new things along the way (I know I did as I researched this). I really enjoyed this article. I try to be as semantic as possible in my markup, but Keith's post shed light on things I didn't know—especially the impact certain elements can have on accessibility.

For those coming off the heels of The Changelog #292 where we talked with Philipp Krenn about Elasticsearch, you're gonna wanna play around with full text searching your man pages with Elasticsearch. This post covers: Setup an Elasticsearch instance locally Create an index for the data Feed the index with the man pages of the OS Create a search method for full text searching Full text search the man pages

Joel Califa writes on his personal blog about small interface changes to GitHub that have saves millions of developers immeasurable amounts of wasted time and anxiety. One small change can add up to a big win. High frequency actions (such as creating new PRs on GitHub) take place millions of times a day. A given user might go through the same flow several times per week, per day, or even per hour. These flows become a part of their lives. If there is even a slight inefficiency or frustration, it compounds with every use. One confusing moment that takes an extra 5 seconds—repeated multiple times a day in perpetuity—adds up to a lot of anxiety and wasted time. My takeaway? Don't underestimate the impact of seemingly small interface changes!

Judah Gabriel starts this post off with the question "Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!” — and I don't fully disagree, until you think about where your users will come from. The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web. There are many more lessons learned about the process — from creation to submission — but here's the tldr... Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape. (We're planning a deep-dive on PWAs for an upcoming episode of JS Party. Subscribe to be notified.)

Here's a shiny new new project from Vue's creator. There are plenty of static site generators in the wild, but most of them are created with blogging or generic content in mind. VuePress has a specific angle: VuePress is composed of two parts: a minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue’s own sub projects. The default theme looks great (no surprise there) and the supporting documentation/story telling around VuePress is quite impressive as well. But perhaps you're wondering, "Why not $X?", where $X is a similar alternative. Here's why.

Matt Jaffey joined the show and talked with us about Pilosa, building distributed index with Go, and other interesting projects and news.

Jerod Santo, Suz Hinton, Feross Aboukhadijeh, and Kevin Ball talk about awesome things being done with JavaScript like WebUSB, WebTorrent, and DSLs.

This is way too freakin' fun! It uses your webcam to insert you into Matrix-y digital rain. 👋

This list is a lot longer than I expected! Alongside each app is an icon indicating whether it's written in Swift or Objective-C, which is nice for those of us looking for reading material. 💪

It's a reimagining of the Singularity OS of old, using new technologies like WebAssembly and Rust. Using an intermediate language as a compile target for applications allows for architecture agnosticism and interesting optimizations that would not be possible on conventional OSes. Here's to the crazy ones. 🍻

Jon Rohan writes on the GitHub Blog: To support your project’s contributors it’s important to make the contributing experience as frictionless as possible. Migrating our Octicons to Figma let us cut out painful steps in our previous workflow. Having their API available for automating the work has allowed contributors to contribute using powerful platform-agnostic design tools without any overly complex setup. This seems to be one of the first major steps I've seen to use a platform-agnostic design tool like Figma, which lets you design, prototype, and gather feedback all in a browser based design tool. Couple that with a robust API and some robots to automate things as well as open up your design flow to contributors.

I wasn't ready to become the maintainer of Babel. After all, I had never published my own npm package or explored much of the codebase. But slowly (sometimes really slowly) I got used to it. I recall Kent C. Dodds saying that if you want to be a maintainer, just act like and do the things a maintainers does. Sounds easy enough 🤣. I particularly enjoyed the linked post on imposter syndrome from Rachel Smith.