Changelog

When Apple open sourced Swift, it was only a matter of time before the server-side frameworks started rolling out. Perhaps that time is now? Amazon's entry is called Smoke, and InfoQ has the deets: Amazon Smoke framework is a new open-source light-weight server-side framework written in Swift and aimed to build REST-like or RPC-like services. Its architecture stresses ease of use and favours a pure-functional programming style for request handlers. Click through for some code snippets and to learn exactly how Smoke is built (hint: they're using SwiftNIO)

Adam and Jerod talk with Allen "Gunner" Gunn about Sustain Summit. What is it, the kind of conversations that happen there, issues the open source community is having right now, and how Sustain stands out from events called "unconferences."

Chris and Daniel are back together in another news/updates show. They discuss PyTorch v1.0, some disturbing uses of AI for tracking social credit, and learning resources to get you started with machine learning.

If you're using EC2 and paying big bucks to do so, you owe it to yourself to check out AutoSpotting: Once installed and enabled by tagging existing on-demand AutoScaling groups, AutoSpotting gradually replaces their on-demand instances with spot instances that are usually much cheaper, at least as large and identically configured to the group's members, without changing the group configuration in any way. For your peace of mind, you can also keep running a configurable number of on-demand instances given as percentage or absolute number.

Tanya Janca's new live video show about “Sloppy DevOps” sounds like a lot of fun: A free online show dedicated to the art of implementing DevSecOps, includes free workshops, lessons and nerd-er-ific discussions!

GraphQL is based on a very simple HTTP transaction, which sends a request to an endpoint with query and variables. Many libraries require complex stacks to make that simple request. In any project you don't use React, Relay, you'll need a simpler client which manages your query and makes a simple request. Isomorphic, in case you were wondering, means it runs both on the client and the server.

The strong advantage of TensorFlow is it flexibility in designing highly modular models which can also be a disadvantage for beginners since a lot of the pieces must be considered together when creating the model. If you're interested in TensorFlow, but haven't dove in yet for one reason or another, this might be a good place to start.

Adam, Jerod, and Tim get together to talk about Plex! Plex is a media server which allows you to store your movies, TV shows, music, photos, etc. Turns out, you can actually use it together with an antenna to watch live TV and DVR content. They chat about what has Adam so excited, the pros and cons (or as Adam said, "trade-offs"), and how to get started.

Where does Feross get all those wonderful toys? He builds them with JavaScript, of course! BitMidi – a website for listening to your favorite MIDI files – is his latest creation. In this episode, Jerod “sits down” with Feross to learn all about it. How do MIDIs even work? Why won’t they play on the web anymore? Can WASM save the day (hint: yes)? How does Feross get so many eyeballs on his creations? Is Preact awesome for building sites like this? What’s the future of BitMidi look like? Don’t ask us, listen to the episode!

Kate Matsudaira provides 5 excellent strategies for pushing through: Even if you love your job, you don't always feel like doing it every day. There are so many factors that influence your ability to show up to work with enthusiasm and then work hard all day long. From gamification to calendaring, Kate has a lot of good advice in this piece. I even learned a new word, "precrastination", which I've been doing a lot of without even knowing it! 💪

If you've ever thought, "How do I do X in React", there is a good chance this website has an example of X for you to learn from. Data grids, forms, calendars, charts... you name it and this site probably has it.

This looks super useful: Rather than stepping through lines, move back and forth through loop iterations and see how the values of selected expressions change

This must be of the dark arts. Never before has this level of visual UI and control been given to the masses, carte blanche — wow, truly impressed. From Vlad Magdalin (Webflow co-founder and CEO) on Twitter: CSS Grid in @webflow is one of those features that makes me fall in love with our mission all over again. The power and flexibility this places in designers' hands is mind-blowing, and it the amount of creativity this can unleash is super inspiring! 😍https://t.co/mPlezTPgZv pic.twitter.com/INe3N0LEqI— Vlad Magdalin (@callmevlad) October 10, 2018 The video attached to this tweet has been viewed 23,000 times (so far)!

Hot on the heels of Rails' announced rich text editor comes tiptap for Vue, which is built with Prosemirror. But what does "renderless" even mean? With renderless components you'll have (almost) full control over markup and styling. I don't want to tell you what a menu should look like or where it should be rendered in the DOM. That's all up to you. There is also a good article about renderless components by Adam Wathan. That's a great idea as long as you provide some default/swappable rendering for folks who just want to get started quickly. Full demo of tiptap in action right here.

Eryn O'Neil grew up in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago. When it came time for college, it was easy for her to move a few states over and go to college in a small town in Iowa. She now lives in Minneapolis, and after years of being self-employed, she just finished a months-long journey to find her next job. Eryn talks to me about being the first female engineering manager at her new company, what excites her about technology, the hurdles of married life, and staying healthy in a demanding industry.

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled "Setting expectations for open source participation" and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what's the goal? They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there's a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

Biscuit is a monolithic, POSIX-subset operating system kernel in Go for x86-64 CPUs. It was written to study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel with a common style of architecture. With ~38k commits and 8+ years of dev, this has been a massive effort. Find the research paper right here.

I love a good, minimal "use me at all sizes" typeface — especially when it's open source and community focused like Inter UI is. Looks good at large and small sizes and is perfect for that minimal UI look. From Rasmus Andersson, Designer/Engineer at Figma...

I really dig Itamar's writing style: It’s time for another deep-dive into Python brokenness and the pain that is POSIX system programming, this time with exciting and not very convincing shark-themed metaphors! There's a lot to learn here, and it's not all Python specific. Hop in, the water's warm (but filled with sharks)!

It's often hard for me to wrap my head around a technology/service until I see some concrete use cases for it. In this article, Rohit does a good job of laying out a bunch of serverless use cases. Maybe one or two will compel you to dig deeper.