Plain Vanilla web dev, the missing semester, why CSV is still king, ngtop, the history of BASIC, ArchiveTeam Warrior & more

Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

The Pudding (who we talked to here) ran an experiment where they used an LLM to make one of their data-driven, visual stories. Effectively, they tried replacing themselves with Anthropic’s Claude. The conclusion: “Do we feel replaceable? In short, not right now.” (readme)

Ok, let’s get into some human-generated news.

🎧 This week’s awesome developer pods

đŸŽ™ïž Open is the way (Joseph “JJ” Jacks)
💚 From Chef to System Initiative (Adam Jacob)
🚀 5000 Walmart stores in 2 months (Martin Jackson)
đŸȘ© A Nick-level emergency (the JS Party crew)
đŸ€– Broccoli AI at its best đŸ„Š (Bengsoon Chuah)
⏰ What’s new in Go 1.23 (Carlana Johnson)

😔 80% of professional programmers are unhappy

The latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey results (65k developers from 185 countries) had some shocking (but not exactly surprising) findings:

80% of professional programmers are unhappy. One in three respondents actively hates their job, while almost half survive in survival mode. This leaves only 20% of those who claim to be somewhat happy. Although programmers are well-paid and often able to work remotely, many are still dissatisfied.

According the the survey, the main drivers of developer frustration are technical debt & the complexity of the tech stack they have to work with. Combine that with the pressure to meat unrealistic deadlines, endless meetings with point-haired bosses & the recent, industry-wide massive layoffs
 and yeah, 80% sounds about right, if not a little low.

🍩 Doing web dev using only vanilla techniques

One way to fend off the “complexity of the tech stack” factor, which we know leads to developer unhappiness, is to eschew complex tools & frameworks that set out to help you build websites, but sometimes end up costing you (and your users) in unnecessary complexity down the road. But how does one go about using plain vanilla tools / techniques in a smart way in 2024? Enter Plain Vanilla:

This is an overview of the major techniques used to make web sites and web applications without making use of build tools or frameworks, with just an editor, a browser, and web standards.

đŸ§‘â€đŸ« The missing semester of your CS education

MIT’s “missing semester” course looks pretty amazing:

Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex.

The video recordings of the lectures are available on YouTube.

💰 Is your Next.js app too slow?

Thanks to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News

Frontend issues often have backend solutions!

On Wednesday, September 4th, our friends at Sentry are hosting a workshop to help you identify issues causing slow web pages and poor Core Web Vitals using tracing. You’ll leave the event being able to:

  • Find backend issues that might be slowing down your frontend apps
  • Setup tracing with Sentry in a Next.js project
  • Debug and fix poor performance issues using tracing

This is the second edition of this workshop, because the first one was so well received! Don’t miss it, sign up for FREE right here.

👑 Why CSV is still king

A dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard:

In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It’s simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how the hell did this happen?

After a brief history lesson, the author lays out four reasons why, despite its many problems, CSV isn’t going anywhere anytime soon:

  • It’s good enough for many situations and dead simple to use.
  • Most published datasets today are in CSV format.
  • Many data processing tools still output CSV files.
  • Its human-readability is unmatched among data formats.

In real estate, they say the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a property are “location, location, location.”

In software, I say the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a solution are “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

🧐 ngtop: Request analytics from the nginx access logs

ngtop is a command-line program to query request counts from nginx’s access.log files. Use it like this:

$ ngtop url user_agent –since 1d –where url=/blog/% –where status=200 –limit 5

I share this tool because it made me think: when you combine additional JS payloads bloatin’ up web requests, the EU’s new(ish) privacy laws & new tools that should be better at detecting bot requests, maybe it’s time for server-side-only analytics to make a come back. Something like Netlify Analytics but open source & somewhat backend agnostic would be super cool


đŸŽžïž Clip of the week: Why vectors matter

I thought Roie Schwaber-Cohen from Pinecone did an excellent job explaining the advantages of vector databases for semantic search:

The question is “Where does the value come from?” And I would argue that the value comes from the embeddings.

IWhy vectors matter video thumbnail

Oh, and Roie also wants the LLM fever dream to end


đŸ’Ÿ Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets

A fun piece by WIRED about “the most consequential programming language in the history of computing”


I typed “RUN,” hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.

For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.

💰 Get unblocked, no matter the task

Thanks to Unblocked for sponsoring Changelog News

As developers, we know how to write code. What we’re often missing is the context to know what code to write. Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers we need to get our jobs done – without having to wait on or interrupt our teammates.

đŸ—„ïž Run an ArchiveTeam Warrior on your computer

This tool helps the Internet Archive with their archiving efforts by donating your compute/bandwidth to the cause. When the virtual machine is powered on, it will download sites and upload them to their archive. Too easy! And a better use of your resources than SETI@home or mining Monero


👏 A movement to promote “hobbit software”

I like this idea that Dave Anderson shared on Mastodon:

Now thinking about creating a movement to promote “hobbit software”. Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them.

Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub to run some cronjobs, wanna come along?

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week:

  • On Wednesday: Adam’s favorite author! Dennis E. Taylor
  • On Friday: Ben Johnson joins me for an “It Depends” on databases

Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod