Changelog News

Developer news worth waiting an extra day

Happy Tuesday! 👋

We’re off-by-one again as the powers that be in the US of A insist on Monday holidays. If I’m elected president, I will tackle the issues that really affect the lives of all Americans:

Cancelling Daylight Savings once & for all
Moving all federal holidays to Friday (as God intended)

Ok enough dreaming, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Simply the best pods for devs

🎙️ Reinventing Kafka on object storage (Ryan Worl)
💚 #define: piggyback (Adam, Jerod & friends)
🚀 The diagram IS the code (System Init)
🪩 When 3rd party JavaScript attacks (Simon Wijckmans)
🤖 Metrics Driven Development (Shahul Es)
⏰ The community of gophers (Angelica & friends)

🤖 Cursor wants to write all the world’s code

The team behind Cursor (an AI code editor) made a splash last week, announcing their $60 million Series A funding. People are excited about what the editor can do today (better than GitHub Copilot, some say) and what it might be able to do in the future:

Already, in Cursor, hours of hunting for the right primitives are being replaced by instant answers. Mechanical refactors are being reduced to single “tabs.” Terse directives are getting expanded into working source. And thousand-line changes are rippling to life in seconds. Going forward, we hope Cursor will let you orchestrate intelligent background workers, view and modify systems in pseudocode, instantly scan your creations for any trace of a bug, and much more.

One BIG differentiating factor for Cursor is that it’s an entire editor vs something that you use with existing ones. This could be brilliant, because it lets the team control the entire environment. Or it could be foolish, because most devs love our editor and switching to something else is like changing our identity…

📊 Rug pulls aren’t cool, but are they worth it?

RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens decided to “examine if changing an underlying open source project’s license from an OSI-approved license to a proprietary license has a measurable impact on financial outcomes for the commercial entity backing the project.”

That’s not an easy question to answer, but that didn’t stop her. She looked at MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp & Confluent’s revenue, market cap & net income over time. Click through for the charts. For the conclusion:

While in our sample we see revenue grow post-license change, we don’t see a notable change in the rate of growth. We also see very mixed results in company valuation, and there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company’s value.

🤑 Caleb Porzio made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors

I remember interviewing Caleb when he’d just crossed $100k four years ago. Time flies! Here’s his breakdown of where the milly came from:

5k: Goodness of their hearts “buy me coffee” sponsors
5k: Sold a bunch of stickers once lol
20k: Early access to a side project called “Sushi”
25k: Hourly consulting
20k: Alpine conference (I made $0 from this though)
200k: Companies paying me to put their logos on my websites and such
725k: Livewire premium screencasts

Lesson learned: when it comes to open source, there’s always money in ~~the banana stand~~ educational resources. Reminder: Caleb makes this stuff look easy. IT IS NOT EASY. Steph Curry makes 30-foot jumpers look easy, too…

💰 A password manager for the command line

Thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Changelog News

Say goodbye to copying API keys, database credentials & passwords into your CLI with 1Password.

Now you can authenticate third-party CLIs using biometrics & integrate with your SSH agent so your keys are just a fingerprint away. So cool!

You can do even more with new SDKs for Javascript, Python / Go, IDE extensions & CI/CD integrations.

We use 1Password and we think your team should too.

Just for Changelog readers, they’re doubling their free trial to 28 days (vs 14 days). Head here to get that deal OR head to developer.1password.com to learn all about their developer tooling.

🫶 Elasticsearch is open source, again

Elastic founder/CTO, Shay Banon:

Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called Open Source again. It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All of us at Elastic are. Open source is in my DNA. It is in Elastic DNA. Being able to call Elasticsearch Open Source again is pure joy.

They chose the OSI-approved AGPL as an additional license to the current offerings (ELv2 & SSPL). I honestly did not see this one coming, but I’m happy about it. Read the post for more details (plus some unexplained Kendrik Lamar references strewn throughout) including a portion where Shay pre-answers the trolls who might say, “Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”

We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

🏁 The art of finishing

Tomas Stropus:

It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my many unfinished projects to tackle.

Sounds familiar? I bet it does. Here’s Tomas’ list of strategies that help him finish, in brief:

✅ Define “Done” from the Start
🚀 Embrace MVP
⏳ Time-Box My Projects
🧩 Practice Finishing Small Things
💡 Separate Ideation from Implementation
🎉 Celebrate Completions
👥 Embrace Accountability

I’ve long said that starting something new is easy. People do it all the time. But finishing! That’s the accomplishment. This is why I believe arbitrary deadlines are actually awesome.

Ship, by any means necessary. Because good artists borrow and great artists steal, but real artists ship.

(See also: On finishing things, written just a few weeks earlier)

⏰ State and time are the same thing

Hillel Wayne says state is time & time is state:

Imagine I put an ordinary ticking quartz clock in an empty room. I walk in, and ten minutes later I walk out with two photograph prints. In the 1st one, the second hand is pointing at the top of the clock, in the 2nd it’s pointing at the bottom. Are these two copies of the same photo, or are they two different pictures?

They’re different photos, of course. That’s how we know time has passed. In other words, the only way we can see the passage of time is by measuring changes in observable state. What does this have to do with programming? Everything! Hillel believes this time/state relationship is a good model to reason about abstract systems.

📠 Departure Mono

I absolutely love this “monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe” by Helena Zhang. It looks great in so many contexts, like this old school HUD 👇

✍️ Amazon S3 now supports conditional writes

Amazon S3 adds support for conditional writes that can check for the existence of an object before creating it. This capability can help you more easily prevent applications from overwriting any existing objects when uploading data. You can perform conditional writes using PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload API requests in both general purpose and directory buckets.

Imagine how many lines of code, world-wide, this feature lets us delete from our codebases…

🌎 WordPress will soon power even MOAR of the web

Tumblr’s new(ish) owners, Automattic, are kicking off a project to convert 500 million+ Tumblr “blogs” to WordPress backends.

We’re not talking about changing Tumblr. We’re not turning Tumblr into WordPress. That would defeat the purpose. We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

🆓 A collection of free public APIs (tested daily)

I know what you’re thinking: yet another API list? Not so fast, bucko!

What really sets this site apart from all other API lists is that each API endpoint is tested once every 24 hours by our friendly robots to make sure it works. When our robots find an API that no longer works because it was taken down or moved behind a paywall, it will start ranking poorly and eventually be removed from the site.

That’s the news for now, but this is issue #110, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Chad G, Thomas S, Nicholas B, James H, David C, Jake S, Leonhard G, Nicholas C, Mike B, David H, Don C, Justin C & Frederik L!

We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝)

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

–Jerod