Changelog News

Developer news worth your hyperlinks

Jerod here! 👋

Remember that Dead Internet theory I was talking about a few weeks back? Well, here’s one more piece of evidence that gives credence to the idea: Alan Hamlett reports that of ProductHunt’s 1 million+ user signups… more than 60% are bots! Two questions:

How high will that percentage be 5 years from now?
Are we past the point of no return? If not, when?

Oh well, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Simply the best pods for devs

🎙️ Free-threaded Python (Pablo & Łukasz from core.py)
💚 Developer (un)happiness (Abi Noda)
🚀 You suck at programming (Dave Eddy)
⏰ Russ Cox on passing the torch (+ Austin Clements & Cherry Mui)
🪩 Create interactive tutorials the easy way (Tomek Sułkowski)
🤖 Understanding what’s possible, doable & scalable (Mike Lewis)

⛓️‍💥 The slow death of the hyperlink

This article about linking incentives is framed in the context of journalism, but its implications are wide-sweeping & profoundly disturbing:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…
If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal…

Hyperlink degradation by the big social networks is entirely real & entirely maddening. Here at Changelog, our beliefs are completely antithetical to all that. Our entire purpose is to act as pointers to interesting stuff that other people are doing! On this point, I align with Nilay Patel who says The Verge is “going to revolutionize the media through blog posts.”

It doesn’t sound revolutionary, but in today’s Internet economy it certainly is…

💡 Evolving GitHub Issues

It’s nice to see GitHub isn’t completely ignoring one of their most-used subsystems.

Today we are excited to unveil a major evolution of issues and projects, featuring a range of highly requested enhancements including sub-issues, issue types and advanced search for issues. Together, these additions make it easier than ever to break down work, visualize progress, categorize and find just the right issue in GitHub.

Sub-issues & issue types, in particular, look very useful & quite well done. Kudos to the team.

📣 Evan You announces VoidZero

Vue-creator, Evan You:

I have founded VoidZero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. We have raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by Accel.

Evan wants us to imagine a toolchain that is:

Unified
High Performance
Composable
Runtime Agnostic

Such a toolchain will not only enhance Vite but also drive significant improvements throughout the JavaScript ecosystem. This is an ambitious vision, and achieving it requires a full-time, dedicated team—something that wasn’t possible under the independent sustainability model of my past projects. This is why VoidZero was founded.

My biggest question is addressed at the bottom of their FAQ: Why will this be different from previous attempts to create a unified JS toolchain?

The biggest challenge of a unified toolchain is the zero-to-one problem: it needs to gain critical mass for exponential adoption to justify continued development, but it is hard to cross the chasm before it actually fulfills the vision. VoidZero does not have this problem, because Vite is already the fastest growing toolchain in the JavaScript ecosystem.

My second biggest question was asked by Sebastian Lorber on X…

💰 Serverful JavaScript without serverless hassles

Thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring Changelog News

You know we love Fly. It’s the home of changelog.com.

Imagine if a server could boot as fast as a serverless function. That’s Fly Machines, the backbone of Fly’s public cloud that puts developers first. Serverless compute is a trade-off you no longer need to make. Fly lets you graduate to a full-stack cloud & regain control over your hosting bill. Here’s three reasons Fly is rad:

Boots in 250ms or Less - Functions and apps boot and respond to web requests in 250ms or less with Fly Machines. You decide to keep them running or automatically put them to sleep.
Built for JavaScript Developers - JavaScript, TypeScript, Bun, Deno—whatever your flavor is, Fly Launch automatically detects your runtime and generates a VM with everything you need to run your app.
Real GPUs & CPUs on the Edge - Run workloads that require GPUs or lots of CPUs, memory, and storage in over 30 regions around the world—all interconnected by a private, encrypted WireGuard network that works out of the box.

Learn more about it at fly.io!

👤 When companies are only pretend hiring

This “Ask HN” by user neilk is something Johnny Boursiquot has brought up on Go Time as well…

I’m looking for a job and like many people in this situation am finding it unusually difficult. I’ve read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job reqs open for appearances. Apparently some investors use job postings as a company health metric.
From my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally-recommended CVs are ignored by HR, and other cases had open job postings and passed people successfully through the interview process, and then the hiring manager still didn’t pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places.

The comments mostly corroborate the rumor. One commenter says:

VCs are absolutely using job listings as a health metric, and it is leading to companies listing a bunch of jobs. They aren’t exactly fake jobs – they will hire someone if some unicorn walks in. But they are nice to have jobs, not necessary jobs.

Be careful out there & give yourself a little leeway, too. Maybe you didn’t get the job. But then again, maybe nobody got the job…

🛶 Does it scale (down)?

Klaas van Schelven:

It’s 2024, and software is in a ridiculous state.
Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka, ElasticSearch, load balancers, sharded databases, Redis caching… for everything.
Everything’s being built like it’s about to hit a billion users overnight. Guess what?
You don’t need all that stuff.

This is why YAGNI is probably my most-used programming principle. Klaas nails it:

Scaling isn’t wrong. But scale down first. Start small. Grow when needed. Optimize for iteration speed.

🎞️ The Ladybird team likes Swift over Rust

Andreas Kling tells us all about Ladybird evaluating replacements for C++. Full episode

🎨 Crafting QR codes

Kyle Zheng:

QR codes have invaded our world.
Their prolific penetration is no surprise. They store information efficiently, scan fast and reliably, and now that QR code scanning is built-in on most phone cameras, there is nothing that even comes close to their convenience.

If QR codes are going to be ubiquitous, they might as well look cool! Kyle goes on to describe qrframe, a generator he built for crafting cool looking (albeit sometimes unusable) QR codes. Oh, and all he learned along the way!

🏭 Build simple systems with Go + htmx

By combining the speed & simplicity of go + hypermedia attributes (htmx) to add interactivity to websites, all conveniently wrapped in pure go, you can build simple, fast, interactive websites without touching javascript. All compiled to a single deployable binary.

This is in alpha release, but I dig the concept and the single deployable binary is quite attractive, indeed.

💰 Making Postgres easier & more reliable

Thanks to Timescale for sponsoring Changelog News

Timescale’s goal is simple: to be your everyday database for all your workload needs by not only making Postgres powerful, but also easier to use. Here’s a quick recap of their September launches:

Modern Postgres GUI With PopSQL - For years, developers have juggled tools like psql, pgAdmin, and DBeaver to manage Postgres. These tools weren’t built for modern, fast-paced, cloud-native workflows. They slow you down, force you to switch between platforms, and make collaboration harder. Enter PopSQL, the collaborative SQL Editor that’s bringing order to SQL chaos. Now integrated with Timescale.
Moving Faster From PoC to Prod With Timescale UI Tooling - Moving from a proof of concept to production can be tricky. We built Timescale’s UI Tooling to make that process easier and faster.
Simplify Cluster Management With PatroniSets - Managing large-scale databases with traditional StatefulSets can be a hassle. Rolling updates and volume resizing often disrupt services. That’s why we introduced PatroniSets—to remove these headaches and simplify cluster management.

Read about a few more awesome launches on the Timescale blog!

🚫 Why Gumroad didn’t choose htmx

Gumroad CEO, Sahil Lavingia:

Initially, it seemed promising!
…
However, unlike Tailwind, which has found its place in our toolkit, htmx didn’t scale for our purposes and didn’t lead to the best user experience for our customers–at least for our use case.
Here’s why:

htmx is cool, but it’s not a silver bullet! (There aren’t any) The htmx team knows this, which is why they published this non use-case right on htmx.org…

📐 The (un)ordered list you’re looking for

That’s the news for now, but this is issue #115, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Gabriel P, Rayan A, Anthony J, Alex R, Torbjørn F, Thomas M, Robert C, Christopher D & Matthew H!

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