Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hello, friends! 👋

SpaceX won the weekend by having Starship’s “Super Heavy” booster return to its launchpad where the launch tower caught it using arms (nicknamed the “chopsticks.”) 🥢

Meanwhile, I can’t even chopstick a serving of fried rice without the aid of my off-hand… Oh well, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Simply the best pods for devs

⏰ Unpop roundup (Jerod & Go Time guests)
💚 The indispensable cog (Johnny Boursiquot)
🪩 A great horse to bet on (Jerod & KBall)
🎙️ The Moneyball approach (John Nunemaker)
🚀 TIME to get SERIESous about databases (Lili Cosic)
🤖 Towards high-quality (maybe synthetic) datasets (Argilla)

🔋 Working from home is powering productivity

Nicholas Bloom, writing for the IMF:

WFH increased about tenfold following the outbreak of the pandemic and has settled in at about five times its prepandemic level. This could counter slowing productivity and deliver a surge in economic growth over the next few decades. If AI yields additional output, the era of slow growth could be over.

Nicholas’ research into the topic focuses on how WFH 1) increases inputs like labor & capital, and 2) grows productivity. However, like all things, it does have its downsides, including the damage to city centers & large reduction in valuations of commercial office space. He concludes:

Being an economist usually means balancing winners and losers. Analyzing changes in technology, trade, prices, and regulations usually has mixed effects, with large groups of winners and losers. When it comes to working from home, the winners massively outweigh the losers. Firms, employees, and society in general have all reaped huge benefits. In my lifetime as an economist I have never seen a change that is so broadly beneficial.

🫣 The expropriation of Advanced Custom Fields

Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine’s beatings will continue until morale improves. His latest move: taking over the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, which is used by millions:

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.
A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

To see it for yourself, visit this ACF plugin page: wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

What you’ll see (as I publish this on 2024-10-14) is Automattic’s own Secure Custom Fields plugin. This is technically inside the realm of Auotmattic’s guidelines, which says they can remove any plugin for any reason, but it is NOT inside realm of what’s cool/reasonable in the open source world.

DHH says it well:

Weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot allow to form precedence. They must remain neutral territory. Little Switzerlands in a world of constant commercial skirmishes.

🗺️ Software Engineer pay heat map (US)

Levels.fyi, a site started to help job seekers compare pay across different companies, has added a salary heat map!

With it, you can:

Explore the interactive heat map of total compensation pay ranges across the United States, organized by DMA regions and accompanied by a color-coded legend
Click into a region and uncover insights on salary percentiles, breakdown of total compensation components, and top paying companies
Send them feedback! What else would you like to see?

💰 DevOps is now multiplayer

Thanks to System Initiative for sponsoring Changelog News

We’re excited to see Adam Jacob & team make the next frontier of DevOps automation Generally Available!

DevOps is now multiplayer & realtime. You can define & manage your infra as a living architecture with everyone that needs to be involved playing their role in parallel. DevOps was never a solo game, so why should you remain silo’d in PRs and merge requests just waiting. That’s the old way.

You also have full programmability. You can write small, reactive functions to model new services in minutes. You can customize existing models to conform to organizational security policies & contribute back to the community (if you’d like). All of this from within the app.

Full batteries are included. Everything your team needs to run a production infrastructure is in the box. There is no need for other platforms, glue code, or state file management. Everyone is on the same page, all the time.

The icing on the cake is always up-to-date change sets. Just like Git, change sets essentially “fork” the entire hypergraph of functions. This allows teams to propose changes, validate the safety / security of their configurations & keep things up-to-date as the environment changes.

To experience DevOps in multiplayer mode, go to systeminit.com. They have a generous free tier, so please try it out yourself!

😶‍🌫️ The disappearance of an Internet domain

This piece by Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is:

On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.
The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Once the treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Will the .io domain go with it? Probably not. There’s too much value tied up in it for that to happen, in my opinion. But it certainly could! And that’s kinda scary…

🧠 Cognitive Load is what matters

Warning: I’m highly tempted to quote this entire article. I will do my best not to, but you have been warned…

There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let’s focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.
Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint.
Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code.

That’s it! I’m stopping right there. Just go read it. The overarching point: we should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. But how?

🎞️ Chris Wanstrath’s life after GitHub

“I never worked one day at Microsoft”

Our Ladybird show wasn’t solely about Andreas Kling’s browser effort. GitHub co-founder Chris “defunkt” Wanstrath also shared quite a bit of previously unknown details about his life after the GitHub acquisition.

🚬 Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter?

The answer to that question is a resounding, “Yes.” Because if it were “No”, it wouldn’t be a newsworthy link, would it?

A while back I read about using a piezo-electric BBQ Igniter coupled to an inductor as a low-budget tool for electro-magnetic fault injection (EMFI), and I was captivated. I wondered, how far can you take such a primitive tool? At the time, the best thing I could come up with was exploiting a software implementation of AES running on an Arduino, using DFA—it worked!
But I wasn’t fully satisfied. I wanted to exploit something more “real,” but I was out of ideas for the time being.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, and the announcement of the Nintendo Switch 2 is on the horizon…

💰 Eight Sleep’s cutting-edge Pod 4 Ultra

Thanks to Eight Sleep for sponsoring Changelog News

Hey there! We have something really exciting to share with you today — a sleep technology that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in our bedrooms. Let me introduce you to Eight Sleep and their cutting-edge Pod 4 Ultra. So, what exactly is the Pod?

Imagine a high-tech mattress cover that you can easily add to any bed. But this isn’t just any cover - it’s packed with sensors, heating and cooling elements, and it’s all controlled by sophisticated AI algorithms. It’s like having a sleep lab, a smart thermostat, and a personal sleep coach all rolled into one device.

The Pod uses a network of sensors to track a wide array of biometrics while you sleep - sleep stages, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, temperature, and more. The really cool part? It does all this without you having to wear any devices, so you can leave your wearables on the nightstand.

The Pod uses precision temperature control to regulate your body’s sleep cycles. It can cool down to a chilly 55°F or warm up to 110°F, and it does this separately for each side of the bed. This means you and your partner can each have your ideal sleep temperature.

But the REALLY cool part is that the Pod uses AI and machine learning to learn your sleep patterns over time and uses this data to automatically adjust the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your body preferences. Instead of just giving you some stats, it understands them and does something about it. Your bed literally gets smarter over time.

Ready to take your sleep and recovery to the next level?

Head over to eightsleep.com/changelog and use code CHANGELOG to get $350 off your very own Pod 4 Ultra. You get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don’t like it. But, we think you’ll love it and your body will thank you. Shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at eightsleep.com/changelog

🦊 textfox is a Firefox theme for the TUI enthusiast

A note from the author:

This was written in a couple of hours and only tested using rose-pine moon theme, so it might not work as intended for every theme, PR’s are welcome!

🏆 Your award-worthy (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now, but don’t forget to join our free community & come hang with like-minded people in our Zulip chat!

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

–Jerod