Ghostty 1.0 is coming, learning to learn, Arc is dead, React Native's new architecture, against /tmp & more

Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here, in Raleigh for ATO! 👋

Sounds like BlueSky is having another moment. Connect with us there! For now we’re just sharing new episode announcements, but we’ll ramp up the content as that community continues to grow. Oh, and you’ve already joined our community, right? Right?!

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Simply the best pods for devs

⏰ AI for Observability (Yasir Ekinci)
💚 Ten years of freeCodeCamp (Quincy Larson)
🚀 Your customer is Amazon.com (Pete Naylor)
🤖 Big data is dead, analytics is alive (MotherDuck)
🎙️ Elasticsearch is open source, again (Shay Banon)

🐳 Developing with Docker (the right way)

Daniel Quinn has used Docker differently at every job he’s started in the past 10+ years. It’s time for some consensus, he thinks, on how to do it Right™

The argument here is that the use of Docker and various tooling shouldn’t be unique to any particular project, that this sort of thing should be so standard it’s both common and boring to even think about. My experience tells me that we’re not there yet though, so this is just me making the case for what I think constitutes a good setup.

His major argument is that if you’re using Docker, you aren’t writing software anymore. Instead, you’re “building immutable images.”

Images that are developed locally, tested in CI, and deployed to production, but importantly, the image at each of these stages is exactly the same: reproducible at every turn. There’s little value in developing and testing one thing if what you roll out to production is something else entirely.

Check out his article for why he thinks the 12-factor app is uniquely suited to Docker-based systems.

⏳ Ghostty 1.0 is coming

Mitchell Hashimoto says his new terminal emulator will be publicly released this coming December:

In short, Ghostty 1.0 aims to be the best drop-in replacement for your current terminal emulator on macOS and Linux. Ghostty will be fast, feature-rich, and have a platform-native GUI while being the most standards-compliant terminal emulator available.

Why Ghostty? Mitchell felt that existing terminal emulators “pushed an unnecessary choice between speed, features, and platform-native GUIs.” With Ghostty, Mitchell says pick any three.

And since Mitchell previously built a publicly-traded company around his open source work, this note on finances is worth highlighting as well:

Ghostty is a passion project for me and I have no plans to pursue any sort of commercialization of the project. As stated in the first paragraph, Ghostty will be released as an open-source project under the MIT license.

🧠 Learning to learn

Maybe we spend too much time learning and not enough time learning how to learn better. Kevin Li:

Learning to learn is extremely high leverage. 40 hours at 25% efficiency is the same as 12.5 hours at 80% efficiency. And it turns out that being productively honest is one of the most effective and kindest things you can do for yourself.

If you want to take your learning process more seriously, maybe try this suggested “optimal learning flow”

  1. Very quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is.
  2. Build a personal curriculum to become an expert and avoid the trap of the expert beginner.
  3. Sprint hard the first 15-20 hours to impress initial memory, then decelerate to a more regular pace.

💰 AI GPU clusters, from your laptop, with Livebook

Thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring Changelog News

This excellent post on Fly’s blog is a recap of Chris McCord and Chris Grainger’s ElixirConf keynote:

Livebook, FLAME, and the Nx stack: three Elixir components that are easy to describe, more powerful than they look, and intricately threaded into the Elixir ecosystem. A few weeks ago, Chris McCord (👋) and Chris Grainger showed them off at ElixirConf 2024. We thought the talk was worth a recap.

Did you know that any Livebook, including the one running on your laptop, can start a runtime running on a Fly Machine, in Fly.io’s public cloud?! That’s pretty cool… That Elixir machine lives in your default Fly.io organization, giving it networked access to all the other apps that might live there. But that’s just the start…

Check out the post to see how the Chris’ used FLAME to generate a cluster of 64 GPU Fly Machines, each running an L40s GPUs to do hyperparameter tuning on a laptop. 🤯

⚰️ Arc is a dead browser walking

I verbalized my concern with the (otherwise exciting) Arc Browser being venture-backed on a coupleoccasions. Concerns realized!

Arc has gained a loyal user base but ultimately hasn’t achieved mainstream adoption, which the Browser Company wants. CEO Josh Miller spoke on a YouTube Video about the company’s realization that Arc, due to its complexity and unique features, caters more to power users and might not reach the wider audience the company wants…

They’re now working a new browser that they hope will go mainstream. That’s a hard pass from me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

⚛️ React Native’s new architecture is here

Congrats to the React Native team for shipping a major rewrite that sets the project up for the future:

The New Architecture is a complete rewrite of the major systems that underpin React Native, including how components are rendered, how JavaScript abstractions communicates with native abstractions, and how work is scheduled across different threads. Although most users should not have to think about how these systems work, these changes bring improvements and new capabilities.

The old architecture was holding the team back, making it difficult (or not possible) to properly support React’s concurrent features. To solve these problems, the New Architecture includes four main parts:

  • The New Native Module System
  • The New Renderer
  • The Event Loop
  • Removing the Bridge

The new architecture is now ready for prime time. In fact, it’s been in production use for months at shops like Expensify, Kraken & BlueSky.

🫥 /tmp is usually a bad idea

TIL! I’ve never run into any of the (many) bugs & complications laid out in this article against /tmp. Tony Finch’s remedy:

There should have been per-user temporary directories in different per-user locations. In fact, on some modern systems there are per-user temporary directories! But this solution came several decades too late.

🙋‍♂️ Embeddings are underrated

Kayce Basques:

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to advance the state of the art in technical writing. No, I’m not talking about text generation models like Claude, Gemini, LLaMa, GPT, etc. The ML technology that might end up having the biggest impact on technical writing is embeddings.

Embeddings aren’t exactly new, but they have become much more widely accessible in the last couple years. What embeddings offer to technical writers is the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales.

💰 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

🚫 The Narrows Bridge: From Open Source to AI

RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady has been thinking a lot about the debate around the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID):

It was … implicitly predicated on a single core assumption: that open source and AI are, or can be made to be, compatible. Simply stated, the current process assumes that it is possible to achieve a definition of open source that is both consistent with long held open source ideals and community norms while being equally applicable and relevant to fast emerging AI projects and their various interested parties…

I do not believe the term open source can or should be extended into the AI world.

🎞️ The real reason ZSA won’t make wireless keyboards

A photo of Erez Zukerman on the left with the words “Why our keyboards are wired” on the right.

📐 Don’t leave without your list o’ links

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

  • DHH talking Rails 8 on Wednesday
  • The best from this week’s ATO convos on Friday

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

–Jerod