What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, December 2nd, 2024. We've arrived at `months[11]`, which means everyone's breaking out their year-end content. First up, Oxford has selected their word of the year: [brain rot](https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year) > (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Hopefully we do not contribute to brain rot... But speaking of year-end content... we're preparing for our 7th annual [State of the "log"](http://changelog.com/topic/sotl) episode and we need your help! [Go to changelog.fm/sotl](https://changelog.fm/sotl) and leave us a voice mail. If your audio is used on the show, we'll hook you up with your very own Breakmaster Cylinder remix! 🕺 Ok, let's get into the news.

[If not React, then what?](https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/) In the hopes of steering the next team away from the rocks, Alex Russell dives deep on why he believes "nobody should start a new project in the 2020s based on React. Full stop." His overarching message: > Frameworkism isn't delivering. The answer isn't a different tool, it's the courage to do engineering. I've been preaching similar things around these parts basically forever. Not against frameworks, per se, but against the belief that the *next* framework will deliver us from whatever self-constructed hellscape of a codebase we're currently abiding in. This statement rings particularly true: > A shocking fraction of (decent, well-meaning) product managers and engineers haven't thought through the whys and wherefores of their architectures, opting instead to go with what's popular in a sort of responsibility fire brigade.

[The real cost of knowledge silos](https://leadership.garden/knowledge-silos/) Csaba Okrona takes note that the SO survey revealed **45% of developers hit knowledge silos *three or more times per week***. Here's what keeps him up at night: - Engineers feeling frustrated and isolated - Innovation dying in departmental dead ends - Your best people solving the same problems over and over After years of scaling engineering teams, Csaba has identified four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos: 1. The Vertical Information Trap 2. The Documentation Curse 3. The Onboarding Gap 4. The Tribal Mindset Check his article for descriptions of each. What's the path forward? Csaba says: > Want to break this cycle? Start rewarding the sharing of knowledge more than its possession. Make “multiplier effects” part of your promotion criteria. Celebrate the engineers who make others better.

[Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines](https://markwhen.com/) This project by Rob Koch looks really well-made and full-featured! > A markdown-like *journal language* for plainly writing logs, gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, todos, timelines, calendars or anything that happens over time. Rob hasn't merely designed the Markwhen language, he also created [Meridiem](https://meridiem.markwhen.com), a collaborative editor for it that supports custom commands, snippets, visualizations, autocomplete & more! Oh, and he built a [CLI](https://github.com/mark-when/mw), an [Obsidian Plugin](https://github.com/mark-when/obsidian-plugin) & a [VS Code](https://github.com/mark-when/vscode) extension...

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[M4 Mac mini's efficiency is incredible](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/m4-mac-minis-efficiency-incredible) Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac mini: > I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power efficiency king, a tiny arm SBC with an RK3588 SoC... but I didn't expect it to jump forward 32%. Efficiency gains on the Arm systems I test typically look like 2-5% year over year. > > The M4 mini I just bought reaches **6.74 Gflops/W** on the HPL benchmark... > > The chip isn't the fastest at everything, but it's certainly the most efficient CPU I've ever tested. And that scales down to idle power, too—it hovers between 3-4W at idle—which is about the same as a Raspberry Pi.

[Comparing AWS S3 with Cloudflare R2](https://kerkour.com/aws-s3-vs-cloudflare-r2-price-performance-user-experience) Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare's competitor across 1) price, 2) performance & 3) user experience vectors. I'll leave the details for you to plumb on your own time, here's Sylvain's conclusion after all the hard work had been put in: > I initially started this conclusion along the lines of "S3 strengths are... R2 strengths are ... So now the decision is up to you", but damn the blandness! > > Honestly, I see only a few reasons to use S3 today: if ~40ms of latency really matters, if you already have a mature AWS-only architecture and inter-region traffic fees are not making a dent in your profits, or if it's really hard to bring another vendor into your infrastructure for organizational reasons. That's all. > > Maybe 90%+ of projects and organizations will be better served by Cloudflare R2. We've been on R2 for over a year and while it has a *few* rough edges (reduced 3rd-party client support, custom domain requirement, off the top of my head) it has saved us a bunch of money on egress fees!

That's the news for now, but... also scan the companion issue of our Changelog Newsletter for even more news worth your attention, including: good software development habits, the skill that is not-doing, can you measure a tech team's efficiency, DHH talking BDFLs, WordPress, SQLite, and Rails, and more! Get in on that action at changelog.com/news We have some great episodes coming up for you this week: Akon joins me from Hack Club’s new High Seas competition on Wednesday, and on Friday, we talk shop with ShopTalk's Chris Coyier and Dave Ruport. Have a great week! Leave us a voicemail at changelog.fm/sotl, and I'll talk to you again real soon.