Changelog News
Developer news worth your attention
Jerod here! š
One way folks pinch pennies these days is by downgrading their streaming subscriptions to the ad-supported plan. But just how many ads might you have to endure from any given streamer?
According to some Sherwood News research, Disney+ will likely subject you to more ads than anyone else, eating up ~13-16% of your watch time. Netflix, on the other hand, shows you ads ~3-4% of your time. These numbers are different depending on what youāre watching, and they may change at any moment, but I found them interesting, nonetheless.
Ok, letās get into this weekās news.
š§ Itās a peccadillo circus
Mat Ryer is back! He plays the piano, we tell each other truths/lies, we pay homage to the 8ā floppy disk, Mat accepts an open source medal, and so much more. Itās a real circus. MatGPT!
š The new $30,000 side hustle
Bloomberg reports (but I link to Megan McDonoughās commentary on LinkedIn because paywall) that employee referrals have become a lucrative side hustle for tech workers.
Platforms like Blind and Refermarket are connecting job seekers with company insiders willing to offer referralsā for a fee.
Iām not surprised that this is a thing, but Iām certainly disappointed. How can you feel good about making money by referring a complete stranger for a position!? I guess you get over it because itās an easy $30k? Crazy timesā¦
While this phenomena is likely rare, it is indicative of a job market that is way out of wack. The $30k income referenced in the headline is one individual who produced āmore than a half a dozen successful hires for the companyā after referring more than one thousand job candidates to his employer.
š¤ Mistakes we make in large codebases
Sean Goedecke has spent a decade working on large established codebases, which he defines as having:
- Single-digit million lines of code (~5M, letās say)
- Somewhere between 100 and 1000 engineers working on the same codebase
- The first working version of the codebase is at least ten years old
I canāt say Iāve ever worked on a codebase in this category, so Iāll have to take Seanās word for it. That word isā¦
Thereās one mistake I see more often than anything else, and itās absolutely deadly: ignoring the rest of the codebase and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing codebase in order to keep your nice clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it! In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible, in order to maintain consistency.
šŖ¦ Apple is killing Swift
Jacob Bartlett tells the brief history of Swift and why he believes (and its creator, Chris Lattner seems to agree) that it has fallen from its original, great vision.
Today, weāre going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. Iāll explain how Swiftās dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible, and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become.
Jacob describes Pythonās BDFL roots, Rustās community-driven roots, and Kotlinās corporate-backed roots. Then, he compares these to Swift, which he calls āCorporate Dictator for Lifeā
Modern Swift is a slave to the top-down whims of the Apple MBA cabal: who prize secrecy and sneer at community input. Unshackled from Lattnerās influence, or even the relentless drive to craftsmanship imposed from Jobs, itās all about shipping the latest proprietary profit driver.
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āØ Turn GitHub repos into interactive diagrams
GitDiagram is an awesome site by Ahmed Khaleel that uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet to take the contents of any GitHub repo you pass it and turn it into an interactive Mermaid diagram! Hereās the diagram it created when I passed it changelog.comās source code:
You can click on each component to go straight to the code it represents and you can export the Mermaid code for use elsewhere.
š¦ Exploring a stablecoin bank
Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercardās duopoly:
Right now, Visa and Mastercard charge merchants egregious 2-3% swipe fees ā which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe feesā¦. This is partly why Visa and Mastercardās profit margins are each higher than 50%: small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and Mastercard since they control 80% of the credit card market.
A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees ā rightfully so ā and if they could opt for a lower-fee network that wouldnāt limit their TAM, theyād switch in a heartbeat.
Iāve long asked cryptocurrency bulls to point me to the killer apps. First it was ICOs, which didnāt really pan out (too many scammy founders). Then it was NFTs, which were a lot like the pogs of my youth (fun for a day or two). More recently, itās been ~~prediction markets~~ gambling, which I admit is a legit app, just not one Iām interested in.
But, āknocking 3% off every transaction in the worldāā¦ That dog could hunt! Unfortunately, itās also going to require government intervention, of which Iām a perma-bear.
šļø The power of the button
Rachel Plotnick joins us for the first show of 2025 to discuss her book āPower Buttonā and the research she did, and why we love/hate buttons so much. We also discuss her upcoming book āLicense to Spillā as well as the research sheās doing on energy drinks.
š Introducing Werk
Simon Ask Ulsnesās werk project is a simplistic build system, similar to make
, and a command runner, similar to just
.
The motivation for werk is that make is annoying. Make is a very sophisticated tool that solves a bunch of problems I donāt have, and doesnāt solve many problems that I do have.
Simon does a good job of explaining why he created werk instead of making existing tools work for him. And I have to admit, the example Werkfile
that builds a C program looks straight forward yet powerful. Alpha software, but worth a look!
š§ Awareness Syndrome
Pablo Stanleyās latest (wonderfully illustrated) post might hit close to home:
Sometimes, imposter syndrome isnāt wrong. Maybe we feel like an imposter because weāre still learning. Maybe weāre not good yet. Thatās not a problem ā itās just the truth.
The key is not letting it stop us. Keep at it. Being bad at something is just part of getting better. When feeling like an imposter, maybe itās just self-awareness kicking in. But, we can use it to push forward.
š Donāt leave without your (un)ordered list
- OS in 1,000 Lines
- The future of htmx
- Browser adaptation
- How I program with LLMs
- rpg-cli: Your filesystem as a dungeon!
- Cashing in on GIF by charging royalties
- The most elegant configuration language
- How do you DRI your career in a bad market?
- television: The revolution will (not) be televised
- How browser cache partitioning changed the web
- antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo) on technical blogging
- quickwit: Cloud-native search engine for observability
- Bad Apple but itās 6,500 regexes that I search for in vim
- Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025
- A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions
- Nvidia announces $3K personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits
Thatās the news for now, but stay tuned for our upcoming show with Elecia White from embedded.fm! We dive deep into the world of programming things that arenāt computers.
Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & Iāll talk to you again real soon. š
āJerod