Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

Remember Skype? Microsoft recently announced on X that starting in May of this year, it’s going bye-bye. As early-days podcasters, we had a love/hate relationship with the O.G. video calling platform, especially after MS took it over. Skype hasn’t been relevant for years, but it’s still a bit sad to see it go.

I don’t miss the software, but I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for its classic incoming call sound.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Building for application developers

Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they’re doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don’t even need and they’re poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era. VIDEO

💥 JavaScript fatigue strikes back

Allen Pike returned to the JavaScript ecosystem after a ten year hiatus. A lot has improved in the interim, but he found one constant:

These changes have each boosted the ecosystem in its own way. And each has fueled one dynamic that has not changed: choosing the right JavaScript framework is hard, man.

Allen thinks through some framework choosing decisions, then ends his post on an upbeat:

I think, though – and this may just be my innate optimism – that the situation has improved a lot. And now that the JavaScript ecosystem is building frameworks that can share code between the client and server but keep most of it from being sent to the browser, the next 10 years of evolution should be less disruptive than the last.

I hope you’re right, Allen. I hope you are right.

🐣 The early days of Linux

Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, having met Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in 1988. In this 2023 contribution to LWN, Lars tells the story from his perspective. It all started with a typo?

Toward the end of that first year, we had gotten access to a Unix server, and I accidentally found Usenet, the discussion system, by mistyping rm as rn, the Usenet reader. I told Linus about it and we spent way too much time exploring this.

There’s lots of fun gems shared here. Like this one that shows Linus’ humble aims:

In August 1991, Linus mentioned his new kernel in public for the first time, in the comp.os.minix newsgroup. This included the phrase “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)”

For many of us, Linux has always been a core piece of our computing lives. It’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always existed, or that its dominance was at one time unsure (even unlikely). Stories like this, told by the people who lived it, always remind me of this great insight from Steve Jobs:

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use…
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

🗂️ If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

Piotr Migdał says that as a data scientist, he turns things into vectors. As an unabashed archivist, he turns things into Markdown.

Markdown files are essentially plaintext with some extra syntax for common elements like sections, bullet points, and links. The format deliberately avoids precise control over display details like font selection. Following the rule of least power, I consider this limitation a feature. For contrast, consider PDF - a format so powerful that it can run Doom.

He goes on to explain how he does it, tools that help, and what he’d like to exist in the world to make this all easier/better. But the main point is the main point. When it comes to things that have to last, plaintext is great and Markdown is a great format for your plaintext.

💰 Next Edit understands the code change ripple effect

Thanks to Augment Code for sponsoring Changelog News

The newest feature from our friends at Augment Code is one I’ve wanted my entire career.

Every dev out there knows the pain that follows updating a field in one file. Now you’re hunting throughout all the various places in the codebase to update SQL queries, tests, and type definitions (If you’re in to that kind of thing). What should be a simple change becomes a tedious game of find-and-replace.

Next Edit is their solution to this problem. It extends beyond the cursor by understanding the ripple effects of your changes and automatically suggests necessary updates across your entire workspace. While you code, it’s scanning your codebase, identifying dependent files, and generating contextual suggestions that keep your code in sync.

And guess what, Next Edit is available today to everyone using Visual Studio Code. All you have to do is pull the latest update to the extension and Next Edit will be there to help you get more done.

Curious how Next Edit does what it does? The team behind it also shared their AI research behind the feature.

🕹️ Git is getting gamified

Git-Sim creator, Jacob Stopak, is back with an even more ambitious project than his original tool to visualize Git commands. This time, he’s putting everyone’s favorite (but difficult to conceptualize) distributed version control system into a Minecraftian voxel world so you can explore a repo’s history in 3D.

The linked announcement tells the entire Devlands journey, including the $2,660.16 Jacob dropped on a domain he later realized he couldn’t use. 😳

🧪 Functions in CSS?!

Did you know CSS is (close to) getting first-class function support?! You can use them today in Chrome Canary (behind an experimental flag) and hopefully in other browsers soon. Where to turn for a nice rundown? CSS-Tricks, of course!

Arguments?! Return values?! That’s worth spitting my coffee out for! I had to learn more about them, and luckily, the spec is clearly written, which you can find right here.

Juan Diego Rodríguez does a great job laying out the details on how they work (they can have type-checking, they can have list arguments, they cannot return early, etc.) and imagining cool use cases for them. He thinks the future is bright…

There’ll be a time when our cyborg children ask us from their education pods, “Is it true you guys didn’t have functions in CSS?” And we’ll answer “No, Zeta-5 ∀umina™, we didn’t” while shedding a tear. And that will blow their ZetaPentium© Gen 31 Brain chips.

🎙️ Kaizen! Pipely goes BAM

It’s Kaizen 18! Can you believe it? We discuss the recent Fly.io outage, some little features we’ve added since our last Kaizen, our new video-first production, and of course, catch up on all things Pipely! Oh, and Gerhard surprises us (once again). BAM! VIDEO

💼 Ludic’s guide to getting software engineering jobs

The steps in this guide have generated $979,000 in salary, measured as the sum of the highest annual salaries friends and readers have reached after following along, where they were willing to attribute their success actions in here. If it works for you, email me so I can bump the number up.

If that isn’t proof enough that this guide is worth a scan, I don’t know what is.

🪦 Open source is where dreams go to die

Work for free and in return watch your passion get crushed by entitled users who are never satisfied? Trevor I. Lasn thinks so:

Hector Martin (marcan) spent years bringing Linux to Apple Silicon - an incredible technical achievement - only to walk away exhausted and disillusioned.
This story repeats with depressing regularity across the open-source landscape. Passionate developers create something valuable, share it freely with the world, and then watch as their gift becomes a burden that consumes their life.

⚖️ Begrudgingly choosing CBOR over MessagePack

Taylor Troesh lays out how he decided CBOR is the serialization format for his needs. I always love posts like this:

Uh oh – competing standards? Marginal design tradeoffs? Open-source woes? Buckle up!

MessagePack wins on the coolness factor, but thankfully Taylor is an actual engineer, so that didn’t phase him:

Everything about CBOR is uncool. It was designed by a committee. It reeks of RFCs. Acronyms are lame. Saying “SEE-BORE” is like licking a nickel.

Worth a read if for no other reason than to enjoy Taylor’s incomparable style.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

📚 The Developer’s Dictionary

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

Wednesday: Redis creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo (Antirez)
Friday: Friendly Feud with our JS Party peoples

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

–Jerod