Changelog News – Episode #20

Tracking layoffs, tech worker demand still high, ntfy, devenv, Markdoc & Mike Bifulco

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Roger Lee has been tracking all tech layoffs since COVID-19, Amanda Hoover says tech worker demand is still high, ntfy helps you send push notifications for free, devenv lets you share development environments without containers, Markdoc scales from personal blogs to massive documentation sites & we talk with Mike Bifulco at All Things Open 2022.

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Chapters

1 00:00 Intro
2 00:48 layoffs.fyi
3 01:51 Tech worker demand
4 03:08 ntfy.sh
5 04:13 devenv.sh
6 04:54 markdoc.dev
7 05:16 Outro
8 05:45 Mike Bifulco

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Changelog

Play the audio to listen along while you enjoy the transcript. 🎧

I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, November 14th 2022.

We’re knee deep in post-production of all the excellent conversations we recorded at All Things Open.

Expect one or two anthology episodes of our Friday interview show coming soon.

We’ll also be attaching one conversation to the end of our Monday News show for the next few weeks.

Now, we are committed to keeping these News briefs brief… so the interviews will always be at the end so you can skip ‘em if you’re not interested or simply don’t have the time. Once we’ve emptied the queue, it’s back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of the news, let’s get in to it.

The top clicked link in yesterday’s edition of Changelog Weekly is a bit of a downer. It was the layoffs tracker at layoffs.fyi.

Roger Lee has been tracking all tech layoffs since COVID-19. All the data is compiled from public reports and stored in Airtable, which provides embeddable table listings and charts.

So far in 2022, 788 tech companies have laid off 120,699 people. Notable, last Tuesday when I posted the tracker to Changelog News, 757 companies had laid off 104,791 people.

That means 31 companies laid off 16,908 people in the past week alone. A huge portion of that total, of course, is due to Meta performing the largest layoff in absolute terms of 11,000 people. Devastating.

Our heart goes out to each and every one of you who lost your job this year. And we have high hopes that you’ll get back on your feet quickly… which brings up to our next bit of news.

Amanda Hoover writes for Wired: Despite Big Layoffs, Tech Workers Are Still in Demand

“While many individual workers must now find new jobs, the broader outlook for tech workers remains strong. Their skills are still in demand, and their peers have responded to recent cuts with a wave of grassroots support to help laid-off workers find new jobs. Despite their command of the headlines, Big Tech companies are just one niche in the broader tech industry. Many smaller firms and companies in adjacent industries are still hiring tech workers, albeit at slower rates than tech giants recently did, and potentially for lower salaries. Some companies are now jumping at the chance to attract people previously monopolized by recruiters from the largest companies.”

Turns out Big Tech has scooped up so many of us over the past few years that many other industries have been left in the dust. From government to retail to ag, many companies are jumping at the opportunity to land talented workers like us that they previously couldn’t.

We’ve also been banding together to help one another land safely with new employment, which is awesome. The article mentions a LinkedIn group for workers let go by Meta and a Google sheet with potential opportunities for laid off workers. We’ll link to both in the show notes for ya.

Here’s a cool new thing. Notify (spelled ntfy) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service that lets you send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup, cost or setup.

You publish messages via a PUT or POST request to ntfy.sh with your topic as the URL path. Since there’s no sign up, the topic is essentially a password. Then you subscribe to topics using your phone, a given web UI, or in your own app by using the subscribe API.

Apps are available for iOS and Android and the entire system is completely free and open source forever. Here’s Notify’s creator Philipp C. Heckel talking about that: “I love free software, and I’m doing this because it’s fun. I have no bad intentions, and I will never monetize or sell your information. This service will always stay free and open. You can read more in the FAQs and in the privacy policy.”

devenv is a tool that lets you build, share, and run your local development environments with a single command. Without containers. How does it do that? With Nix, that’s how.

You define your development processes declaratively in a devenv.nix file and start them with devenv up. There are 80,000+ prebuilt packages for Linux/macOS and X64/Arm64. And yes, Windows users: it works with WSL.

We’ve been thinking about how we might revamp our contribution flows for changelog.com. I’ve always disliked our Docker-based flow because I don’t want to run it myself… devenv might be just the tool for the job.

Lastly, have you checked out Markdoc? It’s Stripe’s open source, Markdown-based authoring framework that scales from personal blogs to massive documentation sites. I’ll keep it brief, because today’s bonus interview from All Things Open is with Mike Bifulco who gave a talk about Markdoc in the developer track and then talked to us even more about it in the hallway track.

That is the news for now. We hope you enjoy this bonus interview and stay tuned to The Changelog because on Friday we’re shipping our first anthology episode with special guests Arun Gupta from Intel, Chad Whitacre from Sentry and Ricardo Sueiras from AWS.

Have a great week, share The Changelog with your friends & we’ll talk to you again real soon.

Changelog

Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚

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