Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hey there! 👋

This week’s audio edition features One More ~~Thing~~ Interview from Open Source Summit where Adam and I talk with Red Hat’s Jeffrey “Jefro” Osier-Mixon all about Automotive Linux. It’s good!

🎙️ Listen to the full episode or jump straight to the interview.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🌚 Reddit goes dark

Last week we covered how Reddit’s API (over)pricing changes caused its 3rd-party devs to announce closures, which causes many of its mods and users to revolt. After that, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman held a dumpster-fire of an AMA, doubling down on the pricing and his treatment of beloved Apollo dev, Christian Selig. This week they revolt began in earnest. And boy did it.

At the time of publishing over 8k unique subreddits have gone dark, representing almost 30k moderators decisions for a subscribed user count of 2.7 billion.

It’s been so bad for Reddit, in fact, that the site (and API) was down for multiple hours today. Related links:

🌝 Lemmy lights up

As the old saw goes: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Reddit’s implosion has many people looking elsewhere for their not-so-centralized Reddit replacement. Enter Lemmy: A link aggregator for the fediverse. Yes, the fediverse strikes again.

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Can Lemmy do for disillusioned redditors what Mastodon did during the Twitter exodus? Related links:

👀 OpenObserve: cloud native observability platform

OpenObserve is a cloud native observability platform built specifically for logs, metrics, traces and analytics designed to work at petabyte scale.
It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune which you can get up and running in under 2 minutes.
It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported nor required with OpenObserve. OpenObserve provides its own UI which does not require separate installation unlike kibana).

Sounds a lot like VictoriaMetrics, which I’ve also heard good things about. But I’m no expert in this arena. I’d love for someone to do a comparison of all these different offerings. ELK stack vs Grafana stack vs VictoriaMetrics vs OpenObserve. If that’s even apples to apples, I dunno. Exciting space!

🤌 Give your API the SDKs it deserves

Thanks to Speakeasy for sponsoring this week’s Changelog News 💰

Do your users bear the burden of integrating your APIs? That’s not great.

Or maybe you’re manually updating a bunch of client libraries? What a pain.

Here’s a better idea: Build your APIs using industry standards like OpenAPI 3, Postman, etc. and use Speakeasy’s pipeline to create idiomatic SDKs for all of the most popular languages and frameworks out of the box.

Here’s the best part: their pipeline operates as part of your CI/CD. So when your API changes, your SDKs change with it. It’ll even automate publishing to your favorite package managers like PyPi, npm, Maven, and more.

If that sounds like a better world to you, head over to speakeasyapi.dev and join the beta today.

✍️ Some blogging myths

Julia Evans is one of the most successful developer bloggers out there, so when she decides to write up some myths about blogging… it’s worth paying attention to what she has to say. Here a few of the myths she debunks in the linked post:

myth: you need to be original
myth: you need to be an expert
myth: writing boring posts is bad

She goes into the details as why these are all myths in the post. And here’s a good contrarian one from the end: myth: everyone should blog

Blogging isn’t for everyone. Tons of amazing developers don’t have blogs or personal websites at all. I write because it’s fun for me and it helps me organize my thoughts.

Hacker Stations featured my “programming and podcasting setup”

I’m honored to join the likes of Daniel Stenberg and Mike McQuaid by having my home office featured on Hacker Stations! Check it out if you’re curious about my hardware setup, the software I use on a daily basis, my favorite programming languages, my most prized (non) possession in the space & more.

rachelbythebay tries to answer “how to become a systems engineer”

I don’t know know exactly who “rachelbythebay” is (I’ve tried to get her on the pod a couple times to no avail. If you have a connection, please make it!), but I do know she knows her stuff. She was asked be a reader to write about becoming a systems engineer. So she tried:

Seriously though, if you look up “systems engineering” on Wikipedia, it talks about “how to design, integrate and manage complex systems over their life cycles”. That’s definitely not my personal slice of the world. I don’t think I’ve ever taken anything through a whole “life cycle”, whatever that even means for software.

She eventually gets past the (enjoyable as it is) semantic flogging and provides some honest-to-goodness excellent advice:

I think it goes something like this: you start from the assumption that when you see something, you wonder why it is the way it is. Then maybe you observe it and maybe do a little research to figure out how it came to be the thing you see in front of you. This could go for just about anything: a telephone, a scale, a crusty old road surface, a forgotten grove of fruit trees, you name it. By research, I mean maybe you go poking around: try to open that scale with a screwdriver, get out of the car and walk down the old road, or turn over some of the dirt in the field to see if you can find any identifying marks.

Why SQLite is so great for the edge

Piotr Sarna:

Everyone already knows that SQLite is great. This article makes the praise much more specific though — it explains why we, the developers of libSQL, think that SQLite is a great choice for bringing your data to the edge.

Stable Diffusion can make amazing QR codes

Last week I linked up an app for making QR codes with arbitrary designs in the middle and properly link slapped by a reader with a (now dark) Reddit thread or someone making even more impressive QR codes with the help of Stable Diffusion.

Mitchell Hashimoto’s approach to building large technical projects

Wise words from the man who gave us Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Terraform & more:

Whether it’s building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.

And that’s just the first paragraph! He uses a real-world example of building a terminal emulator throughout the post so that there is realistic, concrete experience shared. Good stuff.

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund offers up to €300k in open source challenges

The Sovereign Tech Fund is looking for people who use open source and want to contribute back. Participants can work on contributing back to open source for up to eight months, with a budget of up to €300,000 for each four-month round. They’re supporting:

Creation and improvement of developer tooling
Production security of FOSS components
Documentation of critical open source infrastructure technologies

Apply now through July 6th, 2023. And if you get funded, let us know! (thanks to Powen Shiah for submitting this)

DeepMind AI creates sorting algorithm up 3x faster than our designs

Computer scientists have, for decades, been optimizing how computers sort data to shave off crucial milliseconds in returning search results or alphabetizing contact lists. Now DeepMind, based in London, has vastly improved sorting speeds by applying the technology behind AlphaZero — its artificial-intelligence system for playing the board games chess, Go and shogi — to a game of building sorting algorithms.

My favorite part is how it came up with “new moves” for us humans to copy.

To see where AlphaDev eked out its gains, the team took a closer look at its algorithms. For sorting, they found two new tactics, which they called the AlphaDev swap move and the AlphaDev copy move.

Maybe you’ve heard of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback? This is more like: Human Learning from Machine Feedback 😉

A simple cli utility for querying your node_modules directory

The fact that this tool exists (and that it actually looks useful) is a commentary on the dependency hell that many of us live in. But here we are.

A modern Wine wrapper for macOS built with SwiftUI

Whisky provides a clean and easy to use graphical wrapper for Wine built in native SwiftUI. You can make and manage bottles, install and run Windows apps and games, and unlock the full potential of your Mac with no technical knowledge required. Whisky is built on top of CrossOver 22.1.1, and Apple’s own Game Porting Toolkit.

Algolia’s fast and full-featured autocomplete library

Did you know Algolia’s awesome autocomplete UI is open source and frontend framework agnostic? Good news on both fronts.

polywasm is a polyfill for WebAssembly

The playground that shows off esbuild (a JavaScript code transformation tool) needed a polyfill for WebAssembly, so Evan Wallace built one:

WebAssembly support is already widespread so you don’t normally need a polyfill to use it. However, certain modern JavaScript environments have WebAssembly disabled. For example, Apple’s Lockdown Mode (an opt-in security enhancement) disables WebAssembly in Safari.

On the asymmetry of open source (2021)

Caddy web server maintainer Matt Holt writes up what he calls “a comprehensive guide to funding open source software projects.” But first, he points out that: “Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users.””

That asymmetry, he believes is the crux of the open source sustainability problem.

🎧 ICYMI: Recent good pods from us

Changelog & Friends #3: Homebrew project leader Mike McQuaid joins us to weigh in on Apple’s big Vision Pro announcement. We also hit on our favorite (and least favorite) non-AR things from the WWDC 2023 keynote.
The Changelog #543: Our final anthology episode from Open Source Summit NA ‘23 features conversations with Jeff Sica from CNCF, Eddie Zeneski from K8s’ CLI team & Yaron Schneider from Dapr.
Go Time #279: Tips, tricks, best practices and philosophical AI debates abound when OpenAI ambassador Bram Adams joins Natalie, Johnny & Mat to discuss prompt engineering.
Founders Talk #97: Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker to discuss Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.
JS Party #278: KBall interviews Nick Nisi about the Pandora’s box that is his tooling/developer setup.

That is the news for now!

On Wednesday, we go deep on Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, the head of Passwordless at 1Password. And on Friday’s talk show, Mat Ryer joins us for what will surely be a ridiculously good time.

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

–Jerod