Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hey hey! 👋

We’re shipping a day late this week due to the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S. Or maybe I was stuck at Burning Man and Labor Day is just a convenient excuse?! You decide…

Ok, let’s get into the news. (Audio Edition)

👤 A portrait of the best worst programmer

Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he’s ever worked with (who also happens to be “a heck of a programmer”). Tim scored zero points on the company’s productivity metric and almost got fired, but…

Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.

Two takeaways from this excellent post: Measuring developer productivity is hard, and be like Tim.

☎️ OpenTelemetry in 2023

Four years in, Kevin Lin declares that OpenTelemetry delivers on its promise for open observability.

It has to date provided a stable standard for the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, and traces), a collector that can receive, process, and export telemetry in any environment, and SDKs to instrument code in all major languages. It has also continued to expand its scope and introduced additional standards around semantic conventions and agent management.
Today, OTEL is the second most active project in the CNCF, behind only Kubernetes in popularity. Its contributors are spread across all major observability vendors and its protocol has near-universal adoption among observability providers.

We use OTEL to send data from our Phoenix app to Honeycomb and while it “just works”, it strikes me as (overly?) complicated… but maybe that’s inevitable for a spec that serves so many interests in so many ways.

⚖️ Terraform vs. GitOps vs. System Initiative

Justin Garrison thought now is a good time to take stock of the infrastructure automation tools people should be using. Here’s a snippet from each of the three contenders he writes about in detail.

Terraform:

Terraform is a single-player tool in a multiplayer world. It’s great for infrastructure management when teams are small and complexity is under control. But once you try to hide complexity in wrappers, abstractions, and deploy pipelines, it’s time to look for other options.

GitOps:

GitOps works for Kubernetes, but outside of that ecosystem, you end up writing HCL to manage everything else… You turn everything into a Kubernetes problem, and everyone who needs infrastructure needs to be a Kubernetes user.

System Initiative:

System Initiative has the potential to bring application and infrastructure developers to the same table, speaking the same language and collaborating… The biggest drawback I see with SI right now is it’s not ready. The ecosystem is small. It’s not stable for production workloads, and many of the ideas are not fully solidified.

💻 Warp is the modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built right in

Thanks to Warp for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

You’ve probably heard us discuss Warp on multiple occasions. That’s because we’re fascinated by this super cool rethink of what the terminal should be.

Unlike any terminal you’ve used before, Warp is designed for team collaboration. You can save and share your team’s terminal docs in a shared Warp Drive right next to the command line. Everything in Warp Drive is searchable and stays in sync so your entire team has what they need for incident response or onboarding new devs.

And with Warp AI, you can generate commands from natural language, debug errors, or even accomplish complex tasks without visiting Google or Stack Overflow. Visit warp.dev and get started today or download the macOS app and let them know Changelog News sent you!

😅 How Apple beats burnout

Inc. published an interesting piece about Apple and how it’s “upholding its hustle culture while creating a happy workplace.”

It’s not just that it’s willing to splash out on high salaries, lavish offices or fat benefits packages. What makes a corporate job at Apple so appealing is how “cushy” its roles are-and there’s a brilliantly simple, yet highly effective reason why that is–despite its fast-paced and demanding hustle culture that would send many running for the hills.
What Apple is doing that employers often overlook is rewarding hard-working employees. Not with more money, a bigger office or Steve Jobs’ favorite employee perk. But the best perk of all that keeps people happy to hustle: freedom, according to a current employee, and recent Glassdoor reviews seem to attest.

I don’t share this to toot Apple’s horn, but because it reinforces something I believe deeply: that freedom (in its many forms: autonomy, agency, etc.) is the most important factor to produce work satisfaction once your financial needs have been taken care of. Seek it in your career and give it to others every time you have the opportunity.

💸 How to sabotage your salary negotiations efforts before you even start

Speaking of your financial needs… after coaching hundreds of people through salary negotiation, Aline Lerner published some great advice about two things you must avoid. Both involve how you talk to recruiters at the start of your job search, way before there’s an offer:

Revealing information too early in the game
Negotiating before you’re ready

In this post, she explains why these two mistakes “routinely sabotage salary negotiation efforts” and what you should say to recruiters instead.

🎥 Steve Yegge: Git is awful. GitHub isn’t good enough. It’s killing us!

Changelog++ people are the only ones who’ve heard this epic opinion shared by Steve Yegge after our official recording concluded, but we’ve since decided to publish the video for all to enjoy/hate (depending on your persuasion.)

🎧 ICYMI: Recent good pods from us

Back to the terminal of the future – Adam is joined by Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO of Warp. We talked with Zach last year about what it takes to build the terminal of the future, and today Adam catches up with Zach to see where they are on that mission. They talk about the business model of Warp, how they measure success, reaching product/market fit, building features developers love, integrating AI, and the pros and cons of going open source (again).

You call it tech debt I call it malpractice – Go Time panelist (and semi-professional unpopular opinion maker) Kris Brandow joins Jerod & Adam to discuss his deep-dive on the waterfall paper, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system.

Automating code optimization with LLMs – Dan & Chris sit down with Mike from TurinTech to hear about practical code optimizations using AI “translation” of slow to fast code. We learn about their process for accomplishing this task along with impressive results when automated code optimization is run on existing open source projects.

Modernizing packages to ESM – Mark Erikson and Amal Hussein talk about the shift from CommonJS to ES Modules. They discuss the history of module patterns in JS and the grueling effort to push the world’s biggest developer ecosystem forward. Get ready to go to school kids, this one’s deep!

What’s new in Go 1.21 – Go Time’s “what’s new in Go” correspondent Carl Johnson joins Johnny & Kris yet again to discuss what’s new with the latest iteration of Go in version 1.21.

📡 Other stuff on the radar

Read ME: A minimalistic cross-platform eBook reader built with Tauri
Home ME: A simple personal cloud experience built around the Docker ecosystem
RSS ME: Paste in a URL and get back an RSS feed for (almost) anything
Biome ME: Formats and lints your JS, TS, JSON & CSS in a split second
Curve ME: Richard Ekwonye goes deep on Bézier Curves and the logic behind them
Explore ME: A web-based tool to help you explore FFmpeg filters
Kube ME: A simple terminal dashboard for Kubernetes built with Rust
USENET ME: The Register is calling it a comeback, but USENET has been here for years
Expand ME: A tool for automatically creating typing shortcuts from a corpus of your own writing

🗣️ Quote of the week

“We build our computers the way we build our cities–over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”

– Ellen Ullman in The dumbing down of programming (1998)

That’s the news for now, but it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Daniel M, Nick H, Jarvis Y, Nicholas H, Dan B, Thomas E, Philipp K, Parker S, Bard A, Robert E, Benjamin & Michael D! We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝)

Have a great week, tell your friends about Changelog News if you dig it, and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod