Changelog News

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Jerod here! 👋

The internet is awash with Apple Vision Pro unboxings, reviews, hot takes & memes. But you already knew that. This humble newsletter will continue our focus on telling you about stuff you don’t already know about.

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

🎧 ICYMI: Recent good pods from us

💚 You have how many open tabs?! – we take you to the hallway track at THAT Conference

🎙️ In the beginning (of generative AI) – Joe Reis on data engineering & the beginning of generative AI

🪩 Angular Signals – KBall & Amal interview Alex & Pavel from the Angular Signals team

🤖 Large Action Models & Rabbits 🐇 – the rabbit r1 gained huge interest in both the device & LAMs

⏰ Go Capture the Flag! 🚩 – Neil S Primmer & Benji Vesterby’s experience running a CTF at GopherCon

🙏 The promise of hackable software

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated:

Among major software platforms today, browser extensions are the rare exception that allow and encourage users to modify the apps that we use, in creative ways not intended by their original developers. On smartphone and desktop platforms, this sort of behavior ranges from unusual to impossible, but in the browser it’s an everyday activity.
Browser extensions remind us what it’s like to have deep control over how we use our computers.

Amen to that! Perhaps people like us who live, breathe & eat (metaphorically) open source software take hackability for granted at times. But we shouldn’t! Geoffrey says it’s not an accident that openness emerged on the web platform:

When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he imagined it fitting into this tradition. “My vision was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew.”

This post was originally written in 2019, but it (deservedly) resurfaced this week, so he added some 2024 updates at the end. Amongst other addenda is what Geoffrey is working on in this space: malleable software powered by AI

👤 The undercover generalist

Adolfo Ochagavía:

Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist… Below follows an account of my struggles, hoping it might be useful for other adventurers out there.

I can commiserate with Adolfo here. I’m a long-time proponent of generalizing to maximize your impact and minimize the odds of investing big in the wrong tech, but I certainly have felt the tension between that and potential clients who have very specific needs and no good way to find someone to help them except to look for a specialist. He concludes:

Paradoxically, it looks like presenting yourself as a specialist is a requirement to get generalist projects! How is that possible? … my current theory is that focusing on your experience with a specific technology, and on your involvement in a particular community, makes it easier to establish trust with people who don’t know you well. And, as trust grows, there’s more and more room for the undercover generalist to come to the light of day!

🛣️ Take the road most documented

Jack Garbus:

How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux is too difficult for new users, but for me it’s been the only distribution I’ve been able to get consistently working, and it’s all thanks to the detailed documentation and known workarounds.

I’m a long-time Debian user, but I tried Arch (btw) once back in the day. The best part of the experience was the Arch Wiki. By far. So I’m picking up what Jack is putting down in this post:

I love exciting, and popular, and new software, but installing Arch showed me that popular isn’t as important as understandable.

His conclusion: “with all else equal, take the road most documented.”

🪲 Sick of wasting cycles playing whack-a-mole with bugs?

Thanks to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Sentry’s got you! Sentry shows developers what’s broken with code-level visibility from pre to post release.

Meet Neil Manvar, their Director of Solutions Engineering, for an unrestricted live group demo on Thursday, February 22nd and RSVP to get all your questions answered!

Oh, and use code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan. Too easy, right?

🗺️ Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub

Terence Eden:

I used to like the original FourSquare. The “mayor” stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends “I am at this cool museum” or “We’re at this pub if you want to meet” or “Spending the day at the park”.
So, is there a way to recreate that early Web 2.0 experience with open data and ActivityPub? Let’s find out!

He divides the work into two parts (getting nearby points of interest & sharing location on the Fediverse) and then gets to work, but never puts it all together. The bad news, from the end: “Creating an ActivityPub server which can post geotagged notes into the Fediverse might be a little beyond my skillset!”

If that part were straight forward, perhaps we’d see a trend of Rebuilding $X for ActivityPub using $Y posts…

🧩 How to connect ideas together

Sebastien Dubois:

As you learn and grow, you’ll accumulate more and more knowledge. While each piece is important, the relationships between ideas is, at least, as important as the ideas themselves.

This is a powerful post to help you connect ideas together with actionable steps around knowledge graphs, how to use tooling like Obsidian & helping decide what deserves to be linked, and what doesn’t.

🎞️ Clip of the week

This question that’s been on my mind for awhile, so I asked our new Ship It! host, Justin Garrison:

Note: Justin answered this off the cuff and didn’t love his answer, in retrospect. Here’s his follow-up.

📨 News submissions from the community

Luca Pette tells the origin story of TypeStream (Unix pipes FTW)
Erik Kennedy’s recent video: a Figma crash course (builds a full website in 60 minutes)
Zach Musgrave goes deep on designing a coherent product (from last year but seems timeless)
Matija Sosic on the importance of RFCs in programming (weeks of coding saves you hours of planning)
Kelvin Omereshone pitches The Boring JavaScript Stack 🥱 (but aren’t they all at this point?)

🔬 dep-tree is a code base entropy visualizer

This Go program visualizes the entropy of a code base with a 3d force-directed graph. The more decoupled and modular a code base is, the more spread the graph will have. Works on JavaScript/TypeScript, Python & Rust programs for now. Point it at a GitHub project and see what you can see 👀

🆙 12 modern CSS one-line upgrades

Sometimes, improving your application CSS just takes a one-line upgrade or enhancement. In this super-useful post, Stephanie Eckles shares 12 cases when you can do just that!

🤼 HTMX and Web Components: a Perfect Match

Igor Roztropiński takes two hot topics in the web dev world and pairs them up for some very interesting results! “Even though they do not know anything about HTMX, it turns out that it is a breeze to connect these two technologies!”

😎 One more just because it’s cool

As echoes of towel.blinkenlights.nl ringed in my head, I typed ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no watch.ascii.theater into my terminal. Today’s showing: Goodfellas!

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

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Daniel W, Rusty N, Olivia B, Dan S, Benjamin G, Arthur M, Johan S, Kristofer B, Marek N, Dylan G, Darron S, Sebastian B, Thomas C, Fabian G, Ruben V, Jonathan P, Jakub C, Eugene T, Sukhdeep B, Johannes K, Vivek S, Cole C, Konrad O, Brett N, Fang Z, Rod S, Asem H, Hubert C, Philip K, Kilian K, Pontus U, Jesse B, Ben R, Jon B, David G, Shaun O, Christopher P, Tony G, Justin P, Mads D, Jan S, Wes M & Silviu B!

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

–Jerod