Changelog News

Developer news you can groove to

Jerod here! 👋

I wanted to announce our fresh Changelog Beats in last week’s issue, but Apple Music didn’t approve it until I’d already hit Send. I guess that’s just life in the walled garden. Oh well, introducing…. Dance Party! 🕺💃👯🫠

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

🎧 Simply the best podcasts for developers

🎙️ The Changelog #577: Taking on Goliath with Nadia Odunayo

💚 Friends #30: Future of [energy, content, food] live from THAT Conf

🪩 JS Party #311: React Server Components 🧐 with Dan Abramov

🤖 Practical AI #255: Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs with Karan Malhotra

⏰ Go Time #302: What’s new in Go 1.22 with Carlana Johnson

☺️ Keep calm and log files

Will McGugan’s new Toolong (tl) terminal app lets you view, tail, merge & search log files (plus JSONL) in a “snappy, straightforward to use” way. Here’s his why:

I spent a lot of time in my past life as a web developer working with logs, typically on web servers via ssh. I would use a variety of tools, but my goto method of analyzing logs was directly on the server with *nix tools like tail, less, and grep etc. As useful as these tools are, they are not without friction.
I built toolong to be the tool I would have wanted back then.

🦊 Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy

Diane Brady writing for Fortune:

Mozilla Corp. … announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.

The short-term plan, according to Chambers (who has an open invitation to The Changelog) is:

to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO.

New products. AI tools. What next, Mozilla Vision Pro?! Here’s where I’d focus if I were Mozilla CEO: making Firefox so good it does to Chrome what it did to Internet Explorer not so long ago…

🥊 NATS vs Kafka

Thanks to Synadia for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Are you using Kafka in production and looking for something significantly simpler yet more cost effective that can easily extend to the edge?

NATS is becoming the go-to alternative that satisfies Kafka’s use cases, but does much more than streaming.

Stateless messaging? Request-reply? Key-value storage? Object storage? NATS does that!

Synadia is helping teams get beyond the assumption that “Kafka is the default” by showing how NATS can take their applications to the next level. Learn more and try it out for free by going to synadia.com/changelog

🥪 sudo is coming to Windows

Microsoft’s Jordi Adoumie:

We’re excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session. It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console.

It’s also open source, which is how I know it clocks in at ~75 lines of PowerShell and is in no way a fork or a port of Linux’s sudo, just a reimplementation of the concept for Windows. Before you know it, they’ll be ditching those trashy backslashes and adopting the simple slash (no need to saw the forward bit) too! 😉

🔐 The story of getting SSH port 22

Tatu Ylonen, author of the original SSH, tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22.

I wrote the initial version of SSH (Secure Shell) in Spring 1995. It was a time when telnet and FTP were widely used.
Anyway, I designed SSH to replace both telnet (port 23) and ftp (port 21). Port 22 was free. It was conveniently between the ports for telnet and ftp. I figured having that port number might be one of those small things that would give some aura of credibility. But how could I get that port number?

The internet was much smaller back then, so the process was straight forward (but still intimidating). It boils down to a well-worded email to the IANA (which is included verbatim in the post) and voila!

🌟 (Almost) every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup

In this ~20-minute read, Jack Lindamood gives an “Endorse” or “Regret” rating for ~50 different services, tools & processes he used over the 4 years he led infrastructure at Cresta. Here’s a sampler platter:

🟩 Endorse: GitOps
🟥 Regret: Multiple applications sharing a database
🟩 Endorse: Notion
🟩 Endorse: Slack
🟥 Regret: Datadog
🟥 Regret: Not using open telemetry early

He includes a write-up for each entry, so you can learn why he endorses or regrets each one too.

🏃 page-speed.dev

An open source web app by Daniel Roe to create shareable Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights results.

📽️ A short film in 256 bytes of code

I found an old VHS tape at a yard sale.
It was labeled “Bitwise Liminal” in sharpie.
But when I watched the video it was only static.

Then I started having vivid and… unsettling dreams.
Also I couldn’t stop thinking about that weird VHS tape.
After researching I learned it was a digital backup.
Using some special software I recovered the data.
To my shock, it was a 256 byte program…

With trembling hands I opened it in a web browser.
Strange. This reminds me of the dreams I’ve been having.
Now I don’t need to sleep anymore.
I just keep watching.

👴🏻 How Mat Ryer writes HTTP services in Go after 13 years

Mat Ryer has been writing HTTP services in Go longer than Go has been around, proving it IS possible to have more years of experience in a technology than said technology has existed. Tech recruiters of the world have been vindicated at last! 😜

🧩 Discover and share Neovim plugins

Dotfyle is a community site for Neovim users to discover plugins and share dotfiles, which maintains an index of 900+ Neovim plugins & 1200+ configurations.

You can upload your configuration and it automatically detects which plugins you’re using, and syncs this on a daily basis. Which enables it to detect which plugins are trending and popular based on real usage.

🎞️ Video of the week

I had a great conversation with Den Delimarsky on his The Work Item podcast recently. Watch (or listen) if you’re interested in some of the behind-the-scenes Changelog stuff. Here’s how Den describes it:

a podcast that not only uncovers the intricacies of Jerod’s career but also shares some unconventional lessons learned from his work. From navigating the ever-evolving tech landscape to spearheading Changelog, Jerod brings a wealth of experience that transcends your typical engineer expectations and taps into the heart of what it means to build a sustainable developer community.

💼 In brief, before you go

Twined: a multi-platform RSS reader built using Kotlin and Compose
Lied to: debugging issues in a proprietary software with unreliable logs
Extended: “It’s like Nuxt, but for Chrome Extensions”
Distributee: a reading list all about distributed systems
Catalogued: out-of-this-world web design inspiration from across the web
Imitated: Ollama learns OpenAI’s API

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

On The Changelog: Stefano Maffulli, Executive Directory of the Open Source Initiative
On Changelog & Friends: Jamie Tanna, Senior Software Engineer at Elastic

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

–Jerod