Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hello again! 👋

We’re dreaming up a new landing page for Changelog News and I’d love to feature some nice words from actual readers and/or listeners on it. I hear social proof is a compelling thing 🤓

Do me a solid and drop one or two lines of high praise into this little form (only if you dig my work, of course) and I’ll happily link back to a URL of your choosing if we end up using your quote. Thanks! 💚

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

🎧 Good listens for the week

🎙️ Quinn Slack, co-founder & CEO of Sourcegraph: changelog.fm/580
💚 Nathan Sobo on open sourcing Zed: changelog.com/friends/33
🚀 Hybrid infrastructure load balancing with the Kong folks: shipit.show/93
🪩 Writing tech books with Adrienne Tacke & Dylan Hildenbrand: jsparty.fm/314
🤖 A deep-dive on Representation Engineering: practicalai.fm/258
⏰ Anthony Starks on creating art & visualizations with Go: gotime.fm/305

💪 Apple backs off killing web apps, but the fight continues

This is a long story and I’m linking to the end (of this chapter, anyhow) so here’s a quick catch-up:

As part of their (seemingly malicious) compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple had removed Home Screen web apps in the EU in betas of iOS 17.4. The internet erupted (led by the Open Web Advocacy, amongst others) and after much backlash they have reversed this change.

In the wake of this reversal, The OWA says:

While this is a stunning victory for the web, it is just one part of a longer battle… The fight is not over and will not be over until Apple allows both browsers and web apps to compete fairly on all their platforms globally.

We have members of the OWA booked to join us on JS Party next week, which should be interesting.

🚢 Shipping quality software in hostile environments

Luka Kladaric:

I once had the opportunity to work for a startup that had fallen from tech debt into tech bankruptcy. Although we managed to get it back on the right track, it made me rethink the concept of tech debt and how we ship software - especially in hostile environments.

He goes on to tell this true story in great detail, which is horrifying yet echoes so many of our experiences. Here’s just one of the many horror scenes he describes:

There is also a handcrafted build server, a Jenkins box hosted in the office, but no record of how it’s provisioned or configured. If something were to happen to it, the way you build software would just be lost. Each job on it is subtly different, even for the same tech. You have an Android source code that you build three instances out of, but each of them builds in a different way.

This is a solid essay replete with warnings and a plea at the end to ditch the “tech debt” concept altogether. Where have I heard that before? 🤔

📦 Deno’s new package registry is an npm superset

This registry, which lives at jsr.io, was created not to kill npm, but because “the world today is not the same as it was when npm was originally introduced.” Namely:

ECMAScript modules have arrived as a standard
There are more JavaScript runtimes than just Node and browsers
TypeScript has emerged as a de facto standard

The npm registry has been incredibly successful thanks to the contributions of developers worldwide. We want JSR to build on this success, not fork it. JSR is a superset of npm, much as TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript.
JSR is designed to interoperate with npm-based projects and packages. You can use JSR packages in any runtime environment that uses a node_modules folder. JSR modules can import dependencies from npm.

The Deno team is bankrolling this effort for now, but they’ve set up a separate GitHub org for it and say in the future it may be funded by other means. However, one of the core design principles (which is not like npm) was to keep operating costs low.

We expect that the Deno Company will be able to continue paying for JSR’s hosting bills for the foreseeable future - JSR is designed to be very cheap to run.

🚀 Sentry Launch Week is ready for liftoff

Thanks to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

March 18th through 22nd, our friends at Sentry will be showing off the major investments they’ve been making in their already industry-leading suite of offerings.

They’ll be showing off new features and products all week long, so tune in to their YouTube and Discord daily at 9pm PT to hear the latest scoop.

And if you want to be the first to see their new release videos + a chance to win Sentry swag, enter your email address right here. While you’re at it, use code CHANGELOG to save $100 on their team plan when you sign up. ✊

🫣 Periodic Face-to-Face

Martin Fowler makes the case that remote-first teams still benefit from face-to-face gatherings, and should do them every few months.

But however capable folks may be at remote working, and however nifty modern collaboration tools become, there is still nothing like being in the same place with the other members of a team. Human interactions are always richer when they are face-to-face. Video calls too easily become transactional, with little time for the chitchat that builds a proper human relationship. Without those deeper bonds, misunderstandings fester into serious relationship effectively resolved if everyone were able to talk in person.

This rings true to me. Our team was remote since day one (we’re hybrid now) so we have a lot of experience (ten years!) working through issues from afar. However, our bond is always strongest right after a conference or other opportunity to hang together in meatspace.

the most valuable part of a face-to-face gathering isn’t the scheduled work, it’s chitchat while getting a coffee, and conviviality over lunch. Informal conversations, mostly not about work, forge the human contact that makes the work interactions be more effective.

🧐 Can we get more decentralised than The Fediverse?

Eugene Ghanizadeh:

I guess that the fediverse will be as decentralised as email: a bit, but not that much. Most people will be dependent on a few major hubs, some groups might have their own hubs (e.g. company email servers), personal instances will be pretty rare. This is in contrast to personal blogging, where every Bob can easily host their own (and they often do). I mean that’s already implied by the name: fediverse is a federated universe, not a distributed one.
Why does this matter? Well I like not being dependent on one entity, but I would like it much more if I was dependent on no entities at all. In other words, I like to publish my own personal blog and get all the goodies of a social network, without being dependent on other micro-blogging / social content platforms.

Eugene thinks deeply about this and offers a solution that harmonizes with a “fediverse-viral” post of mine from last week.

🔥 Blazer is “business intelligence made simple”

An open source Ruby on Rails app for exploring your data with SQL. Available as a Docker image. Battle tested at Instacart.

Try the demo for yourself right here.

💾 ingestr copies data between any two databases

This is a CLI that lets you ingest data from any source to any* destination using a single command, no code necessary. Example!

ingestr ingest \
    --source-uri 'postgresql://admin:admin@localhost:8837/web?sslmode=disable' \
    --source-table 'public.some_data' \
    --dest-uri 'bigquery://?credentials_path=/path/to/service/account.json' \
    --dest-table 'ingestr.some_data'

That command gets the table public.some_data from Postgres and uploads it to BigQuery.

(* some sources cannot yet be destinations: SQLite, MongoDB, MySQL to name a few)

🙋 Serving my blog posts as Linux manual pages

You are likely to enjoy this post the most if you are interested in Linux and/or Linux manual pages, or if you enjoy reading about esoteric programming projects.

Nerd alert! I enjoyed this post…

🔗 Quick hits before I let you go

That’s the news for now, but we have Internet hall of famer & DNS legend Paul Vixie coming up on The Changelog this week, so stay tuned for that!

Have a great week, leave us some nice words if you dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod