Changelog News

Developer news worth forwarding to your friends

Hello, friends! 👋

There’s a nerdy Pro Tip® floating through the series of tubes that you should append before:2023 to your Google searches. This excludes all of the AI-generated ~~content~~ trash that’s been indexed by our computing overlord lately. But that’s amateur hour.

True Pros append after:2024 to our searches. Want to know who wins the upcoming election, McFly?

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

🎧 Good pods for your week

🎙️ Kris Moore from iXsystems on TrueNAS & FreeBSD changelog.fm/583
💚 THE Cameron Seay returns changelog.com/friends/36
🚀 Andy Glover talks productivity engineering at Netflix shipit.show/96
🤖 Jared Zoneraich from PromptLayer practicalai.fm/261
⏰ Questions from a new Go developer gotime.fm/308

⚰️ Redis adopts dual source-available licensing

Another open source project bites the dust. Here’s their explainer:

The success of Redis has created a unique set of challenges. Redis has been sponsoring the bulk of development alongside a dynamic community of developers eager to contribute. However, the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community. Despite efforts to support a community-led governance model, and our desire to maintain the BSD license, delivering multiple software distributions simultaneously – across open-source, source-available, and commercial software optimized for different on-premises and cloud platforms – is at odds with our ability to drive Redis successfully into the future.

When this news first dropped last Wednesday, I quipped: Gentlemen, start your forks. Drew DeVault must’ve been listening. (Probably not literally, but in spirit.) Enter Redict. Drew writes:

Like many of you, I was disappointed when I learned that Redis®1 was changing to a non-free licensing model. This is a betrayal of the free software community, but perhaps not an entirely surprising one. Forks are likely to start appearing in the coming days, and today, I would like to offer Redict to you as a possible future home for your needs, and present its trade-offs as compared to the other forks you’re likely to be choosing from soon.
In short, Redict is an independent, non-commercial fork of Redis® OSS 7.2.4.2 It is based on the BSD 3-Clause source code of Redis® OSS, and all changes from this point onwards are licensed under the Lesser GNU General Public license, LGPL-3.0-only.

Oh, and Microsoft also announced Garnet (a Redis client compatible cache-store) just two days prior to the Redis re-licensing. Fortuitous timing or did they know something?

Perhaps someone at MS typed redis after:2023-03-19 into Bing and… nah, forget it.

🤝 We need community built software

In the wake of this latest open source rug pull, Matthew Miller (Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat) made a great point on Mastodon that I think is worth re-posting in full:

The Redis thing underscores a key point: open source is not enough. We need community built software – free and open source licenses are just one aspect of that.
If a company requires you to assign copyright (or equivalent re-licensing rights) in an asymmetrical way, they will inevitably eventually decide to take that option once they want to cash in on the goodwill you’ve built for them (let alone the code).

This sparked a quality discussion, which you can follow in the replies to his post.

🪩 POST/CON 24 is THE event for API enthusiasts

Thanks to Postman for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Postman’s annual user conference pops off April 30th-May 1st in San Fransisco and they’re going all out to ensure this is your must-attend event of the year!

You’ll level up your skills with hands-on workshops…
You’ll hear from experts on how they’re bring APIs in to the future…
You’ll be the first to know about new Postman features…
You’ll help shape the future of Postman by meeting with product leaders…
You’ll network and connect with tech leaders from OpenAI, Heroku & more…

And, to top it all off: they’re throwing an absolutely amazing after party! 🕺

You’ll meet at SF’s tallest skybar for cocktails, dinner & 360° views of the City and the Bay… then stroll to nearby August Hall to enjoy drinks, a private bowling alley & a live performance by multi-platinum recording artist T-Pain. How cool is that?!

🦆 DuckDB as the new jq

Paul Gross makes the case that DuckDB (like a SQLite geared towards data applications), because it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, is better than jq for exploring documents. Here’s some sample code of downloading repo information from GitHub’s API and extracting stats on the types of licenses they use:

% duckdb -c \
  "select license->>'key' as license, count(*) as count \
  from read_json('https://api.github.com/orgs/golang/repos') \
  group by 1 \
  order by count desc"

┌──────────────┬───────┐
│   license    │ count │
│   varchar    │ int64 │
├──────────────┼───────┤
│ bsd-3-clause │    23 │
│ apache-2.0   │     5 │
│              │     2 │
└──────────────┴───────┘

I tend to agree that SQL is easier to reason about than jq’s search syntax, which I use just infrequently enough to have to ask ChatGPT every time…

😵‍💫 I’m a programmer and I’m stupid

Anton Zhiyanov has been getting paid to code for 15 years despite being, in his own words, “pretty dumb.”

I haven’t been diagnosed with any specific medical condition, but my mental capacity is very limited. I find even easier Leetcode problems challenging. Reading about a basic consensus algorithm makes my head explode. I can’t really follow complex dependencies in a code base. I can’t learn a fancy language like Rust (I tried, but honestly, it’s too much). I hate microservices and modern frontends because there are so many moving parts, I can’t keep track of them all.

So what does he do about it? Here’s where things get interesting…

I use the simplest mainstream language available (Go) and very basic Python. I write simple (though sometimes verbose) code that is easy to understand and maintain. I avoid deep abstractions and always choose composition over inheritance or mixins. I only use generics when absolutely necessary. I prefer flat data structures whenever possible…

He goes on, but you get the drift. Anton keeps things incredibly simple. But that’s not dumb. That’s smart! Which means he’s dismantled his own premise. Which might be dumb? … I need a break…

🙈 The one about the web developer job market

Baldur Bjarnason chimes in on our collective sense of impending job doom, from the perspective of web developers:

We have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades and that’s with the “AI” bubble in full force. If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash.

Don’t sugarcoat it, Baldur! Shoot it to us straight. Here’s more on how web media is in free fall and that’s bad for web devs too:

Web media is a major employer, both directly and indirectly, of web developers. If a big part of the web media industry is collapsing, then that’s an entire sector that isn’t hiring any of the developers laid off by Google, Microsoft, or the rest. And the people they aren’t hiring will still be on the job market competing with everybody else who wouldn’t have even applied to work in web media.
This would be bad on its own, if it weren’t for the fact that search engine traffic is declining as well. LLM-enabled spam sites are flooding the search engine results which drives down traffic to web media sites in general.

It’s mostly more bad news from here. This one sums his stance up:

It’s reasonable to expect that the job market is unlikely to ever fully bounce back, due to the collapse of web media alone.
It’s also reasonable to expect that the job market might take another sharp turn to the worse because the AI Bubble will run its course eventually. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a genuine innovation or an overblown yarn-ball of dysfunction and wishful thinking, bubbles end eventually.
Both finding a job and hiring for web development will likely only get harder.

There is a section called “So, what should I do?” that I recommend all web developers at least take a look at. One sentiment that I will heartily echo here: this is probably as good a time as any to start a business.

This path is risky but, at this point, so is just trying to build a regular career in software development. Bootstrapped entrepreneurship might begin to look like a promising alternative to many in the field.

🎞️ Video of the week

I’m only 8 minutes in to the Node.js documentary, but I’ve seen enough to know it’s worth a recommend. The Honeypot team is absolutely killing it with these software-focused documentaries 👏

🦀 CrabNebula Cloud is here!

Thanks to CrabNebula for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Thanks to CrabNebula Cloud, Tauri app developers can now seamlessly distribute their apps on all platforms. This is a huge step forward for Tauri’s fast-growing ecosystem, but don’t take our word for it… here’s Rustacean Marc Espín:

One thing I missed in the Rust ecosystem was a standard for app distribution. And I believe that the Rust community now has a solid choice for such task, thanks to CrabNebula Cloud. It is easy to use, secure and will be framework-agnostic.

CrabNebula Cloud features a purpose-built CDN, security updates as first-class citizens & smart organization management that mirrors GitHub’s hierarchical structure. Check it out!

🛠️ Tools for your trade

Planka is “free open source kanban board for workgroups.”

Looks a lot like Trello

jnv for “interactive JSON filter using jq.”

For those of you not impressed by DuckDB

lcl.host is “the fastest/easiest way to get HTTPS in your local dev env.”

Crowded space, but looks solid

Memories is a “fast, modern and advanced photo management suite.”

Like Google Photos, but for Nextcloud

Ludic is a “lightweight framework for building dynamic pages in pure Python.”

For the htmx curious

Open Interpreter is “a natural language interface for computers.”

A ChatGPT-like interface for your terminal

Ignite is “a static site builder for Swift developers.”

Every dev needs a solid SSG in their life

magick.css is “magically playful, yet simple styling. all in one file.”

Kudos for not calling it automagick.css

Lumentis makes “AI powered one-click docs from transcripts and text.”

Showing you the cost before you decide to run it is super cool

Failsafe-go is “a library for building fault tolerant Go applications.”

I could surely find a way to mis-use this

Monolith is “a CLI for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file.”

Handy for backing up a dynamic site statically

sqlite-schema-diagram doesn’t have a tagline, but you get the idea.

That’s the news for now, but stay tuned for our 3rd installment of It Depends, which ships out later this week! The topic this time: whether it’s better for software devs to specialize or generalize…

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

–Jerod