Changelog News

Developer news from Tornado Alley

Jerod, still here! 🌪️

After 50+ hours without power to my home office, I planned to publish this issue from my parents’ basement 🤓

Thankfully, the lights flipped on last night ~8pm and the Series of Tubes pushed that sweet, sweet internet back into our lives. Just in the nick of time! ⌛️

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Podcasts! Get yer podcasts!

🎙️ Louis Pilfold, the creator of Gleam changelog.fm/588
💚 Adam Jacob’s spicy takes on recent OSS drama changelog.com/friends/41
🚀 Mandi Walls takes us back to AOL chat rooms shipit.show/101
🪩 Ryan Carniato on Solid and Signals jsparty.fm/320
🤖 Yoav Shoham, Co-Founder at AI21 Labs practicalai.fm/266
⏰ What’s new in Go’s cryptography libraries: Part 3 gotime.fm/313

💡 Good Ideas in Computer Science

Daniel Hooper:

Programmers love arguing for their favorite technologies. C++ vs Rust. Mac vs PC. These arguments overshadow the victories of Computer Science — the ideas that we all agree on. To unearth these ideas, I recently asked a simple question on Twitter/X:
What ideas in computer science are universally considered good?

The resulting list includes 17 ideas (not implementations) that are “universally considered good”, which means not debated. What’s interesting (in addition to the ideas themselves) is that they were all thought of/discovered prior to 1974. Where are all the new good ideas in Computer Science?! Perhaps we’re still debating them…

By 1974, 50 years ago, we had most of what we call modern computing. Today’s fundamentals are the same — a C programmer from 1974 would feel at home on a modern computer except for the alien-like speed. I hope we have new ideas that in 50 years will be universally considered good.

⚰️ Corporate Open Source is Dead

Instead of linking to and IBM press release announcing their purchase of HashiCorp for $6.4 billion, let’s enjoy our friend Jeff Geerling’s analysis!

As free money dries up and profits slow, companies slash headcount almost as fast as community trust.

Can you smell what Jeff is cookin’?

Open source culture relies on trust. Trust that companies you and I helped build (even without being on the payroll) wouldn’t rugpull.
But time and time again, that trust is shattered.

He goes on to declare 2024 as the year that ‘corporate open source’ dies. But it ain’t all bad, not in Jeff’s eyes:

In fact, this could be a huge opportunity; what happened to the spunky startups like Ansible, HashiCorp, Elasticsearch, or Redis? They were lighting their industries on fire with great new software.
What happened to building up communities of developers, crossing cultural and economic barriers to make software that changed the world?
There are still projects doing that, but so many succumb to enterprise money, where eye-watering amounts of revenue puts profit over philosophy…
Maybe it’s time for a new open source rebellion. Maybe this time, money won’t change company culture as new projects arise from the ash heap. Maybe not, but at least we can try.

🗑️ WIP is waste

Jared Turner writes on thoughtbot’s blog (which I’ve linked to seldomly in recent years, but I’m tickled at the opportunity. They did a lot of good for me in my early consulting career):

Work in progress has zero value. Ship!
Before a task is shipped it provides zero value.
Any work in progress is pure cost.
Two tasks in progress adds cost, for no value.
Only after shipping do you create value. Always ship.
One task shipped is infinitely better than 4 tasks “almost done”.
Ship something of value first. Then begin something new.

This is a good reminder for me that our (super cool) “custom feeds” feature that currently only I am using provides zero value to the people I’m building it for until I actually ship the sucker…

‼️ Join Tauri’s “DevTools Premium” waitlist

Thanks to CrabNebula for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

If you’re building with Tauri, this might be the best news you hear all week! DevTools Premium is right around the corner. Here’s what you can expect:

A native desktop app built with Tauri
First-class support for Tauri 2.0
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Usable as an embedded drawer in a Tauri app
Or popped out for a bigger view just like Chrome DevTools

The CrabNebula team is even experimenting with more advanced features like record/replay of debugging sessions.

It’s not just about finding and fixing issues; it’s about understanding, optimizing, and perfecting the application development process.

Join the waitlist today!

😱 A leadership crisis in the Nix community

Daroc Alden, writing for LWN:

On April 21, a group of anonymous authors and non-anonymous signatories published a lengthy open letter to the Nix community and Nix founder Eelco Dolstra calling for his resignation from the project. They claimed ongoing problems with the project’s leadership, primarily focusing on the way his actions have allegedly undermined people nominally empowered to perform various moderation and governance tasks. Since its release, the letter has gained more than 100 signatures.

That open letter isn’t merely lengthy, I’d call it meandering and difficult to follow. Thankfully, the good communicators at LWN grokked it so we don’t have to:

The open letter has several related complaints, but the most central one is that they allege Dolstra has repeatedly strong-armed the board and members of other community teams to overrule their decisions.

The crux of the matter seems to be that Nix is governed by the NixOS Foundation, but Dolstra is acting like a BDFL. The authors (and signatories) of the letter are calling for Dolstra’s resignation from the board. If he doesn’t, a fork is likely.

🔬 Ruby might be faster than you think

After running a “crystalized” version of Fibonacci to confirm it executed 4x faster than a pure Ruby version, John Hawthorn noticed something…

But something is a bit off here. The Ruby implementation has a subtle mistake which causes signficantly more work than it needs to.

Turns out by tweaking the Ruby implementation and enabling the built-in JIT compiler, he flipped the benchmark on its head:

Now it’s Ruby that’s 5 times faster than Crystal!!! And 20x faster than our original version…
I thought it was notable that by making some minor tweaks to Ruby code it can now outperform a precompiled statically typed language in a purpose-built example of when it is slow. I’m hopeful that someday with future advancements in the Ruby JIT even the small tweaks might not be necessary.

My takeaway from this post isn’t that Ruby is finally Web Scale™️ now, it’s that we do well to know our tools deeply, whichever tools we decide to use.

💭 Think pieces / long reads

🤲 Open sourcing MS-DOS 4.0

Scott Hanselman & Jeff Wilcox, on Microsoft’s Open Source Blog:

Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we’re releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There’s a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release.

The spirit of open innovation is one of my favorite spirits, indeed.

🫠 Maybe MOAR is not the answer

Thanks to Test Double for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

We thought the whirlwind of layoffs was going to calm down. Then it didn’t. Turns out a relentless push for MOAR features and MOAR developers is not the answer…

Where did this all go wrong & how can we avoid it in the future? Test Double has some thoughts.

🙅‍♂️ The End Of The Free Tier

Juan Diego Rodríguez goes deep on free-tier pricing for Smashing Magazine: why it’s a popular offering for startups, why they inevitably remove it & how we can reason about it, both as a customer and as a SaaS operator:

Free tiers should attract users rather than trap them, and there is an abysmal difference between replacing a free tier for $5 per month with one that costs nearly $40. Taking away the service is one thing; charging exorbitant rates on top of it only adds insult to injury.
We can do better here, and there are plenty of alternatives to free tiers for effectively marketing a product.

🙈 Google lays off its Python team

These comments by Martin DeMello, sum it up:

i got caught up in this :( really sad about the whole thing; this was by far the best job i’ve had in my 20-year career (including other teams at google), and i do not know if i will ever have another one as good. we were a chronically understaffed team supporting a large part of the python ecosystem at google, and we did some amazing work over the years…
i reckon we simply got offshored, since they’re now building a whole new python team in munich, though i don’t know whether for cost reasons or to expand the languages presence in the munich office or both.

I’m old enough to remember when Google was the coolest tech company in the world and could do no wrong in the sight of software developers. The GOOG’s fall from grace has been both epic & tragic. I’m hopeful the Pythonistas affected will find better places to hang their hats soon, if they haven’t already.

🧰 New tools for the ol’ toolbox

Statusnook: Effortlessly deploy a status page and start monitoring endpoints in minutes (open source, self-hosted)

gothstarter: A starter pack for web apps built with Go, Templ, HTMX & Tailwind (coolest stackronym yet?)

pragmatic-drag-and-drop: Fast drag and drop for any experience on any tech stack (powers Trello)

canvas-confetti: Performant confetti animation in the browser (might as well do it right)

Perplexica: An AI-powered search engine (open source alt. to Perplexity AI)

pico: Open source and managed web services leveraging SSH (publish via rsync or scp)

🎞️ Clip of the week

Anthony Starks defends his unpopular opinion that “The Linux desktop is here and it’s fine”

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week: Dustin Bluck (the new owner of Castro) on Wednesday & Ron Evans (from TinyGo) on Friday.

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

–Jerod