Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hello again! 👋

Short issue this week as I have to catch a flight this afternoon to Seattle for Microsoft Build. If you’re going to be there, hit reply and let me know! Adam and I would love to connect with as many folks as possible while we’re there 🙏

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 A fresh batch of pods for devs

🎙️ Birk Jernström is building the Patreon for developers changelog.fm/591
💚 Alex Kretzschmar & the perfect media server changelog.com/friends/43
🚀 Andrew Atkinson on picking (and scaling) Postgres in 2024 shipit.show/104
🪩 Brian Breiholz on building 3D games in the browser jsparty.fm/323
🤖 Josh Albrecht’s full-stack approach to AI agents practicalai.fm/269

👽 Kyle explains “Legacy Software” to the aliens

Every so often, Taylor Troesh publishes something so stinkin’ good I’m actually mad about it. I don’t even know why I’m mad, but at least one of the reasons is that I struggle to pick a pull quote. Ok here’s my best shot:

Why not use the old languages? Ha! Dude, nobody uses those languages anymore! They don’t have any of the new libraries.
No, we don’t port over the new libraries because it would feel too “clunky.”
Of course, we try to make the languages less clunky! It’s called “ergonomics.” But whenever we add ergonomics to a language, it becomes clunkier.
No, we can’t rewrite the legacy software in a new language because the problem is usually too dangerous or complicated.
I guess they got lucky? Nobody today would dare tackle those same problems in the same languages.

Ok sorry I can’t limit myself to just one shot. Here’s a chaser:

Sorry, no more questions. I’m two minutes late for standup. Humanity is deprecating TypeScript next year, so we’re migrating our proxy server to HypeScript, but we just found out it’s incompatible with our orchestrator, so we have to switch cloud providers. Please don’t call this number again.

😖 Why designers aren’t understood

Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman addresses why so many designers feel misunderstood and under appreciated in business contexts:

Corporate language is filled with metaphors of fighting. Companies “conquer” the market, they “capture” mindshare, they “target” customers, they “destroy” the competition, they want to attract more “eye-balls, get users “hooked, and increase “life-time value.
Designers, on the other hand, don’t speak in such metaphors. We speak of how to “reduce” friction, “improve” consistency, “empower” users, “enable and help” users, “meet” their expectations, “bridge the gap”, “develop empathy”, understand “user needs, design an “inclusive” experience.

This is two very different ways to communicate. In response, Vitaly shares how he approaches language in business meetings, not by adopting the language of the business world, but by telling a story (in eight parts):

Next time you walk in a meeting, pay attention to your words. Translate UX terms in a language that other departments understand. It might not take long until you’ll see support coming from everywhere — just because everyone can now clearly see how your work helps them do their work better.

📺 This Week in Net on Cloudflare TV

Thanks to Cloudflare for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Did you know that Cloudflare puts out a ton of great video content?! For example, This Week in Net:

On the latest episode, host João Tomé heads to SF for the cybersecurity RSA Conference, catches up with Emily Hancock (Cloudflare’s CPO) & interviews Dani Grant, a former Cloudflare employee and co-founder of jam.dev, a company dedicated to fixing software bugs and built on Cloudflare’s platform.

🗑️ Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

Oracle has swapped Terraform for the open-source fork OpenTofu under the hood of its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Cloud Manager. It is now telling customers they “must” make the shift to its new OpenTofu-based version of the migration/provisioning tool by June 30, 2024.

The reason for the switch is unsurprising, but notable nonetheless: “due to forthcoming Terraform licensing changes.” This is a big vote of confidence for the fork. Will Oracle’s move be a one-off or the first big domino to fall in an OpenTofu rally?

🕹️ Hackers reprogram NES Tetris from within the game

It is bonkers that people have the time (and wherewithal) to discover this stuff:

the player has to hold down “up” on the third controller and right, left, and down on the fourth controller (that latter combination requires some controller fiddling to allow for simultaneous left and right directional input). Doing so sends the jump code to an area of RAM that holds the names and scores for the game’s high score listing, giving an even larger surface of RAM that can be manipulated directly by the player.

🙅 Open source is neither a community nor a democracy

DHH:

…remember that open source is first and foremost a method of collaboration between programmers who show up to do the work. Not an entitlement program for petulant users to get free stuff or a seat at the table where decisions are made.

This reminds me of something Ron Evans said on our pod (which I echoed on the freeCodeCamp pod) about where the “open source community” meets:

there’s no single open source community; there’s many. In fact, one could splinter into two, or three, or ten, at any point.

🥳 Upstream: a one-day celebration of open source

Thanks to Tidelift for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Join 50+ speakers & 4500 participants on June 5th, 2024 for an awesome one-day celebration of open source, the developers who use it, and the maintainers who make it.

A 100% virtual, completely free event bringing together like-minded application developers, open source project maintainers, and the extended network of people who care most about their work.

This year’s theme is Unusual ideas to solve the usual problems. Don’t miss it!

📧 Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email

Gabriel Sieben explains why he believes email is pretty good for users, but the backend is a mess:

…we’ve got a lousy spec, with decades of cruft and unofficial spec, and we aren’t that great at securing it, or making sure messages are authentic. So… could we do better?

He then proposes a hypothetical 2nd-gen email and what he thinks it could possibly look like and the technical process (MX2) by which we might incrementally adopt it (similar to the HTTP to HTTPS transition). There’s many good ideas in this post and links to further discussion, with this edit in response:

MX2 will literally never happen if Google and Microsoft don’t join in. They would also, of course, have considerable control on the outcome. However, if even open-source communities and developers adopted MX2 because it was easy to implement and open source… you never know what grassroots can do.

🎞️ Clip of the week: Zeno’s YC pitch

Zeno Rocha was super candid with Adam about his YCombinator pitch & how he got Resend’s initial funding.

🔗 Quick hits before I hit the road

Pi-C.A.R.D: an AI powered voice assistant running entirely on a Raspberry Pi

IPO: Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London

pipecat: a framework for building multimodal conversational agents

Retro: Zach Leatherman opens up about running the recent 11ty conference

PinePods: a self-hosted podcast system with great taste for content ;)

Athena Crisis: a high-quality video game built with just web tech

N64: Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

Winamp: the O.G. llama will soon make its source code “open to developers”

Obisidian: 1658 plugins have been categorized in this unofficial directory

Pic Smaller: compress JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, GIF images intelligently

Emoji: the history of our favorite unicode characters goes way back

That’s the news for now, but this is issue #95, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Ross R, Doug L, Alex M, Mariusz J, Scott L, Kevin S, Erik J.A., James M, Joonas K, Olivier F, Alex S.B. & Anton K!

We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝)

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