What exactly is a software architect, anyhow?

A software architect is a software expert who makes high-level design choices and dictates technical standards, including software coding standards, tools, and platforms. (Source: Wikipedia: Software Architect)

If that’s something you’d like to do (or are doing, but want to do it better), then this is a great resource for you. It covers the levels of architecture, important skills to obtain, books to read, and a technology roadmap.

In this episode, we’re joined by Kelsey Hightower to discuss the evolution of cloud infrastructure management, the role Kubernetes and its API play in it, and how we, as developers and operators, should be adapting to these changes.

The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers.

On this episode Dan Guido –CEO of security firm Trail of Bits and Algo’s creator– joins Jerod to discuss the project in depth.

The goal of svelvet is to make svelte play nicely with snowpack and web_modules.

As of today, svelte depends on a loader for webpack or rollup which compiles your svelte components into individual js files. Since snowpack’s goal is to avoid the need for a bundler, we can’t use those loaders, but we can use svelte’s internal compiler api to do 95% of the work for us. On top of that, svelvet adds automatic file watching to recompile your svelte files just like a loader would, but much faster!

I’m not gonna lie, any green field that offers a super light build process is looking pretty stinkin’ green these days. That being said, there’s a reason we call it the bleeding edge.

One of the things people most associate with AI is automation, but how is AI actually shaping automation in manufacturing? Costas Boulis from Bright Machines joins us to talk about how they are using AI in various manufacturing processes and in their “microfactories.” He also discusses the unique challenges of developing AI models based on manufacturing data.

This isn’t the most practical item in our feed this week, but it’s definitely neat and the how is it made section of the README (and related code) shows how you might accomplish something similar.

Alex Hudson:

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.

We had a great dialog about this topic on our 2020 predictions episode of JS Party. I tend to agree with Alex’s analysis, which is in-depth and well-reasoned. What do you think about the “no code” movement? Hype or reality? Somewhere in between?

Show us humans a picture of someone in uniform on a mound of dirt throwing a ball and we will quickly tell you we’re looking at baseball. But how do you make a computer come to the same conclusion?

Visual Question Answering

In this post, we’ll explore basic methods for performing VQA and build our own simple implementation in Python

Dan Abramov on the dangers of doing DRY wrong:

Obsessing with “clean code” and removing duplication is a phase many of us go through. When we don’t feel confident in our code, it is tempting to attach our sense of self-worth and professional pride to something that can be measured. A set of strict lint rules, a naming schema, a file structure, a lack of duplication.

First you have to learn the rule of writing software. Then you have to learn how and when to let go of the rules.

Mat, Carmen, and Jon are joined by Dan Scales to talk about Mat’s favorite keyword in Go - defer. Where did the defer statement come from? What problems can it solve? How has it shaped how we write Go code? How are other languages solving similar problems? And what exactly was changed in Go 1.14 to improve the performance of defer?

No more waiting for your bundler to rebuild your site every time you hit save. Instead, every change is reflected in the browser instantly.

This relies on ESM (Mikeal gave a great rundown on the current state of things on a recent JS Party), so it’s not for everyone. The homepage has rundowns on who should use this, who should avoid it, and how to get started.

Brought to you by the fine folks at Pika.

Here’s a fun project attempting to explain what exactly is happening under the hood for some counter-intuitive snippets and lesser-known features in Python.

While some of the examples you see below may not be WTFs in the truest sense, but they’ll reveal some of the interesting parts of Python that you might be unaware of. I find it a nice way to learn the internals of a programming language, and I believe that you’ll find it interesting too!

This is awesome! I hope it’s a huge hit and is quickly emulated by other successful tech companies.

Dev Degree is a 4-year, work-integrated learning program that combines hands-on developer experience at Shopify with an accredited Computer Science degree from either Carleton University or York University.

Working closely with our university partners, students take three university courses on campus each term and spend ~25 hours each week at Shopify.

This is 4,500+ hours of work experience paired with 4,000+ hours of academic experience. You earn $160k in salary, tuition, & vacation AND there’s a built-in 50/50 gender parity in the program.

KBall, Divya, Mikeal, and Feross dig deep into refactoring. When to do it, best practices, things to watch out for, and the difference between a refactor and a rewrite. We then close out with some key pro tips.

I’m not sure which is more interesting: the fact that Next.js is getting in to the static-site generation game or the fact that Notion is becoming popular enough amongst devs that people would use it as a back-end for their blog.

The Notion aspect, while interesting, comes with a big disclaimer:

since it is using a private API and experimental features, use at your own risk as these things could change at any moment.

Jeff Kaufman thinks so:

we don’t understand why programmers are paid so well. If you’re a programmer, there’s enough of a chance that this is temporary that it’s worth explicitly planning for a future in which you’re laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work.

I don’t believe the sky is falling, but Jeff’s advice is good nonetheless. One thing you can start doing right now (and is always a wise move) is to live beneath your means. That way, if/when your means are substantially reduced, you may feel a pinch, but it won’t squeeze you all the way out.

Rete is a modular framework for visual programming. Rete allows you to create node-based editor directly in the browser. You can define nodes and workers that allow users to create instructions for processing data in your editor without a single line of code.

GoatCounter is a web analytics platform, roughly similar to Google Analytics or Matomo. It aims to give meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics for business purposes, while still staying usable for non-technical users to use on personal websites. The choices that currently exist are between freely hosted but with problematic privacy (e.g. Google Analytics), hosting your own complex software or paying $19/month (e.g. Matomo), or extremely simplistic “vanity statistics”.

There’s a free hosted offering for non-commercial use. For those running businesses, self-host the thing. Live demo here.

Welcome to 2020 — on this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode Jerod and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science our newest podcast, it’s for the curious! And we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come…

Here’s a heartwarming tale of how Backblaze broke libcurl’s copyright, then fixed it, then donated a hefty $15,600 to the project. Why that particular amount?

Backblaze was started in my living room on Jan 15, 2007 (13 years ago tomorrow) and that represents $100/month for every month Backblaze has depended on libcurl back to the beginning. / Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze

More like this!