PostgresML, the future of Go, Markdown for timelines, replacing Google Fonts, and more

Issue #412 • 2022-06-26

Changelog Interviews
Practical AI
Go Time
JS Party
Ship It!

Markdown markwhen.com

Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines

There’s a long history of timeline tools for the web, but most of them had you inserting the data into an XML file, a JSON object, or worse yet: the HTML itself. Markdown-style plain text to the rescue?

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #markdown#dataviz

Fonts fonts.bunny.net

A GDPR compliant drop-in replacement for Google Fonts

Bunny Fonts is an open-source, privacy-first web font platform designed to put privacy back into the internet.

With a zero-tracking and no-logging policy, Bunny Fonts helps you stay fully GDPR compliant and puts your user’s personal data into their own hands. Additionally, you can enjoy lightning-fast load times thanks to bunny.net’s global CDN network to help improve SEO and deliver a better user experience.

All font in the collection are fully open source, which means you can use them without fees even in commercial offerings.

JavaScript tauri.app

Tauri (a cross-platform app toolkit) goes 1.0

Tauri is an app framework built with Rust. You build UIs for it using virtually any frontend JavaScript framework. It has three major tenets: security, privacy, and environment. Speaking to the latter:

The apps you make are lean and performant, which reduces electricity, storage space, and general natural resource consumption. Every byte saved is a leaf on a tree that gets to grow.

This project has gotten a lot of early interest because, well, people have been waiting for an Electron alternative to emerge. Now that Tauri is 1.0 I’m guessing adoption will really start to take off.

Even more good news: we have an episode on Tauri in the hopper for ya 💪

Raygun Icon Raygun – Sponsored

Monitor and improve Core Web Vitals

Get a detailed overview of how your website performs against Google’s modern user-centric metrics, alongside all the diagnostics you need to take action.

For $8 per user per month you get Raygun’s first-class support for CWVs plus a ton of tooling to improve the performance and user experience of your application.

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Startups herman.bearblog.dev

The problem is that your users hate MVPs

Building products is a difficult and time-consuming effort. Figuring out what the problems, finding a potential solution to that problem, and then building that solution all take a decent chunk of time and effort. It’s due to this process that the minimum viable product was born. The motivation for building an MVP is still valid. Build something small and easy to test, launch quickly, and pivot or trash it if it doesn’t perform as desired.

There is another, less selfish way.

I read an article by Jason Cohen a few years ago which changed the way I think about product development. Instead of building MVPs, we should be building SLCs. Something Simple, Loveable, and Complete.

I like the thinking behind SLCs. So simple, so loveable, so…

Hat tip to Henry Snopek for linking this up in the #gotimefm channel of Gophers Slack! When it comes to thinking about your projects, Henry says:

I like to use MVP for fast projects, and SLC for “effective” projects…

Yeah, I like that framing too. So simple, so loveable, so…

Career successfulsoftware.net

No-one knows what they are doing

Wise words from Andy Brice:

When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions…

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started, and still struggle with decisions now.

I tell people this all the time when they ask me for advice. I’ll still give them my advice. But it comes with the disclaimer that I really have no idea what I’m doing. 😆

Python github.com

Efficiently diff rows across two different databases

  • ⇄ Verifies across many different databases
  • 🔍 Outputs diffs of rows in detail
  • 🚨 Simple CLI/API to create monitoring and alerts
  • 🔁 Bridges column types of different formats and levels of precision
  • 🔥 Verify 25M+ rows in <10s, and 1B+ rows in ~5min
  • ♾️ Works for tables with 10s of billions of rows

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #python#databases#tooling

Chronosphere Icon Chronosphere – Sponsored

Observability platform for scaling cloud-native

Chronosphere is the observability platform for cloud-native teams operating at scale.

When it comes to observability, teams need a reliable, scalable, and efficient solution so they can know about issues well before their customers do.

Companies born in the cloud-native era often start with Prometheus for monitoring, which is obviously an amazing piece of software, but they quickly push it to its limits and often outgrow it. They run into issues with siloed data, missing long-term storage, and wasted engineering time firefighting the monitoring system vs delivering their application with confidence.

Learn more and get a demo at chronosphere.io.

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Linux phoronix.com

Linus Torvalds: Rust for the kernel could possibly be merged for Linux 5.20

Speaking this morning at The Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit, Linus Torvalds talked up the possibilities of Rust within the Linux kernel and that it could be landing quite soon – possibly even for the next kernel cycle…

The Linux 5.20 merge window will open following the release of Linux 5.19 stable around the end of July, so at that point we’ll see if the Rust PR is submitted and lands for this next kernel version. It wouldn’t be too surprising with how things have been pacing and already having the blessing of Linus.

Lots of positivity about this in the attached comment thread.

Bash til.simonwillison.net

One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite

Simon Willison figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 CLI:

sqlite3 :memory: -cmd '.mode csv' -cmd '.import taxi.csv taxi' \
  'SELECT passenger_count, COUNT(*), AVG(total_amount) FROM taxi GROUP BY passenger_count'

Ie TL;DR’d the one-liner for ya, but you’ll have to go to Simon’s site for the explainer.

PHP github.com

Laravel Pint is a minimalist code style fixer for PHP

Laravel Pint is a zero-dependency PHP code style fixer for minimalists - built on top of PHP-CS-Fixer. Pint makes it simple to ensure that your code style stays clean and consistent.

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #php#laravel

Flatfile Icon Flatfile – Sponsored

A turnkey CSV data importer with compliance built-in

Build the CSV importer of your dreams in minutes - no more wasting dev cycles. Start importing data with Flatfile’s beautiful UI component and import messy spreadsheets in less than 60 seconds.

Flatfile’s proprietary Data Hooks® and Smart Fields™ make it easy to create templates so data gets to your system exactly how it needs to look.

HIPAA, GDPR, SOC II Type II compliance out of the box.

View the platform and get started at flatfile.com

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Machine Learning github.com

A collection of resources to learn about MLOps

While still in its infancy, MLOps has attracted machine learning engineers and software engineers in general. With every new paradigm comes new challenges and opportunities to learn. In this primer, we highlight a few available resources to upskill and inform yourself on the latest in the world of MLOps.

Good resources, regardless of whether you think MLOps is its own thing or should be rolled into DevOps.

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #machinelearning#ops#awesome

Brave github.com

Brave Search Goggles

Goggles enable anyone, be it individuals or a community, to alter the ranking of Brave search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of Brave’s search index.

This could be really cool! A few examples use cases:

  • No Pinterest - Rerank results to remove pages / threads hosted on Pinterest.
  • Rust programming - Rerank results to boost content related to the Rust programming language.
  • Hacker News / 1k short – Prioritizes domains popular with the Hacker News community, minus those that would rank among the top 1000 most-viewed websites.

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #brave#tooling

Svelte YouTube

Svelte Origins: A JavaScript Documentary

The Documentary tells the story of how Svelte came to be, what makes Svelte different, and how it changes the game as a JavaScript framework. Filmed in locations throughout Europe and the US, it features Svelte’s creator Rich Harris and members from the core community who contributed to making Svelte what it is today.

Lots of familiar faces in this one.

logged by jerodsanto Discuss #svelte#javascript

Sourcegraph Icon Sourcegraph – Sponsored

Weakest link in software supply chain security (it’s not open source)

From the Sourcegragh blog:

Open source code is both treasure chest and Pandora’s Box. Instead of starting from scratch when building an application or program, software developers can draw from third-party libraries and packages to jump-start development. These shortcuts come with risk though, as packages often contain yet more packages within, and these dependencies could harbor malicious code planted by bad actors, or vulnerabilities that leave your code open to exploitation.

It’s easy to blame poorly maintained open source projects and make that random person in Nebraska the scapegoat here, but don’t write off third-party code. The alternative is reinventing the wheel every time and is likely to be frustrating for your engineering teams as they work on solving problems they know someone else has fixed already instead of writing new code. So, how do you balance the velocity unlocked by using third-party libraries with the risk posed by unaudited code? The answer is in your vulnerability management process.

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Apple appleinsider.com

How Apple could kill CAPTCHAs

AppleInsider explains Apple’s new Private Access Tokens (PAT) tech announced at WWDC:

Using a new HTTP authentication method called PrivateToken, a server uses cryptography to verify a client passed an iCloud attestation check.

When the client needs a token it contacts an attester — in this case, Apple — which performs the process using certificates stored in the device’s Secure Enclave.

I’ve been waiting for someone to kill CAPTCHAs for us, but this will be an Apple-only solution for now:

The company is working to help make Private Access Tokens a web standard, but there is no mention of tokens working on Android or Windows. People on those platforms may have to put up with CAPTCHAs, for now — or wait for Microsoft’s and Google’s work on the matter.

I believe this is the draft of the standard that they’re referring to. Cloudflare also has a nice article on their work in this space.