The Astro team releases a new documentation builder, legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth plays with ChatGPT, over 500 volunteer mods have signed an open letter to Stack Overflow Inc, Reddit faces a revolt due to their new API pricing & the Technology Innovation Institute release Falcon, a new open source LLM that’s topping Hugging Face’s leaderboard.
Will McGugan’s Trogon auto-generates friendly TUIs for your CLI apps, Stability AI’s official open source variant of DreamStudio, John Calhoun writes about life after 26 years programming at Apple, Google’s news TLDs could be a boon to scammers & Pablo Meier documents a way to discuss programming languages.
Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.
Tracy Durnell thinks AI has already poisoned its own well, Adam Hill’s microsite catalogs everything you need to UnsuckJS, Lionel Dricot thinks we need more Richard Stallman, not less & the Vulcan team proves you can’t trust ChatGPT’s package recommendations.
The Gorilla team is building an API store for LLMs, DeviceScript is Microsoft’s new TypeScript programming environment for microcontrollers, Nyxt is a hackable browser written in Lisp, Morgan Housel writes about expectations debt & I issue a gentle reminder to my fellow software engineers: there’s still no silver bullet.
Chris Stjernlöf got nerd-sniped and ended up writing down his practices of reliable software design, Ben Visness has had enough with the npm community’s propensity to pull in micro-libraries to suit every need, “Stay SaaSy” makes three metaphors for problem solving categories, Troy Hunt takes us inside the “3 billion people” National Public Data breach & Dasel is one data tool to rule them all.
Bun 1.0 is out of the oven, Mojo is now available for local download, Vince Lwt asked 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions & published the answers, Textual Web turns TUIs in to web applications & James Haydon dives deep to discover the bug that the UK air traffic control meltdown.
OpenTF announces they’re forking Terraform and joining the Linux Foundation, Meta gets in the LLM-for-codegen game with Code Llama, Matt Mullenweg announces WordPress.com’s new 100-year plan, Paul Gichuki from Thinkst learns that default behaviors stick (and so do examples) & Marco Otte-Witte makes his case for Rust on the web.
ElectricSQL is a project that offers a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps, Ned Batchelder writes about the myth of the myth of “learning styles”, Carl Johnson thinks XML is better than YAML, Berkan Sasmaz defines and describes “idempotency” & HyperDX is an open source alternative Datadog or New Relic.
InfluxDB finishes a multi-year rewrite in Rust, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be on sale by the end of the month, the Bruno team builds an open source API explorer that’s local-first and will never have a cloud, Xe Iaso thinks gokrazy is really cool & Matt Rickard shares lessons from years of debugging.
Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he’s worked with (who also is a heck of a programmer), Kevin Lin declares that OpenTelemetry delivers on its promise for open observability, Justin Garrison details Terraform vs GitOps vs System Initiative, Inc. writes how Apple beats burnout & Aline Lerner’s advice on how (not) to sabotage your salary negotiations before you even start.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ recommendations for remote vs colocated teams, Duarte Carmo created a neural search engine from Changelog transcripts, Tom Hacohen says strong static typing is a hill he’s willing to die on, Orhun Parmaksız created a CLI that makes your keyboard sound like a typewriter & Luke Plant spits hard truths about simplicity.
Chip Huyen documents the shifting sand of large data models, Herman Ă•unapuu reviews the Zimaboard, Bryan Braun shares 4 of his most recent VSCode configuration discoveries & Swizec Teller wrote a great summary of the inaugural AI Engineer Summit.
ChatGPT’s new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox’s share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can’t be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she’s ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the “code is read more than written” cliche with his own: “code is run more than read.”
David Hugh-Jones has a lot to say about what makes a good comment, Hugging Face released a distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition, The New Stack reports on C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup’s plan for bringing safety to the language, Jeff Sandberg declares that CSS is fun again & Jose M. Gilgado praises the beauty of finished software.
The hubbub of the web dev world right now is Next.js’ integration of React Server Components, Kent C. Dodds writes up why he doesn’t use Next, Lee Robinson responds with why he does, the NixOS team hits a milestone in their reproducible builds effort & OpenSign is an open source alternative to DocuSign.
A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.
The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a “eulogy” to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.
Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.
This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!
Scott Chacon writes up his insider take on GitHub’s success, Sentry wants other companies to take the Open Source Pledge, Benj Edwards used AI to reproduce his late father’s handwriting, Dave Kiss explains the current hype that PHP is getting & Taylor Otwell raises $57 million series A from Accel.
sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev’s fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto’s experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.
Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes “all code is tech debt” is all wrong.
Brendan Gregg details how eBPF can help us have no more blue Fridays, Misty De Meo thinks GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software, Gavin D. Howard does not want Rust to be used for everything, The Notion team published a deep dive into how they used the WASM version of SQLite to improve browser performance & Gregor Ojstersek writes up how to build good relationships inside and outside your engineering teams.
Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).
The big story right now is the recently uncovered backdoor in liblzma (aka XZ) – a relatively obscure compression library that happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH.
This incident is noteworthy for so many reasons: the exploit itself, how it was deployed, how it was found, what it says about our industry & how the community reacted. Let’s dig in!
A popular open source iOS authenticator app goes rogue under new ownership, Andreas Kling steps back from SerenityOS & forks Ladybird, Vhyrro takes a thought-provoking try at a “static effect system”, Matt Bessey is over GraphQL & Marc-Andre Giroux still likes GraphQL sometimes (in the right context).
HashiCorp sends OpenTofu a nasty-gram in the wake of Matt Asay’s infringement claims, Polar is like Patreon but for software creators, a Common Corpus of LLM data is released on HuggingFace & Loki is an open source tool for fact verification.
A new badge for open source projects that won’t be getting any maintenance, everything Chip Huyen learned from looking at 900 open source AI tools, CNBC writes up tech’s renewed layoff trend, Teable is a Postgres-Airtable fusion & Target announces an open source fund.
Apple backs off killing web apps (but the fight continues), Luka Kladaric writes about how to ship quality software in hostile environments, Deno’s new package registry is an npm superset, Martin Fowler on the value of periodic face-to-face & Eugene Ghanizadeh wants us to get more decentralized than the Fediverse. Leave us nice words!
