The LAST Strange Loop conference is right around the corner!

The conference has accumulated 673 videos on its YouTube channel, which means there’s gold in them hills, but finding the gold might consume some of your precious time. Good news!

I was hanging out in the conference’s Slack when someone asked:

What are some of y’all’s favorite past Strange Loop talks? As someone who knows the conf by reputation but hasn’t been before, I’m curious what some of your favorites are!

A barrage of YouTube links followed, so I scooped them up to share here so everyone can enjoy these golden Strange Loop talks ✨

We asked 100 JS Party listeners what ONE thing they always have to remind themselves when coding. Survey says!

I’ve found myself referencing this a couple times recently. Both of those conversations were in the context of React, but the principle applies to every over-adopted technology.

I had the honor of joining the fine folks at Elixir SF awhile back to talk all about how we’ve been podcasting on Elixir for a long time now. Tune in if you’re curious about such things and/or if you’d like to take a stroll down memory lane as I show old versions of our album art and play our intro music along the way.

The preso is average, but the Q&A near the end is above average, if you ask me. OH! And also we got Zoom bombed twice, which was a first for me. Thankfully, it was also a last. So far, at least…

After reading Lucas da Costa’s Why deadlines are pointless and what to do instead, I agree with almost every point he makes, especially this one:

It’s about time we start calling deadlines by their real name: pressure

Lucas goes on to describe how deadlines can cause harm, can’t actually make people code faster, and so on. I agree with that too. But does that make them pointless? Not necessarily!

Sometimes a little pressure is just what the doctor ordered. Here’s what I mean by that.

You’re cordially invited to the “Best Booth in the Building”! We’ll be giving away stickers & t-shirts, recording shows, playing video games & awarding one lucky/skilled listener with a FREE Nintendo Switch 🕹

Our shows have chapters baked in now, whoop whoop! This post details some of the challenges we had to overcome to get that done, including a brand new open source Elixir library for reading & writing ID3v2 tags.

I won’t call SQLite’s current moment a comeback, because the most used database engine in the world doesn’t have anything to come back from. I’m going with “renaissance”, because despite its already mass adoption, there has been something of a rebirth of interest from one software sector that had previously relegated it to dev & test environments: web apps

I had the honor of joining Robby Russell (who you may remember from Oh My Zsh) on his Maintainable podcast for a super-fun discussion on well-maintained software. Here’s how Robby describes it:

Robby has a chat with Jerod Santo, the Managing Editor and Partner of Changelog Media. Jerod helps lead and co-host Changelog’s flagship podcast, The Changelog, and builds all the cool stuff that makes Changelog awesome. Jerod shares his journey from being a typical networking engineer (Infosec) to the experienced programmer that he is today and his programming wisdom from the trenches.

Tune in as he highlights the undeniable importance of automated test suites and code readability, describes the arc of an engineer’s career, and talks about the past experiences that make him lean more towards clarity over cleverness when coding. He also shares some of the things engineers should consider in regard to pulling in third-party code or writing from scratch, and so much more. Enjoy!

Thanks for having me, Robby! 💚

If you have a library dependency that your application relies upon, and you’re afraid to (or for whatever reason will not) peek under the covers and grok its source code… you should not be using that piece of software.

In this video I kick the tires on Mat Ryer’s xbar, an open source utility that lets you “put anything in your macOS menu bar.” I get it to tell us dad jokes, keep us abreast of Covid case counts, and write a custom plugin that pulls from Plausible Analytics to display changelog.com’s real-time visitor count.

We had a lot of fun recording the Vim with me series alongside episode 450, so I thought, “Hey, let’s keep it going!” We have Nick Nisi for you today. Nick is a regular panelist on JS Party, co-hosted our upcoming Neovim episode of The Changelog, and is personally responsible for the #vimparty channel of Changelog’s community Slack.

(If you have any requests of people you’d like to see Vimming with me, let us know in the comments!)

On The Changelog #451, I spouted off a very brief history of Unix, Linux, and related things. Thanks to our handy/dandy transcripts, that history has been transmogrified into a blog and accompanying audiogram. The podcaster’s version of Don’t Repeat Yourself!

Julia stuck around after our Vim interview to share some of her Vim setup with me. She shows off the Visual Mode feature that I learned on the pod and shared her love of macros as well!

Gary stuck around after our Vim interview to share some of his Vim setup with me. If you’ve never seen Gary use Vim, this is a must-watch. The guy moves at the speed of thought. 🏃‍♂️

Suz stuck around after our Vim interview to share some of her Vim setup with me. She created an epic plugin that lets her Twitch audience comment on specific lines while she’s editing. Definitely worth a 👀!

Every commit is a gift, seriously. One of the best ways to show your appreciation for a gift is by a sincere and thoughtful thank you.

So, in honor of Maintainer Week we encourage you to thank a maintainer who has improved your life with their open source gift to the world.

Here’s a sneak peek of our upcoming episode of The Changelog (plus bonus videos) starring Julia Evans, Drew Neil, Suz Hinton, and Gary Bernhardt!

In my 15+ years of web development, there are very few things I can say are unequivocally a good idea. It almost always does depend.

Storing timestamps instead of booleans, however, is one of those things I can go out on a limb and say it doesn’t really depend all that much. You might as well timestamp it. There are plenty of times in my career when I’ve stored a boolean and later wished I’d had a timestamp. There are zero times when I’ve stored a timestamp and regretted that decision.

We did a somewhat deep exploration of Vite on JS Party #168. During that time I shared some tips & tricks for quickly coming up to speed on an open source project. Some of it is JavaScript/Vite-specific, but there are general principles laced in there as well. Maybe it’ll help you read other people’s code more effectively.