I created a GitHub action that auto-formats Changelog’s episode transcripts. Here’s how.

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.

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!

Spending the time and effort to consider what happens after your cloud credits run out, including how much storage you’ll need to scale and how you plan to manage your data, pays off in the long run. Every developer wants their project to succeed.

So, how do you plan for survival and success when your free credits run out?

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.

Programmers are taught very early on about the importance of organizing their code. Whether it is naming variables and functions, or naming and organizing files, this is a topic covered early in nearly every programming course.

All of this begs the question: why is it so damn hard to figure out how to structure Go code?

I really appreciate how well this event came together. The virtual platform and diversity played a big part in this world-class experience. This was the perfect one to Ship It!, a brand new Changelog show that honours the makers, the shippers, & the visionaries that see it through. Tune in mid-May to find out more about the behind-the-scenes of this event.

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.

Jose Valim (the creator of Elixir) recently asked developers from all programming languages to contribute a solution to a short coding challenge based on a real world use case that I had come up while building an Elixir application. Here’s what happened.

We have to stop insisting that software updates, etc. need to be distributed over HTTPS. Let me tell you why this is not an ideal way of going about it.

Did you hear that Go Time panelist Mark Bates won a FREE Raspberry Pi 400 by besting his fellow gophers in our Go Panic game show at GopherCon?

Turns out he declined the prize, so we’re giving it away to a member of our lovely Go Time audience!!

SMTP should be blocked on public networks.

Email technology offers no effective means to stop phishing, so it’s been a runaway success for the attackers, and a disaster for millions of victims.

Sunsetting SMTP is clearly necessary and feasible. So, I’ve drafted a protocol called TMTP and I’d like to tell you about it.

There’s a new stack in town. PETAL. It destructures to Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine and LiveView. So what is it? Well, it helps you build web applications. Let me tell you about it…

Why do people complain so much about CSS? There’s memes and jokes about CSS… there’s all sorts of tooling for CSS… On our Frontend Feud episode when we asked, “Name something that frontend devs complain about”, CSS was the #3 answer, which was pretty high up the list.

So it seems like it is a thing that people struggle with, complain about etc. I’m just curious, why do you think that is?

As the editor of the Elixir Radar newsletter, I read lots of articles related to Elixir every single week. Along the year I read probably more than 700 articles, so I could curate the best ones and send them to Elixir Radar’s subscribers.

In this article, I share the 11 most popular articles on Elixir Radar in 2020. Those are the ones that had the biggest engagement from Elixir Radar subscribers in each month of 2020, in terms of CTOR (click-to-open rate).