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.

I helped build chapter support for Changelog podcasts. Let’s parse some ID3 tags!

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.

The way that I run my Developer Relations team focuses on three different things:

1. Education 🧑‍🏫
2. Community 🤝
3. Product 🎁

In this post, I will explain each one of those pillars independently.

A summary of 50 hallway track conversations at KubeCon EU 2022. Plus, my eight biggest takeaways on the state of the cloud native world.

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

The reason we find ourselves as practitioners (as an industry as a whole) constantly migrating between different platforms, journeys, and digital transformations… We do this because I don’t think we ever understood the fundamentals.

Many of us use TypeScript in our React applications to eliminate an entire class of runtime bugs. But surprisingly, one of the most commonly used types: React.ReactNode turns out to be unsafe, failing to detect objects that cannot be rendered by React. This post digs into what is going on and how to fix it in your system.

Before making a move into product management, make the most of your technical career. The stories and experiences you gather as a developer will help you. But let’s say you’ve been in the software development field for a number of years, and you’re looking for your next challenge. Here’s a list of “You know you’re a PM if…” statements to help you decide if this career is right for you.

We truly believe that incident analysis can be your organization’s secret weapon that will allow you to gain value from your incidents, but we know getting started can be a daunting task. We’ve been in your shoes and we’ve seen and heard how excruciatingly intimidating it is for many engineers to lead an incident review. This guide is your toolbox, packed with practical, easy-to-adopt strategies for getting you set up to do your first one.

If the datacenter is the computer, then the cloud is its operating system — so let’s start treating it like one and stop micro-managing thousands of individual ones.

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?