My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML, because there are situations where XML is appropriate, but there’s no situation where YAML is appropriate. Let me explain…

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 ✨

This post expands on my waterfall is far superior Unpopular Opinion, providing the background for how I arrived at it, adds some suggestions for improving your software development process, and includes a bonus Unpopular Opinion at the end.

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

The advantages of WebAssembly, with its tight security model, very fast boot-up time, scalability at the edge, much smaller footprints, and portability across environments will really drive a shift away from container-based runtimes for things Kubernetes and edge workloads by 2030.

There’s a ton of energy around making this happen within the WebAssembly community.

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.

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.