GitHub Sponsors is a step forward, but is far from a panacea. I propose “sponsorship pools”, an alternative approach to OSS sustainability.

We had an excellent interview with Beth Dakin and Ronak Shah from the Safari team about what’s new and interesting for developers in Safari 14. There were so many good moments that I figured a round-up post was warranted. ICYMI (or don’t have time for the full convo), here’s the highlights from my POV.

I am now making more money than I’ve ever made while developing open-source software for a community that I adore. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Was it luck? there’s certainly been a lot of that.

Was it fate? Let’s leave religion out of this mmkay?…

Was it that the software I built was so incredibly compelling that it forced 535 people to give me at least $14/mo. to keep working on it? …I wish.

It’s more than that though. There were some key things I did along the way to get here. Let me tell you all about them.

Turns out everyone’s favorite macOS package manager has an official cask for managing fonts. Who knew?!

Behind the scenes we heard about Sid’s idea of “family and friends first,” so we asked him to share the idea with our audience and how it’s being embraced at GitLab. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Founders Talk with Sid. I’m sure we’ll touch on this idea and more._

Even at GitLab, we’ve seen increased productivity as the number of merge requests for both March and April exceeded February’s numbers. But as company leader, I don’t see this as something to tout. This new normal is anything but normal, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. Even though GitLab has always been remote and experienced less of a transition than most other companies, our team members are not immune to the stressors of quarantine. Overworking or maintaining the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I would be prouder if more employees were taking time off to reset and refresh or spend time adjusting to this “new normal” with their families.

Wondering why your Phoenix application is recompiling dozens or hundreds of files every time you make a small change? Cross-module compilation dependencies are often to blame.

If you say… “Hey, computer, play me some music” and then it starts playing you some music, there’s a number of things that have to have happened for that to come true.

What do you do when you’ve determined you can’t refactor your way to greatness? For us, we knew where we needed to be, but the application architecture challenges we were facing seemed to be pointing us towards fully replatforming 😱. We had to get creative…

I’m giving away the four ways of generating ideas that I outline in the book. You can return to these sources over and over again when you need a new idea for your next developer blog post.

The Fyne toolkit provides the easiest way to develop beautiful, lightweight and user friendly native applications for desktop, mobile and beyond. In this post, I describe our design process and why we take a considered approach, moving slower than you might think.

Dan Abramov and Dave Thomas got me thinking. Why did DRY come to mean “Don’t cut and paste”? I have a few thoughts on the subject…

In 2009 I started the Alan Turing petition. Perhaps you read about in WIRED back in 2014. This is my first-hand account of how I started the petition, automated my father with Perl scripts, convinced the UK to apologise to Alan Turing, and received a personal phone call from the British Prime Minister.

Unpopular opinion! Monoliths are the future because the problem people are trying to solve with microservices doesn’t really line up with reality. Just to be honest - and I’ve done this before, gone from microservices to monoliths and back again. Both directions.

Results are in for the 2019 State of JS survey. I’ve been digging through charts to see what I can see. Here are 7 insights that jumped off the page to me.

Gone are the days when we developers were too shy/humble/introverted to promote our warez with the confidence and vigor necessary to draw a crowd.

In fact, we may be experiencing an over-correction. Some of us are selling a bit too hard at times. With that in mind, here’s some help translating between how developers describe our software and what we might actually be thinking. 😉