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?

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.