Justin Searls joins us for hot takes on Apple’s 2024 WWDC keynote. Apple Intelligence stole the show, but did it steal our hearts? Oh, and we learn all about Justin’s Vision Pro Life and how he hopes/expects Apple’s latest device to improve in future iterations.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Our 7th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 12 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Joseph Jacks (JJ) is back! We discuss the latest in COSS funding, his thesis for investing in commercial open source companies, the various rug pulls happening out there in open source licensing, and Zuck/Meta’s generosity releasing Llama 3.1 as “open source.”

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framelication” beat of their own drum.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Site navigation isn’t rocket surgery. But how many times have you gone down this route? You plop that <ul> into your header and then add <li>’s with each of your site navigation links. Then you need to make one of them highlighted based on the current page. Suddenly your nice clean view code gets a lot less readable as you handle conditional logic for setting the highlighted state, not to mention any sub navigation for the selected item. Try as you might to pull as much code into view helpers as you can, straddling the line between Haml or ERB and Ruby helpers never quite seems like a clean fit.

Jeremy Jackson has created an elegant solution with Navigasmic which aims to be simple, customizable, and pleasant to use while using less code than it generates. It features:

• A clean API, leading to cleaner views
• Support for Haml and ERB
• Nested site navigation
• Highlighted states
• Disabled states
• XML sitemaps

Installation

To install Navigasmic, configure the gem in your Gemfile

gem "navigasmic"

… and run

bundle install

In your view, use the semantic_navigation helper method to build your navigation. Here’s an example:

- semantic_navigation :main do |n|
  = n.group 'Media', :html => {:class => 'media'} do
    = n.item 'Image Gallery', :link => {:controller => 'media/images'}
    = n.item 'Videos', :link => {:controller => 'media/videos'}
  = n.group 'Info' do
    = n.item 'About Us', :link => '/about_us', :html => {:title => 'we are the coolest'}
    = n.item 'Nothing Here'

This produces the following HTML:

<ul id="main" class="primary semantic-navigation">
  <li id="media" class="with-group">
    <span>Media</span>
    <ul>
      <li id="image_gallery"><a href="/media/images"><span>Image Gallery</span></a></li>
      <li id="videos"><a href="/media/videos"><span>Videos</span></a></li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <div class="secondary">
    <li id="info" class="with-group">
      <span>Info</span>
      <ul>
        <li id="about_us">
          <a href="/about_us"><span>About Us</span></a>
          <ul>
            <li id="nothing_here"><span>Nothing Here</span></li>
          </ul>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </li>
  </div>
</ul>

Highlighting

One of the most powerful Navigasmic features is the range of highlighting options:

- semantic_navigation :main do
  = n.item 'Image Gallery', :link => 'media/images'
          :highlights_on => [{:controller => 'media'}, /images/, proc { Time.now.wday == 1 }]

Simply pass an array of options as :highlights_on including url_for options, strings, Regexes, even Ruby procs. If the highlighting criteria is met, the <li> gets a highlighted CSS class:

  <ul id="main" class="semantic-navigation">
    <li id="image_gallery" class="highlighted"><a href="/media/images"><span>Image Gallery</span></a></li>
  </ul>

Be sure and check the Readme for advanced usage including disabling options, XML sitemaps, and more.

[Source on GitHub]

Bharat Sandhu, Director of Azure AI and Mixed Reality at Microsoft, joins Chris and Daniel to talk about how Microsoft is making AI accessible and productive for users, and how AI solutions can address real world challenges that customers face. He also shares Microsoft’s research-to-product process, along with the advances they have made in computer vision, image captioning, and how researchers were able to make AI that can describe images as well as people do.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Panelist Jerod Santo and first-time panelist Adam Stacoviak talk with Adam Wathan of Full Stack Radio fame about his CSS utility library called Tailwind CSS that’s growing in popularity to rapidly build custom user interfaces.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

This week Neovim core maintainer TJ DeVries joins Jerod and guest co-host Nick Nisi (from JS Party) to follow-up on our Vim episode with a conversation dedicated to Neovim. TJ tells us why Neovim was created in the first place, how it differs from Vim, why Lua is awesome for configuration and plugins, what LSPs are all about, the cool tech inside tree-sitter, and how he’s writing his own fuzzy file finder for Neovim called Telescope.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Adrien Griveau makes the case for settings as a feature, not a design bug. He build the argument from a simple (and perhaps controversial) point: “users love settings”

There certainly are moments where I find myself on the settings page of a product because it failed to deliver the experience I really wanted. But not all settings are created equal.

There’s a difference between product settings that a product needs to get right by default and preferences that designers deliberately shouldn’t have a strong opinion on.

No one likes to spend the day setting up and recreating the config of their text editor of choice. If you use VS Code and Settings Sync you won’t have to. Paige Niedringhaus writes:

This article will show you how to perfectly recreate your Visual Studio Code IDE settings without starting over from scratch and spending hours on it.

When faced with the possibility of losing (or even trying to transfer) my carefully developed VS Code setup to another machine, I knew there had to be a way to do it gracefully. I just knew the solution had to be out there, and so, I asked the internets, and it brought back Settings Sync.

If all you want to do is keep your dotfiles and app settings in sync between machines (OS X machines, of course), then Laurent Raufaste’s Mackup might just be the perfect thing for you.

Basically it symlinks the supported applications to copied versions of your dotfiles and app settings to ~/Dropbox/Mackup.

For example, once you’ve ran mackup backup your .gitconfig file will live at ~/Dropbox/Mackup/.gitconfig and ~/.gitconfig will be symlinked to it. That way all your precious dotfiles and app settings are synced to Dropbox. When it comes time to get another machine (presumably your next machine) setup, it’s as easy as installing Mackup, and running mackup restore.

Laurent’s notes from the readme:

I change my workstation every X months. Each time I either loose the configuration of all the apps I use, or I just waste a bunch of hours getting setup like I was on my old box. I also spent a lot of time reconfiguring the same stuff again on all my workstations (home, work)

Boring…

I agree.

There are a number of ways to backup your dotfiles, but Mackup is super simple, doesn’t require sharing them on GitHub (if that’s not your thing), and leverages Dropbox – which you likely have on your machine anyways.

Check out the install instructions to get started. You might also consider reading this as well to learn exactly how Mackup does what it does. If you haven’t yet, checkout the unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub while you’re at it. There’s more than one way to skin this cat.

Podman Desktop installs, configures and keeps Podman up to date on your local environment. It provides a system tray, to check status and interact with your container engine without losing focus from other tasks. The desktop application provides a dashboard to interact with containers, images, pods and volumes but also configures your environment with your OCI registries and network settings. Podman Desktop also provides capabilities to connect and deploy pods to Kubernetes environments.

After more than half a decade (6+ years), Mastodon.technology is shutting down. The reason? One person is responsible (Ash Furrow) and they’ve hit their limit personally and technically.

A member of my family was very recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. I am doing everything I can to support them.

Last week, with yet more Elon Musk and Twitter news, the fediverse generally experienced extra traffic with an influx of new users. I woke up to mastodon.technology downtime alerts. In the midst of supporting my family, I had to ssh into a server and fiddle with settings.

I am exhausted.

The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I’ve always been keen to learn the next new skill I need to be an effective admin. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. The monitoring that I have in place is insufficient to solve the current problems and I have zero bandwidth to invest in learning the skills to diagnose and fix the issue.

Ages ago (4 years) we talked with Eugen Rochko on The Changelog (the creator of Mastodon) about the “absolute freedom in how people can run their servers,” and how the “incentives are usually ideological” when running a Mastodon server.

Yes, we talked about the costs of running a server, but from my recollection that seemed to be purely from a monetary perspective. The costs of running a server are also quite time intensive and those costs needs to be factored in as well.

Don’t all AI methods need a bunch of data to work? How could AI help document and revitalize endangered languages with “human-in-the-loop” or “active learning” methods? Sarah Moeller from the University of Florida joins us to discuss those and other related questions. She also shares many of her personal experiences working with languages in low resource settings.

We’re talking with Woody Zuill today about all things Mob Programming. Woody leads Mob Programming workshops, he’s a speaker on agile related topics, and coaches and guides orgs interested in creating an environment where people can do their best work. We talk through it all and we even get some amazing advice from Woody’s dad. We define what Mob Programming is and why it’s so effective. Is it a rigid process or can teams flex to make it work for them? How to introduce mob programming to a team. What kind of groundwork is necessary? And of course, are mob programming’s virtues diminished by remote teams in virtual-only settings?

We upgraded to the new MacBook Pro M1 Max and decided to share our first impressions of the new hardware, how we migrate data and settings from our old machines (or don’t), which apps were “instant installs” for each of us, which apps we’re trying to live without, and how we get our new machines set up for work and play. Nerd out with us!

TLDR:

There are 70% more open roles at companies in data engineering as compared to data science. As we train the next generation of data and machine learning practitioners, let’s place more emphasis on engineering skills.

This vibes with what I’ve been hearing on Practical AI lately. Organizations are facing big challenges when it comes to deploying, maintaining, and improving data processing tools and platforms in production settings. Big challenges produce big opportunities. And what does a data engineer do? According to this article:

Develops a robust and scalable set of data processing tools/platforms. Must be comfortable with SQL/NoSQL database wrangling and building/maintaining ETL pipelines.

If you have that skillset, you are in high demand today. And if you can adapt that skillset and be considered a ML engineer, you will be in high demand for a long, long time.

As I became to customise my settings more and more, having to set up a new environment wasn’t an exciting thing to do anymore. I not only have to remember to install all of these things that I need, but it became also tedious and demanded a large cognitive effort. Also, I got frustrated many times because I thought I was all set up until I realised I forgot to install a particular tool. This post shares some things I’ve learned when comes to automating my environment setup.

Avoid the hassle of following security best practices each time you need a web server or reverse proxy. Bunkerized-nginx provides generic security configs, settings and tools so you don’t need to do it yourself.

What’s not to love?

If you’ve been intrigued by Tailwind and utility-first CSS ever since listening to JS Party #65 with Adam Wathan, but you’ve never gotten around to playing with it… here’s your opportunity. Pop a browser tab, futz with the settings, and see the results in real-time on the right side of the window.

Attention Docker Hub users — Docker Hub has been hacked, so check your email to read the report from Kent Lamb, Director of Docker Support and take appropriate action. Here are the details…

During a brief period of unauthorized access to a Docker Hub database, sensitive data from approximately 190,000 accounts may have been exposed (less than 5% of Hub users). Data includes usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of these users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker autobuilds.

From lugg on Hacker News:

If you got an email you should:

• Change your password on https://hub.docker.com

• Check https://github.com/settings/security

• Reconnect oAuth for automated builds

• Rollover effected passwords and API keys stored in private repos / containers

sshcode is a CLI to automatically install and run code-server over SSH. It uploads your extensions and settings automatically, so you can seamlessly use remote servers as VS Code hosts.

If you have Chrome installed, it opens the browser in app mode. That means there’s no keybind conflicts, address bar, or indication that you’re coding within a browser. It feels just like native VS Code.

It can do image-to-text, image-to-image, or video-to-video. The example output below is an image source with the white background complex character output settings.

What’s cool about this is it’s not a proxy, so you don’t have to futz with certificates, proxy settings, and the like. As long as the iOS device and your Mac are on the same local network, you can view the network traffic of your apps.

Steven Loria:

Stop using unversioned settings files and start storing configuration in environment variables (see The Twelve-Factor App). environs makes it easy to parse environment variables with built-in type-casting and validation. It will even read .env files, which are handy for local development.

💯% agree with using environment variables for configuration. I used to do the .gitignore a Yaml file thang, but nowadays it’s all direnv and/or dotenv.

Yesterday’s coverage of CloudFlare’s new DNS service (1.1.1.1) was met with a few cries of “SLOWER FOR ME”!

Is it faster or slower in your neck of the woods? You can find out easily by running the linked script. CloudFlare wins easily from where I’m sitting (see below). Off to go change my settings!

Mozilla is doing a ton to ensure that people know they are all about privacy and security with the latest release of Firefox.

…we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet. That’s why we build Firefox, and all our products, to give you greater control over the information you share online and the information you share with us. We strive to collect only what we need to improve Firefox for everyone.

To enable tracking protection, open preferences and click on “Privacy & Security,” then scroll down to “Tracking Protection” and change that setting to “Always.” 😎

A page you may not know about is Mozilla’s full-disclosure privacy page for Firefox that includes explanations and details on what data Firefox shares and how you can change your settings to share even less. This page is auto-opened when you first install and launch Firefox.

The massive success of the HTML5 boilerplate has inspired similar efforts in other domains. Michael Goreanski has started such an effort for Nginx, the web server employed by many of the Internet’s top sites (recent stats).

Nginx-boilerplate is only a couple months old, but it already boasts configuration templates that feature:

• A convenient include-based config structure
• Optimized defaults for caching, gzip'ing, uploads, etc.
• Connection and requests rate limitation settings
• Backend response caching
• Various predefined locations
• Advanced logging

Boilerplate projects are great because they provide an opportunity for the community to rally around best practices and put them all in one place. The nginx-boilerplate already has a handful of contributors, but I’d love to see that list explode in the coming weeks.

The project is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

We’re excited to announce that the podcast is moving to 5by5!

Pretty much since we first launched the podcast Dan Benjamin (founder of 5by5) has wanted The Changelog to join the ranks of 5by5. The only reason we didn’t make the move back then was because of how we choose to number our podcast episodes. Rather than having episode #86, we had episode 0.8.6. For Dan, that was a big problem for 5by5’s CMS.

Needless to say, we never made the move. Over the years, we’ve even taken slack for not following SemVer so we figured improperly versioning the podcast for the sake of being more true to the hacker way wasn’t working. So we’re ditching the version numbers as episode numbers, and making our way to 5by5 with normal episode numbers like a good podcast should.

Let me just say that we are STOKED to be joining forces with Dan and 5by5! If you don’t already, follow @TheChangelog on Twitter for blog updates and new show announcements so you don’t miss a beat!

What's changing?

Nothing, for the most part.

Since the re-launch, we made a commitment to you to bring the podcast back – we now broadcast the show live every Tuesday at 5pm CST. No change there.

We also opened up the IRC chat room on Freenode for realtime chat during the show. Moving to 5by5 has no effect on this plan. In fact, it only helps us to better execute this plan.

The only change is where you go to listen to the show live and subscribe.

Nothing, and I repeat nothing is changing with the blog. In fact, we’re growing. More on that later.

Listening live

The show will be LIVE at 5by5.tv/live every Tuesday at 5pm CST.

5by5 also has their 5by5 Radio app for iOS ($2.99) which lets you listen live on the go. You can also opt-in to push notifications when the show goes live so you never miss another show. If you have the app already, head to the settings and enable push notifications for The Changelog. You might as well enable push notifications for Founders Talk too while you’re there.

Listening to the show archive

The entire show archive and future recorded shows will now be served by the 5by5 CMS and distributed across the globe by Cachefly’s CDN. So no matter where you are in the world, you’ll get super fast access to the show.

We’re also pretty excited about the new artwork Jory is making us! Keep an eye out on his Dribbble for a sneak peek.

Subscribing to the show

For those who subscribe via RSS – update your feed to use http://feeds.5by5.tv/changelog, or click here feeds.5by5.tv/changelog.

For those who subscribe via iTunes – No change is required! We did update the feed that iTunes consumes though, so you MAY see older shows get re-downloaded. Sadly, we can’t prevent this. Subscribe via iTunes here.

grunticon — yet another cool project by Filament Group — is a Grunt.js task that takes a folder of SVG files and turns them into SVG data urls, PNG data urls, and plain old PNG files to be referenced via CSS.

It also generates a snippet of JavaScript and CSS to asynchronously load the proper icon CSS depending on the browser’s capabilities. This provides some pretty big wins. It:

1. makes it easy to manage icons and background images for all devices
2. uses resolution independent SVG icons when supported
3. obviates the need for CSS sprites

Getting started with grunticon is pretty easy. All you need is PhantomJS, Grunt.js (of course), and npm. Then you:

npm install grunt-grunticon

There are some required configuration settings as well, so be sure to check out the Getting Started and Documentation sections of the project’s README.