Flavors of Ship It on The Changelog — if you’re not subscribed to Ship It yet, do so at shipit.show or by searching for “Ship it” wherever you listen to podcasts. Every week Justin Garrison and Autumn Nash explore everything that happens after git push — and today’s flavors include running infrastructure in space, managing millions of machines at Meta, and what it takes to control your 3D printer with OctoPrint.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Anita Zhang is here to tell us how Meta manages millions of bare metal Linux hosts and containers. We also discuss the Twine white paper and how AI is changing their requirements.

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NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally joins Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson for an in-depth conversation about ‘everything AI’ at NVIDIA. As the leader of NVIDIA Research, Bill schools us on GPUs, and then goes on to address everything from AI-enabled robots and self-driving vehicles, to new AI research innovations in algorithm development and model architectures. This episode is so packed with information, you may want to listen to it multiple times.

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An amazing panel of AI innovators joined us at the O’Reilly AI conference to answer the most pressing AI questions from Quora. We also discussed trends in the industry and some exciting new advances in FPGA hardware.

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Michal Warda on self-hosting in 2023, Martin Heinz will never use Alpine Linux again, Oliver Rice at Supabase creates type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL, Aaron Patterson converted a BMW shifter into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim, Piet Terheyden has been curating beautiful & functional websites daily since 2013, Ryan Lucas put together a history of Visual Basic, turns out it’s easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars & Mastodon hit 10 million accounts.

Asim Aslam joined us to talk about Micro, a pluggable RPC based library which provides the fundamental building blocks for writing microservices in Go. We also discussed open source sustainability, microservices, and serverless architecture.

I love a good “I built a thing and here is how I built that thing” post, especially when it’s penned by someone like Chris who’s sure to keep you entertained along the way.

Wouldn’t it be neat to have aggregated data (for a website, daily email, push alert, etc) of kids events in our surrounding area so we know about them right away?

— My wife, possibly salty we missed out on Bluey Live tickets in Portland

Austin Henley:

I wanted to test my mastery of Node.js and my reliance on Google and Stack Overflow, so I set out on an adventure to make a todo list web app without touching any external resource for help. I just couldn’t do it…

But this got me thinking. How many people out there, especially professional web developers, can do this?

I used to google for things all the time while programming, but not anymore. 😉

Command (line? I’ve never called it that) mode is indeed where much of Vim’s power lies. In this post on Thoughtbot’s blog, German Velasco explains search and replace, command repetition, ranges, and more.

Includes interview questions, notes, and useful links to other resources to continue your learning.

From the readme:

This project is about experimentations. About CSS3 animations and a graduation project. My name is Pedro Ivo Hudson and this is my debut.

And what a debut. Wow, I’m impressed.

Check it out for yourself at thegoodman.cc or check out the source code as well as the about/credits to learn more about how Pedro did this. By the way, Pedro is open to new projects right now, so get in touch if he’s got the skills you need.

Hat tip to Chris Coyier on Google+

We seem to be experiencing a surge of video generation tools, models, and applications. However, video generation models generally struggle with some basic physics, like realistic walking motion. This leaves some generated videos lacking true motion with disappointing, simplistic panning camera views. Genmo is focused on the motion side of video generation and has released some of the best open models. Paras joins us to discuss video generation and their journey at Genmo.

Jimmy Miller talks to us about his experience with a legacy codebase at his first job as a programmer. The codebase was massive, with hundreds of thousands of lines of C# and Visual Basic, and a database with over 1,000 columns. Let’s just say Jimmy got into some stuff. There’s even a Gilfoyle involved. This episode is all about his adventures while working there.

Sualeh Asif from Control (an AI code editor):

We’ve been using GPT-4 for a few months internally, and we thought we’d highlight a few examples](https://github.com/anysphere/gpt-4-for-code) that have been both particularly impressive and really useful to us.

Here it’s converting a Python dict of member functions to esoteric but correct-on-first-try C++ code 👇

Learning Kubernetes can seem overwhelming. It’s a complex container orchestration system, that has a steep learning curve. But with the right roadmap and understanding of the foundational concepts, it’s something that any developer or ops person can learn.

In this Kubernetes learning roadmap, I have added prerequisites and complete Kubernetes learning path covering basic to advanced Kubernetes concepts.

Setting up Rails for the first time with all the dependencies necessary can be daunting for beginners. Docked Rails attempts to flatten the onboarding curve by only requiring a working Docker installation in order to get started making a new Rails application, working with that application during development, and running a basic server. All based on pre-configured commands and dependencies living in a Docker image.

Getting started is as easy as:

docker volume create ruby-bundle-cache
alias rails='docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/rails -v ruby-bundle-cache:/bundle dhh37/rails'
alias rails-server='docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/rails -v ruby-bundle-cache:/bundle -p 3000:3000 dhh37/rails server -b 0.0.0.0'

Simon Willison is using this year’s Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn Rust.

He’s using Copilot to help him with syntax/snippets via comment-driven prompting. He’s using ChatGPT as a study partner by asking it questions about how to do things in Rust. Is it working?

So far I think this is working really well.

I feel like I’m beginning to get a good mental model of how Rust works, and a lot of the basic syntax is beginning to embed itself into my muscle memory.

The real test is going to be if I can first make it to day 25 (with no prior Advent of Code experience I don’t know how much the increasing difficulty level will interfere with my learning) and then if I can actually write a useful Rust program after that without any assistance from these AI models.

And honestly, the other big benefit here is that this is simply a lot of fun. I’m finding interacting with AIs in this way—as an actual exercise, not just to try them out—is deeply satisfying and intellectually stimulating.

This might be an early glimpse into the future of AI-assisted learning…

Matt Welsh:

I hesitated writing this post, because I don’t want to start, or get into, a holy war over programming languages. (Just to get the flame bait out of the way, Visual Basic is the best language ever!) But I’ve had a number of people ask me about my experience with Rust and whether they should pick up Rust for their projects. So, I’d like to share some of the pros and cons that I see of using Rust in a startup setting, where moving fast and scaling teams is really important.

The learning curve and hiring difficulties seem to be the major culprits, in Matt’s experience.

Lars Wikman on what it takes to learn software development and how he responds when people ask him how they should go about it:

At the time I was learning, I didn’t have access to any kind of bigger picture. I had limited resources. Limited documentation. I had so many limitations. I ran into them constantly and eventually found the next thing I could use to do cool stuff. If you try to teach someone to use an HTML form today, you will need to decide if you are talking about the basic idea or reality. Do we need to cover CSRF, captchas and how to do it in React? How about the backend? Starting out, I didn’t hear about half of the things I didn’t know; I think that made things easier.

When it comes to the software industry, this is the best of times. There are amazing learning resources available, a vast repository of free code that you don’t have to write, and lucrative job offers on the other end of the chasm.

When it comes to the software industry, this is the worst of times. There are too many learning resources to choose from, a crippling repository of free code that might stumble you, and overwhelming imposter syndrome on the other end of the chasm.

Lars sums it up nicely:

Hand someone a fish and they’ll never know that the ocean is vast. Teach them how to fish and they’ll be forever lost at sea.

When you’re building a habit tracker app, you better have a good checkbox. The team at (Not Boring) set out to build such an app:

In trying to get a particularly tricky habit to stick, I tried dozens of apps and nothing worked for me. Recording an action felt like yet another chore. None could approach the most basic satisfaction of simply crossing out an item on a list.

Could you design a simple action that felt as satisfying and infuse it with as much symbolism? Were we about to redesign the checkbox?

I think you know where this is headed.

The end result is quite satisfying, but the journey through their design process is just 🤌

Andraž Bajt:

Basic premise is: browsers are great at navigating pages, let’s leverage that by serving users directly with HTML. This already gives you half-decent pages but you can go further and sprinkle on some sugar. A bit of JS. Instead of reinventing the world in JS let’s try to really use what modern browsers provide natively and then push just a bit forward.

Is the pendulum starting to swing away from SPAs/client-side rendering and back toward MPAs/server-side rendering? Will we ever find balance somewhere in the middle?

The coolest thing about this story is that the entire endeavor was apparently prompted by a random developer tweet! If you’ve ever wondered what all goes in to opening the source of historic software products like this one:

This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.

• Developer names and aliases were removed, with the exception of current employees who worked on the original release who consented to keeping their names in place
• The archive consisted of several CDs, some of which were for alternate builds or products, and have been excluded
• The code does not build with today’s engineering tools, and is released as-is.

For now, [x]it! is merely a file format specification.

You don’t have to use a specific tool for .xit files, the basic operations like creating items or checking them off can be done in every text editor. Tools can make the experience more convenient, though, and provide support for common use cases.

The cool thing is anybody/everybody can now develop integrations for their favorite tools.

In its creator’s own words:

It’s an API development ecosystem. Supports many API protocols. This project has crossed 31.6k+ GitHub stars in 2 years. One of the most growing open source projects in Asia / World.

Try it for yourself at Hoppscotch.io

This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.

When it comes to scaling, we might need to think about:

• data storage, if we store more and more data and it becomes expensive or slow working with them
• fast INSERTs and UPDATES for write-heavy workloads
• making SELECT queries faster because of their complexity or because they need to query huge amounts of data
• concurrency if we have many clients interacting with the database

In this article, I will present some basic ideas and starting points on scaling traditional SQL databases.

Paul Bakaus teased this on JS Party #174, but the announcement landed even sooner than he said it would:

Chrome, at least in its experimental Canary version on Android (and only for users in the U.S.), is getting an interesting update in the coming weeks that brings back RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all the sites you love in Google Reader and similar services.

In Chrome, users will soon see a “Follow” feature for sites that support RSS and the browser’s New Tab page will get what is essentially a (very) basic RSS reader — I guess you could almost call it a “Google Reader.”

I sure do hope this is a small step on a longer journey to bring RSS (back) to the masses. It really is one of the web’s most virtuous technologies. Let’s not get too excited, though:

For now, though, this is only an experiment. Google says it wants to gather feedback from “publishers, bloggers, creators, and citizens of the open web” as it aims to build “deeper engagement between users and web publishers in Chrome.” Hopefully, it won’t stay this way.

My only question is: where can we spam submit this feedback that they’re after?!

Angie Rojas shared some insights into what Deno brings to the TypeScript ecosystem and whether or not it will “render Node.js obsolete.”

During the last 10 years, Node.js has become a big player in the backend framework market, powering several large scale applications across the globe. Meanwhile, JavaScript has also evolved greatly, not only because of the efforts of its development team, but also based on community feedback. However, integrating some of these new language features into a 10-year-old framework is not really straightforward, and has a high level of complexity.

Therefore we could say that Node.js’ architecture hasn’t evolved as fast as the language. As a basic example, Node.js is still based on callbacks, while there are far better ways to deal with asynchronicity in modern JavaScript. This is something that its creator, Ryan Dahl, has acknowledged in the past few years, and it has moved him to work on a new framework that addresses some of these issues. It is called Deno, and in the following article, we would like to explore some of its concepts to determine if it will render Node.js obsolete.

Darling is a lot like Wine only for macOS.

It implements a complete Darwin environment, runs macOS software directly without requiring a hardware emulator, and aims to integrate apps into the Linux desktop experience.

The only downside is they haven’t quite gotten GUI apps working yet:

This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications. It requires some special setup for now though, so do not expect it to work out of the box just yet. We’re working on this; stay tuned!

After searching for a fast and lightweight universal date formatting library, I’ve decided to create my own! I managed to include the most common features in just 157 bytes. The thing is also more than 2 times faster than Moment’s format and 3,5 times faster than date-fns lightFormat. 😃

Formatting patterns are compliant with Unicode Technical Standard #35.

While only a basic set of features is included with the format function, I added an additional localeFormat for locale-based formatting (such as month names). I’m planning on extending the package in the future to potentially include string escape mechanism and time-zone formatting.