Our friends at The Linux Foundation, along side the TODO Group and The New Stack, have released the results of the 2018 Open Source Program Management Survey…

…more than 53% of the companies surveyed say their organization has an open source software program (or plans to establish one within the next year).

Emily shares many key findings, but my key take away is proof (because survey’s are 100% true) that corporate economies bare significant dependence upon open source, and the health of the communities that support that open source, in more ways than they know — and the impact of open source on their bottom line is bubbling up from within as informal working groups.

History is proof that removing a dangerous feature can greatly improve the quality of code. Today, we have a slew of dangerous practices that compromise the robustness and maintainability of software. Nearly all modern programming languages have some form of null references, shared global state, and functions with side effects—things that are far worse than the GOTO ever was.

How can those flaws be eliminated? It turns out that the answer has been around for decades: purely functional programming languages.

The team’s goal is to become “the de-facto open-source alternative to MongoDB.” Here’s why:

MongoDB is a life-changing technology for many developers, empowering them to build applications faster than using relational databases. Its easy-to-use and well-documented drivers make MongoDB one of the easiest to use database solutions available. However, MongoDB abandoned its open-source roots, changing the license to SSPL - making it unusable for many open source and commercial projects.

Most MongoDB users are not in need of many of the advanced features offered by MongoDB; however, they are in need of an open-source database solution. Recognizing this, MangoDB is here to fill the gap by providing an alternative.

This is currently a proof of concept. The concept: a proxy that converts Mongo’s wire protocol to SQL and stores everything in PostgreSQL. Fascinating idea! Will it work?

Will McGugan is a full-stack developer and Python expert who is offering up free reviews for any/all qualifying open source projects.What a great idea/service to the community!

The reviews will focus on API design and general architection of your project with a view to making them a) more maintainable b) future proof and c) user friendly, but will avoid anything that a linter could do for you. Reviews are intended to be constructive and hopefully give advice you can act on, but are in no way a “grade”.

I won’t need to run your code to do a review and reviews aren’t intended to fix bugs.

All reviews will be public and will be published in the repo in a markdown file. An exception would be for any security issues, where I would notify you first.

Not everyone all at once, now. There’s already quite a few requests in the queue.

Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible.

Bitcoin’s Proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism is hotly debated these days due it its energy consumption. Proof of stake (PoS) is a different way to skin the consensus cat.

While it’s less proven to work in the real world (Bitcoin’s uptime and security over the network’s 12-year lifespan is perhaps its greatest asset), PoS is quite promising and we’re starting to see the fruit of that promise with early numbers from Ethereum 2.

Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we’re excited to explore involves new energy-use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country’s worth of energy on consensus.

Once again, Sahil Lavingia shared proof that we can think differently about the future of work. Sure, not every company should operate the way Gumroad is operating, but there are plenty of insights to be drawn from their experience.

Recently, I pitched the whole company about going full-time, because it felt wrong to grow any larger without full-time staff.

Nobody accepted.

I realized then that I was trying to copy the status quo–to try and fix something that wasn’t broken–so that I could feel better about doing things the “normal” way. But the deal we already had in place was better for what our people prioritize: freedom over growth, sustainability over speed, life over work.

I recently spoke with Sahil on Founders Talk #66 about failing to build a billion-dollar company. I highly recommend that episode.

The Servo Project is excited to announce that it has found a new home with the Linux Foundation. Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest!

The project’s governance has also changed. It now has a board and a TSC (technical steering committee). They’ve also set up their community/chat on Zulip, which is new to me and looks… interesting.

How do you ship a product on schedule? One useful mental tool is the You Ain’t Gonna Need It heuristic: leave out all the things that seem nice-to-have, but you have no proof you actually need. And when there’s things you do need, consider the follow-up heuristic: You Don’t Need It Yet.

Is this more proof of Cunningham’s law, which says, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Update: as some keen HN commenters have pointed out, it looks like the rust program is not actually equivalent to the go program. The go program parses the string once, while the rust program parses it repeatedly inside every loop. It’s quite late in Sydney as I write this so I’m not up for a fix right now, but this post is probably Fake News.

Read Christian’s post then have fun in the comments and discussions on HN and Reddit analyzing his hypothesis, which includes a repo of code to backup his ideas.

Why build another JavaScript build tool? The current build tools for the web are at least an order of magnitude slower than they should be. I’m hoping that this project serves as an “existence proof” that our JavaScript tooling can be much, much faster.

According to the author, esbuild is fast because..

1. it’s written in Go
2. much of the work is done in parallel
3. it takes very few passes and avoids data transformations
4. it was coded with performance in mind

Arijit Mukherji on The New Stack:

We all have our favorite urban legends. From cow tipping to chupacabras, these myths persist despite a lack of definitive proof (and often evidence to the contrary). Technology isn’t immune to this phenomenon. It has its own set of urban legends and myths that emerge alongside new technologies and continue well into mass adoption. As organizations consider the shift from monitoring to Observability, I hear three common misperceptions. It’s time to debunk the myths.

Callback: Observability is for your unknown unknowns

This is a proof of concept, but oh what a concept! I freakin’ 💚 Elixir’s pipe operator, hope they’ll add it to JavaScript, and would trade half my kingdom to have it in Ruby.

"https://api.github.com/repos/ruby/ruby".pipe do
  URI.parse
  Net::HTTP.get
  JSON.parse.fetch("stargazers_count")
  yield_self { |n| "Ruby has #{n} stars" }
  Kernel.puts
end
#=> Ruby has 15120 stars

Go already supports many features that functional programmers might want: closures, first-class functions, errors as values, etc. The main feature (and in fact only feature for now) that Fo adds is type polymorphism via generics. Generics encourage functional programming techniques by making it possible to write flexible higher-order functions and type-agnostic data structures.

People have been asking for Generics in Go since the beginning of time. (2009)

At this time, Fo should be thought of primarily as an experiment or proof of concept. It shows what Go looks like and feels like with some new language features and allows us to explore how those features interact and what you can build with them.

Perhaps Fo’s author is hoping that enough traction/excitement around this project will convince the Go team to add Generics to the language.

Inspired by Vim’s modal editing, but built to be as simple as possible. This is no fly-by-night proof of concept. It’s 3 years in the making and looks extremely polished.

I’m definitely going to give Amp a test-drive. 👌

No JavaScript? No problem? This is a proof of concept that does webpage tracking using only CSS.

It works by adding ::after content that loads an external resource from a server-side endpoint that tracks the events. As far as we know, the only way to disable this style tracking is to disable CSS altogether.

This framework is very much in the proof of concept stage. There’s still a lot to do.

The framework provides a seamless GraphQL interface for Rust servers. It is type-safe, ergonomic, very low boilerplate, and customizable. It has potential to be very fast. I believe that it can be one of the best experiences for GraphQL development in any language, as well as one of the fastest implementations (in part, because it seems to me that Rust and GraphQL are a great fit).

Also, check out ~> 2018: The year we learn Rust 1.0 and Rust in 2018

A neat hack from Ryan LeFevre on Flickr’s API.

Someone joked about storing files on Flickr since they now offer 1TB, and I thought it was hilarious enough to try github.com/meltingice/fli…

— Ryan LeFevre (@MeltingIce) May 21, 2013

From the readme:

Store arbitrary data with your 1TB Flickr cloud drive by encoding any file as a PNG. This is mostly a proof of concept right now. Don't do anything beyond tinkering with it yet.

Check out the project on GitHub!

Thanks to Sam Soffes for the tip!

GitHubber Brandon Keepers blew a Gaskit at the Bacon conference in London today. Gaskit is a proof of concept for using a local git branch as a backend for an application. The front end is powered by Rack.

Check out the features for functionality or the README for more on how you can contribute. Don’t miss Brandon’s slides on how he made it.

While still an early alpha, tty.js is an interesting proof of concept from Christopher Jeffrey to use Node.js and Socket.io put a terminal in your browser.

Source on GitHub.

The founders of Dribbble, Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm, join Adam to talk about how Dribbble came to be, the 3rd edition of Bullet Proof Web Design, product development, new and existing features of Dribbble as well as focusing on revenue producing features … and much, much more.

We’re joined by Andreas Møller, Co-founder of Nordcraft — the team behind Nordcraft Engine, a powerful new platform designed to give web developers what gaming developers have had for years. Andreas shares what inspired them to build Nordcraft Engine, why they believe the web is overdue for a shift in how we approach designing and building for the web, ee explore how the platform works, how you can get started, and what’s next for Nordcraft.

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Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

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Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

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Justin Searls from Breaking Change joins the show to discuss Apple’s Intelligence blunder, the end of the good times in the tech industry, and POSSE Party, his in-progress product that lets “any dummy with a website enjoy a life of algorithm-free luxury.”

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Fire up a REPL, grab your favorite Stephen King novel, and hold on to the seat of your pants! Jimmy Miller returns to reveal why, at least for some of us, discovery coding is where it’s at.

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After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface.

Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let’s dig in.

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Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.

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Glauber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Turso, joins us to discuss libSQL, Limbo, and how they’re rewriting SQLite in Rust. We discuss their efforts with libSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain but not being open for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Turso platform, how they test Limbo with Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), and their plan to replace SQLite.

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With so many great programming languages having emerged in the last decade, many of them purpose-built, when and where does Go still make sense and how do you make the case for it at work?

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