Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha’s work on Dracula deserved the same credit. We agreed. So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he’s changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book – 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno’s book for free through our giveaway.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

When we had Mike Riley on the show back in May, one major deterrent to his pitch that we can/should “run our homes on a Raspberry Pi” is that, well, you couldn’t buy one anywhere.

It’s six months later and you still can’t buy one! In this post, Jeff Geerling dives into the why behind that unfortunate fact, gets an official response from RPi, and lays out a few alternatives. One alternative even pleasantly surprised him…

The business context for a rent versus buy dichotomy was first introduced to me by Adam a few years back. It has since then proven very useful as a tool for thinking about the relationship people have to their jobs/companies.

In this post, Cate Huston does an excellent job laying it all out, including which things are generally rented, and which things are generally bought.

Thinking about career decisions this way, you can consider different tradeoffs and options that work best for you at any given time… My question is: are you making those choices mindfully? And do they work for the life and career you want?

To build or to buy, that’s a constant question we ask ourselves as software engineers. In this episode we dig into the nuance of these options and the space between them with an eye toward both the building of software and its eventual maintenance.

Sometimes you start a thing and lose interest. Or maybe it brings in some cash, but not what you’d hoped. Rather than let it languish and eventually die, sell your thing on Tiny Acquisitions.

Sometimes you want to start a thing, but don’t have a good idea. Or maybe you’ve tried a few times, but nothing that generated income. Rather than start from scratch with an unproven idea, buy a thing on Tiny Acquisitions.

Most software companies have to make decisions on whether to build a custom software or buy it from a vendor. In the last year I read many good articles on the web that helped shape my thoughts on how to approach these discussions. This article lists of questions that I have started to use to understand and make these decisions.

On Friday, Business Insider reported that Microsoft has held talks to buy GitHub.

Matt Weinberger writes for Business Insider:

GitHub is a $2 billion startup that claims 24 million software developers as users. On the most surface level, the logic of Microsoft buying GitHub is pretty clear. Developers love GitHub, and Microsoft needs the love of developers.

Here’s the current speculation…

If Microsoft were to acquire GitHub, it would mark a significant change of course from where the startup stood just six months ago. As recently as late 2017, insiders said GitHub was fully committed to staying independent and eventually going public. It’s also possible that instead of striking a deal to buy GitHub outright, Microsoft may make an investment — possibly with an option to buy — and allow one of its top engineers to be poached as CEO.

h/t Dan McClain for sharing this in Slack.

Well, it’s official. The only thing standing between us and a Microsoft-owned GitHub future is regulatory review.

The implications of this acquisition are broad-sweeping, but the way it’ll actually play out is still unclear. Here’s what Satya Nadella says:

We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.

Addressing one of the big questions on developers’ minds, Microsoft states:

GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.

I’m not quite sure what operate independently means in practice. GitHub has been searching for a CEO for months now. How independent do they want to remain?

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we’re in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

Jerod goes one-on-one with our old friend Justin Searls! We talk build vs buy decisions, dependency selection & how Justin has implemented POSSE (Post On Site Syndicate Elsewhere) in response to the stratification of social networks.

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.

A multi-tenant HTTP reverse tunnel solution through remote port forwarding from the SSH protocol.

This is intended for small teams that need to expose the local development environment to the public internet, and you need to bring your own domain name and SSO provider.

It gives stable subdomain for every user, and gated by your SSO through OIDC protocol.

Think this as a bare-bone alternative to the ngrok’s $65/user/month enterprise tier. Try to put this behind a production system will blow up your SLA.

For individuals and production systems, just buy ngrok, it is still my favorite.

Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, has gone back to his notes on brew2 to apply web3 concepts to help “distribute value to open source.” He’s calling this new brew tea.

Tools like Homebrew lie beneath all development tools, assisting developers to actually get development done. We know the graph of all open source, which means we’re uniquely placed to innovate in interesting and exciting ways. This is exactly what tea will do. We’re taking our knowledge of how to make development more efficient and throwing innovations nobody has ever really considered before.

With plans to move the package registry on-chain, Max lays out the numerous benefits due to “inherent benefits of blockchain technology”:

• Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents)
• Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage)
• Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust)
• Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution
• Token can flow through the graph

Max says “token flowing is where things get really interesting,” and goes on to say “with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it.”

(Thanks to Omri Gabay for sharing this first in our community Slack)

With a detailed instructions video, anyone can build it at home - you just need access to a 3D printer and have to buy a Raspberry Pi computer and an 8MP Raspberry Pi camera.

The full set of instructions are on their GitHub org.

Here’s their pitch:

Do you have a home server you want to run a few apps on, but don’t want everything to
break every time you upgrade the OS? Do you want automatic updates but don’t want to buy
an extra 4 servers so you can run Kubernetes?

Do you have a work server that you want to run a few small services on, but don’t want
to have to manually manage it? Do you find that having every deployment action be in
a git repo more tidy?

Harbormaster is for you.

You create a YAML config file with all the git repos you want it to include and it’ll watch them for changes (on a timer) and do the necessary cloning/pulling, service restarting, etc. that needs doing to make it all run. Simple. Neat!

Ahmad Nassri returns to the party for a deep, nuanced discussion around the thoughts he shared in a recent blog post called Solving Solved Problems. We hear about the common issue Ahmad’s seen at software shops of all sizes, learn the anatomy of the total cost of software ownership, and debate what to build and what to buy.

John D. Cook:

I don’t recall where I read this, but someone recommended that if you need a tool, buy the cheapest one you can find. If it’s inadequate, or breaks, or you use it a lot, then buy the best one you can afford.

If you follow this strategy, you’ll sometimes waste a little money by buying a cheap tool before buying a good one. But you won’t waste money buying expensive tools that you rarely use. And you won’t waste money by buying a sequence of incrementally better tools until you finally buy a good one.

What follows is an application of that idea to software tools.

Jon Thornton writes on the Squarespace Engineering blog:

“Tech debt” is a dirty word in the software engineering world. It’s often said with an air of regret; a past mistake that will eventually need to be atoned for with refactoring.

Financial debt isn’t universally reviled in the same way. Your friend takes out a mortgage to buy a house and what do you say? Congratulations! …

The difference is intention. What if tech debt wasn’t always an accident, caused by incorrect assumptions and unexpected circumstances? How would you spend a tech debt mortgage?

We also talked about tech debt in a similar manner on Founders Talk #60.

This is a really interesting usage of blockchain technology to ensure you are really getting what you think you bought. Michael del Castillo writes on Forbes.com:

The fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world, valued at $262 billion, is investing an undisclosed amount in LO3, a New York startup using a modified version of the ethereum blockchain to make it easier for individuals to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables.

While the bitcoin blockchain lets users track the flow of value without the need of banks to audit the system, LO3’s platform, called Exergy, is designed to track the flow of energy as it is added to a shared, local energy network, giving the neighbors who purchase the energy absolute certainty it really came from a windmill, a solar panel or a gerbil running on a treadmill.

Bridget Kromhout dropping some hard truths:

We focus so often on technical anti-patterns, neglecting similar problems inside our social structures. Spoiler alert: the solutions to many difficulties that seem technical can be found by examining our interactions with others. Let’s talk about five things you’ll want to know when working with those pesky creatures known as humans.

Thing #2 (Good Team Interactions: Build, Because You Can’t Buy) alone is worth the price of admission.

OctoLinker is a Chrome extension that turns language-specific statements like include, require, import, etc. in to clickable links. Try before you buy install with their in-browser demo.

I wish I was there to see Duane O’Brien talk through this in person. This talk at FOSDEM examines how he got executive buy in at Indeed for their internal FOSS Sustainability Fund, how the fund was set up, how they encouraged participation, and what the impact has been so far.

Within a given company, there are typically only a few people involved in deciding which FOSS projects and initiatives to support financially. This year we [at Indeed] changed all that and democratize the decision making process. We set up an internal FOSS Sustainability Fund, and invited everyone to participate in the process.

Eduards Sizovs shares advice that changed his life, how that advice helped him to remove all framework books from his bookshelf and in the process shrank his “guilt pile” of books to read from 50 to 0!

Time is the most precious resource we have. Time is limited, nonrenewable and you cannot buy more of it.

Technology, like fashion, is changing at the speed of light. To catch up, we need to run very fast. This race has no winners because it has no end.

Fast forward to the advice part and Eduards shares this from a conversation between with his mentor…

Mentor: “Technologies come and go, but it has a lot in common. Set priorities right. Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools.”

Safia, Nick, Jerod, and Chris get together to talk about documentation. Documentation is essential in our work but it can be difficult to get buy in. The crew talks about how you can get others to care about it in your organization, tools that make documentation easier, and some examples of companies doing it right.

Scam shouldn’t be used as a label for Bitcoin at large, but the hype machine and pump-and-dump schemes around Bitcoin are most certainly teetering on the lines of being a scam.

Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital, writes:

Promoters claim cryptocurrency is valuable as (1) a means of payment, (2) a store of value and/or (3) a thing in itself. None of these claims are true.

1. Means of Payment. Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere, and some cryptocurrencies nowhere at all. Even where accepted, a currency whose value can swing 10 percent or more in a single day is useless as a means of payment.
2. Store of Value. Extreme price volatility also makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value. And the storehouses — the cryptocurrency trading exchanges — are far less reliable and trustworthy than ordinary banks and brokers.
3. Thing in Itself. A bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It only has value if people think other people will buy it for a higher price — the Greater Fool theory.

Want to try WASM before you buy WASM? You’re in luck! I found this while prepping for this week episode of The Changelog with Lin Clark. It’s really well made and definitely lowered the barrier for me to tinker with both WebAssembly and Rust. Worth a 🔖 for sure.

Stephanie Morillo drops some wisdom she gained running the Digital Ocean blog for the past year:

Teams need buy in from the engineering org, a primary owner for all things blog related, a regular publishing cadence, ongoing conversations, flexibility, cross-functional communication, and open dialogue with readers to get the most out of their blog efforts.

Getting buy-in can be the hardest part. I have a hard time convincing myself to blog, let alone other people.

Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.

If you’re using PayPal, their JavaScript Buttons project just made it easier to add Buy Now, Add to Cart and QR Code buttons to your webpages.

This is how simple it gets to include a “Buy Now” button:

<script src="https://raw.github.com/paypal/JavaScriptButtons/master/dist/paypal-button.min.js?merchant=MERCHANT_ID"
    data-button="buynow"
    data-name="Donate to The Changelog"
    data-amount="5.00"
></script>

Here’s a real live example using the code sample above you can really use.

Go ahead and donate a few bucks if you’d like to support us.

Don’t mind the fact that the button says “Buy Now” – I’ve already submitted an issue to add “Donate” button option.

Obviously the PayPal JavaScript Buttons project is a lot easier than digging through your PayPal account and using their clunky tools to include their various buttons. I guess this is a first step of many first steps to get back in the good graces of the developer community – not to mention developer.paypal.com and their many efforts to make PayPal more developer friendly with REST APIs and native SDKs.

Like many of you, we use Stripe as our primary go to for our payment processing to power our membership, but we still have our PayPal account. It’s just there by default, and mainly collecting digital dust unless you’ve decided to use the real live “Buy Now” button above to send us a donation.

If you’re still a fan of PayPal, this project is super easy to use – plus it works with Jeff Harrell’s PayPal MiniCart project

For more details checkout the readme and example page or the source and issues to file a bug or feature request.

For many of you reading this, you might be playing catch up on the disappearance of Mark Pilgrim — like I was while writing this.

On October 4th, 2011 various websites of Mark’s (diveintomark.org, diveintohtml5.org, diveintoaccessibility.org, diveintogreasemonkey.org, diveintopython.org, etc.) started to return the HTTP status code, 410 Gone.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. ~ 410 Gone

Mark also deleted his Twitter, Reddit, Google+ and GitHub accounts as well. But don’t worry, we are now more than 145 days past all of this so there’s no need to launch a manhunt — he’s OK. All that’s over now.

There is a lot more to this story, but I don’t desire to regurgitate that here when other sources have already good and covered it. However, before we move on from that subject — I did get a chuckle from this response from Mark to Jason Scott on Twitter.

Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) October 5, 2011

…and there you have it …

So where’s the code?

Since we know he’s OK, and that he obviously intended to pull a _why — I guess we can simply do our best to preserve his contributions to the web community.

Thanks to Kenneth Reitz, Paul Irish and Jonathan Neal, most of Mark’s public work has been preserved in the mirror of Mark Pilgrim’s GitHub — special thanks to Kenneth for switching github/diveintomark to an org so we can all contribute.

Sources and links

• github/diveintomark org on GitHub
• The disappearance of Mark Pilgrim
• diveintohtml5.info
• diveintohtml5.org resolves to a 410 (Gone) status.
• (Mark) - I’m a four-time published author. I write free books and people buy them. It works out surprisingly well.
• Ask HN: Anyone know where Mark Pilgrim went?
• Needs updated to redirect to diveintomark/diveintohtml5