YC touches so many companies that it is in effect an index on the entire early stage venture capital industry, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average for public stocks.
Lots to ponder in this post. Developer tools, AI, education, and health care are all trending right now in YC investment while hardware and fintech sectors are slowing.
Patrick DeVivo pointed tickgit at Kubernetes’ source code and discovered that the team has a lot TODO…
- 2,380 TODOs across 1,230 files from 363 distinct authors
- 489 TODOs were added in 2019 so far
- 860 days (or 2.3 years) is the average age of a TODO
That’s just a taste of what they found. The article has more info and some analysis to boot.
A nice side-by-side comparison of a simple todo app built with both frameworks. If you’ve experimented with these tools, you’ll probably find this article too elementary to be useful, but if either is unfamiliar to you, definitely give it a read.
I love everything about this: the creativity, the engineering, the relentless desire to be as lazy as humanly possible. Chris automated 100% of this process, from content creation to social interactions to the sales pitch. A must-read.
Alberto Marchetti:
What do you do when you have CronJobs running in your Kubernetes cluster and want to know when a job fails? Do you manually check the execution status? Painful. Or do you perhaps rely on roundabout Prometheus queries, adding unnecessary overhead? Not ideal… But worry not! Instead, let me suggest a way to immediately receive notifications when jobs fail to execute, using two nifty tools…
Writing good tests is hard, and very few people have thought about this domain more than Kent Beck. In this post, he lays out a short list of properties that good tests have.
Look at the last test you wrote. Which properties does it have? Which does it lack? Is that the tradeoff you want to make?
Truly great software companies are self-serve first. Let’s dig into this assertion and why it makes sense.
“Self-serve” is a term I hadn’t heard before being recommended this excellent piece by Gokul Rajaram, but once I heard it, it immediately resonated with me.
A self-serve product is one where a customer can go through the full product experience — from signing up to first use to activating new features to managing their account to upgrading and/or cancellation — all without ever needing to interact with another person… Self-serve first is when the entire company is built around self-serve, when self-serve is the core foundation of the company.
Gokul explains four reasons why he thinks self-serve first is the way to go.
In this post, Rich Archbold touches on something we discussed on a recent episode of The Changelog. Specifically, in the episode, we talked about contentment being the enemy of progress and how that might effect our industry psychologically — at-large. But when is what we’re working on ever good enough?
Rich has this to say…
Software can never be perfect, it can only ever be “good enough”…beyond a certain size and rate of change — it’s always going to contain bugs and experience outages. So how do you know if your software is good enough? … My opinion and approach is to codify your beliefs around what constitutes software that is “good enough” into a small set of engineering principles and build a culture, organization, and set of processes that reinforce them.
Ellen Chisa (CEO) and Paul Biggar (CTO) are out of stealth mode with Dark and they’re moving into private beta.
Starting today, Dark is in private beta. During the private beta, we’ll be opening Dark in waves to many more people. If you have a project that is well scoped and you’re ready to get started, we can let you into the beta quickly (even immediately!).
Check out the language’s FAQs to learn more about their plans, pricing, etc. Right now, it’s not super clear what the full mission of Dark (the language and the company) is just yet, but you can read this on their about page:
Dark’s mission is to democratize coding by making it 100x easier to build software, so the next billion people can code
It’s hard to imagine life before the iPhone changed everything about being mobile. We weren’t as connected as we are now, but we also didn’t have as many distraction opportunities in our lives or a device to become addicted to. From the very moment we wake up, a large majority of you reading this will admit to checking your phone as one of the first things you do when you wake up. So how do we take back our mornings and attention to ease into the day without the potential jolt of stress kicking us into high gear?
“When I wake up, I am stretching instead of scrolling,” says Hancock, 35. “While I’m not up at the crack of dawn, I do consciously plan my mornings to avoid the chaos of the digital world for at least the first 30 to 45 minutes.”
The slow morning movement is one strategy used among people exhausted by their tech-heavy lives to establish a sense of focus for the rest of the day. Some people exercise, while others enjoy some time alone. The point is to create a lack of technological distraction. A slow morning is supposed to be an antidote to the frenetic pace of 24/7 digital alerts.
You should subscribe to Brain Science — we’ll be covering this topic in a future episode.
Yaron Wittenstein:
The world of software is constantly changing at a very fast pace. Yesterday’s axioms might be tomorrow’s anti-patterns.
Newborn technologies rise to popularity only to become obsolete sooner than expected and hardware advancements make things that were considered science-fiction a few years ago possible.
The only certainty is that we don’t know what the future will bring us.
One mantra in this industry is always-be-learning. A message we don’t communicate well enough, however, is how you also have to be willing to let go of once-useful-but-now-limiting knowledge.
Joel Marcey shares his story and some background on what a developer advocate is and how to be success as a developer advocate.
I am a believer in the pop-culture version of Occam’s razor, or the law of simplicity, where the simplest explanation is usually the right one. A developer advocate is exactly what its title implies — an advocate for developers.
A successful developer advocate can go both deep and broad. They can own a technology stack but also run programs that span an entire open source program office…
A successful developer advocate is able to quickly ramp up on new technologies, sometimes with no background in the space previously, and be able to understand how those technologies may fit into the overall open source ecosystem.
Marianne Bellotti shares five pieces of advice she’s taken from folks in other walks of life (NSA agents, therapists, etc) and how she’s applied that in the software world. My favorite one is “Thinking is also work”. On this topic, Marianne notes:
On a personal level it gave me permission to take time when I needed time. Why should I feel guilty about leaving the office to go on a walk? Thinking is also work.
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for us to get away from our computers a few times a day. Many of my best decisions and moments of inspiration have come while on a walk, a bike ride, or yes, while taking a shower! 🚿
Kitze shared this somewhat controversial story of Sizzy — from struggling open source project to successful product launch and charging money. It’s important to hear more stories like this because not all of the roads of open source are paved with gold.
Honestly, it felt kind of shitty to delete the repository and unpin the project from my profile. I hated the feeling but I had to shrug it off. I had to convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong. The app was serving a lot of people for 2.5 years, and I rarely got any contributions. It was time to get real and think about what matters.
Oh, here we go… I’m gonna mention the M word and lose a ton of readers at this point. Money. Money matters.
Kitze also made an appearance on JS Party #72: LIVE from React Amsterdam.
On June 6, 2019 Tetris turned 35 years old. To celebrate, I wrote my own version and posted it in my GitHub repo. No libraries. No frameworks. Just JavaScript. Those learning JavaScript might find a few lessons here!
By now you’ve probably heard about Zoom’s zero day bug that exposed 4+ million webcams to the bidding of nefarious hackers. Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh shared the full background and details on InfoSec Write-ups:
This vulnerability was originally responsibly disclosed on March 26, 2019. This initial report included a proposed description of a ‘quick fix’ Zoom could have implemented by simply changing their server logic. It took Zoom 10 days to confirm the vulnerability. The first actual meeting about how the vulnerability would be patched occurred on June 11th, 2019, only 18 days before the end of the 90-day public disclosure deadline. During this meeting, the details of the vulnerability were confirmed and Zoom’s planned solution was discussed. However…
If you use Zoom or if you’ve EVER installed Zoom, read Jonathan’s write-up and take appropriate action to update Zoom or to remove the lingering web server it leaves behind. Confirm if the server is present by running lsof -i :19421 in Terminal.
Typescene is a robust front end library written in TypeScript: strongly typed, no dependencies, no nonsense. It’s really great for desktop-like (or mobile) applications, not so great for blogs and other content. It isn’t backed by some major corporation, not even a startup, but it’s been built by me: one developer on a mission to build a no-nonsense dependency-less framework
The author’s journey is noteworthy, but if you’re mostly wanting to know if this particular framework speaks to you, jump directly to its list of goals.
Fun idea coming from Pinterest’s engineering team:
engineer Chris Lloyd created the #dead-code-society Slack channel to be “a sombre place for remembering [—]-only diffs.” Messages are prefixed by a :tombstone: and include links to diffs that contain only file or line deletions.
Dead code is worth celebrating, for sure. I love deleting it even more than I love writing it.
Retired code remains in source control history to be remembered and consulted, but it no longer occupies a prominent place in our workspaces, build systems, or cognitive periphery.
Containerization technologies are one of the trendiest topics in the cloud economy and the IT ecosystem. The container ecosystem can be confusing at times, this post may help you understand some confusing concepts about Docker and containers. We are also going to see how the containerization ecosystem evolved and the state of containerization in 2019.
Put on your swimming suit, because this is a deep dive. 🏊♀️🏊
If you’ve been wanting a way to run VS Code as a cloud-IDE, code-server is what you’ve been looking for.
Code-server allows VS Code to run on a remote server making it fully accessible through the browser. … Developers ready to embrace the cloud-based IDE can do so without losing features, or control. This means you can code on your Chromebook, tablet and desktop with a completely synchronized environment. You can spill coffee on your laptop without fear of losing work.
This post from Dan Abramov about why he moved off Medium summarizes both why we’re no longer linking to Medium and why we’ve never put our content there.
Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall. I’m not sure what happened and whether that’s still the case. But I didn’t do it myself, and that caused a blow to my confidence in Medium as a platform. I respect their need to monetize, but it felt wrong when done retroactively.
Consider adding these mechanisms to your services and making them clearly visible and usable in the README. The poor soul having to solve problems late at night will thank you.
Operating Kubernetes clusters is becoming more and more taxing in terms of the number of aliases/scripts and single purpose tools one must install/master. K9s is a terminal based CLI to manage and diagnose Kubernetes clusters in a single command. It provides a unified view to navigate and diagnose K8s resources for your local or remote clusters right there in the same CLI.
Megan O’Keefe, developer relations engineer at Google, shares her setup for Kubernetes as well as some very helpful tips and tricks from her Terminal setup, navigating clusters, and how she gave kubectl superpowers.
As a developer relations engineer for Kubernetes, I work a lot with demo code, samples, and sandbox clusters. This can get interesting to keep track of (read: total chaos). So in this post I’ll show some of the tools that make my Kubernetes life a lot better.
This environment can work no matter what flavor of Kubernetes you’re running.
Kent C. Dodds shares the backstory of paypal-scripts, a tool that encapsulates all the tools common to PayPal applications and published modules and why TypeScript was a fit. Kent took a poll in their #paypal-scripts Slack channel and 100% of respondents said they wanted the change. Here’s what happened next…
About a week later, I had totally migrated
paypal-scriptsfrom supporting Flow to supporting TypeScript (most of that time was making all the tools recognize.tsand.tsxfiles 🙄 and allowingpaypal-scriptsto dogfood itself which is kinda tricky 🐶).
…
Then we had Christmas break 🎄 and the week we got back after the new year 🎆, it was merged and now every new project starts off with modern tools that will stay updated by default and will be statically typed with TypeScript.
