Jack Dorsey:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

Color me surprised and impressed. My first thought was, “why create something brand new when smart people have been working on open standards for a long time already?” Then I read on:

For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.

Verrry interesting, indeed. What do you think will come of all this?

Jane Lytvynenko went digging through the Equifax class-action suit and uncovered some absolute gems:

Furthermore, Equifax employed the username “admin” and the password “admin” to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that “is a surefire way to get hacked.” This portal contained a vast trove of personal information.

Hanlon’s razor often applies in security breaches like these, but I can’t see this as anything but pure negligence by Equifax’s technical teams. There’s more:

Equifax also failed to encrypt sensitive data in its custody… admitted that sensitive personal information relating to hundreds of millions of Americans was not encrypted… Not only was this information unencrypted, but it was also accessible through a public-facing, widely used website.

Filed under you-gotta-be-freakin-kiddin-me

Matt Steele was inspired by Mikeal Rogers’ “ode to GitHub Actions” on JS Party #91. Code is forthcoming. For now, just click through to the tweet to watch the embedded video…

This in-beta feature should be stolen by all browser DevTools teams. Such a great idea!

After announcing the program in a tweet, Jack Dorsey followed up with some details:

This will be Square’s first open source initiative independent of our business objectives. These folks will focus entirely on what’s best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square’s commercial interests. All resulting work will be open and free.

Followed by:

Square has taken a lot from the open source community to get us here. We haven’t given enough back. This is a small way to give back, and one that’s aligned with our broader interests: a more accessible global financial system for the internet.

Whether you’re a devout Bitcoin hodler or an avid nocoiner, you have to admit this a great way (the greatest?) for corporate entities to support the open source community. Full-time salaries. Not focused on commercial interests.

Let’s hope it plays out that way! 🙏

In response to questions about how this change will affect compensation on Medium, Ev says:

It doesn’t affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program. That’s determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted (assuming they’re logged in). #

In response to questions about the state and future of Medium, Ev says:

Generally it’s 📈. Lots of growth and good stuff happening. I have been meaning to give an update. Thanks for the nudge. #

This tweet from Shannon Ashley states she made $8,069.96 writing on Medium in February 2019 and has the screenshot to prove it. She even wrote “What It’s Like To Be All-In On Medium” but you have to be a paying member to read it.

This is an epic open source funding thread by @SwiftOnSecurity:

Corporate purchasing and policies make funding open source Literally Impossible. Nothing’s going to change until you make them pay you.

Someone filed a bug?
Support contract.

Someone wants a feature?
Support contract.

It’s literally easier to pay you $1500/yr than $25 once.

Followed by:

I want to donate $150 to this open source project.
“Do I look like a communist? Is that what you think of me?”

We need a $1.5k support contract rather than pay an on-staff developer $180k.
“Okay submit their IRS W-9 and Point Of Contact for vendor management to reach out to.”

That’s just the beginning. Lots to ponder if you have corporate users and you’re currently using donations as your primary source of funding.

Very cool! I tried to get to a Command Prompt, but it seems key input has been disabled.

There’s lots of fun comments in this Twitter thread.

Wohooo! JS Party live at JSConf US 2018 🤘 🎤

Thanks to Felipe for an awesome shot and tweet of our panelists on stage for the live JS Party at JSConf.

Ives van Hoorne, creator of CodeSandbox, tweeted this and the attached video has already racked up more than 41.5K views!

… This is not only Monaco, this is VSCode itself directly running in the browser with node shims connected to the APIs of CodeSandbox. This means that we can get Grid View, VSCode Extension support, breadcrumbs + more! I’m so excited by this! #

I’m close to getting VSCode extensions working in their own web worker, then we’ll get things like VIM mode, first class TypeScript support and more! The great thing is that it will work exactly as VSCode, it’s literally the same code base. #

It took years!

We’re finally finished removing jQuery from GitHub.com’s frontend. What did we replace it with? No framework whatsoever…

This is a long thread with some great conversations and questions.

This tweet from Dan Dean, an engineer at Simple, made me lol.

How your web application makes it through the framework wars

Jürg Lenhi, writes in this tweet thread:

Let’s talk about open-source. I’ve been developing and maintaining Paper.js for years. It has 8,700 stars on GitHub. Multiple big companies have done projects and products with it. Yet donations and sponsored features are very few, and I need to accept other work to sustain a living.

There are several more tweets that follow this up with more details from Jürg, but what I found missing, is an awareness of what a healthy relationship for him and this project looks like.

If we’ve learned anything from Request For Commits, it is that money doesn’t solve the open source maintainer problem, so donations or Patreon alone aren’t a fix.

(Thanks to Cody for sharing this in our community Slack.)

If so, then this Twitter thread should be a great read for you.

If you’re avoiding services like DynamoDB/Datastore/Spanner/SQS/PubSub out of fear of lock in, remember that managing Cassandra, Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc yourself is also lock in.

💣.

Ecto’s issues have been cleaned up and tagged with labels like Level:Advanced, Level:Intermediate, and Level:Starter to make it easier to know where you’d like to contribute.

@elixirlang on Twitter:

We have just tidied up the issues tracker for Ecto. If you were planning to contribute, pull requests and feedback are definitely welcome. #