Changelog

Twitter is at it again making controversial changes restricting how the developer community can use their APIs to develop 3rd party Twitter clients. Sarah Perez reports on TechCrunch: Twitter is breaking users' favorite third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific by shutting off APIs these apps relied on. Worse still, is that Twitter isn't taking full responsibility for its decisions. In a company email it shared today, Twitter cited "technical and business constraints" that it can no longer ignore as being the reason behind the APIs' shutdown. This change sparked the #BreakingMyTwitter hashtag

Do you want more contributors and maintainers on your project? Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew (macOS package manager), writes on his personal blog: Here are a a few guidelines in thinking about this: Most contributors were users first (“scratching your own itch”: most people start contributing to an open source project to solve a problem they are experiencing) Most maintainers were a contributor and user first (people don’t just jump into maintaining a project without helping to build it first) Maintainers cannot do a good job without remaining a user (to maintain context, passion and empathy) Combined, these start to look a bit like a sales funnel. People have to travel through each stage and there’s a fairly hefty drop-off at each one. Also check out ~> Open source maintainers owe you nothing

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

Bryan Helmig writes on the Zapier engineering blog: As startups grow, we need to make tweaks to the way we work. I’ve found this especially true in engineering. As a co-founder and CTO, my own role has changed a lot over the years. My everyday duties and challenges have shifted, and I’ve had to alter my approach multiple times to help the company reach a new level. The growth stage between just the three of us and where we are today was pretty tricky. Read on for the lessons I've learned as I grew as a first time CTO... Hear Bryan's story on Founders Talk this Thursday.

If you're a maintainer who's feeling the burden of your open source software, you have a few options to consider according to Richard Littauer — you can... Onboard more maintainers - spread the burden to more of the community Clearly set expectations - explain your software is provided on an “as is” basis Hire a maintenance company - wait, what?! Is that we've come to? Are we now hiring code maintenance companies to maintain our open source? I'm actually quite interested in the economies around this, so let this post serve as an open invite to Richard to join me on Founders Talk for a discussion on the state of open source maintenance and his lessons learned building Maintainer Mountaineer.

Bloomberg is citing a sell-off of Bitcoin, Ether, and dozens of smaller digital tokens. The "crypto exodus" is happening due to a "sense of panic" hitting crypto investors. It's been a brutal August for Bitcoin and Ether, with Bitcoin touching below $6,000. “The big story in the market today is the huge weakness in Ethereum,” Timothy Tam, chief executive officer of CoinFi said in a phone interview — “Bitcoin has held up relatively well versus Ethereum. It’s still quite weak versus the U.S. dollar.” While cryptocurrencies rallied in July on hopes that a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund would attract new investors, U.S. regulators have yet to sign off on multiple proposals for such a product. The letdown has coincided with growing concern that entrepreneurs who raised crypto-denominated funds via initial coin offerings (ICO) are now cashing out of holdings such as Ether, the token for the Ethereum blockchain that is a popular platform for crypto projects. What do you think? Are you selling, buying, or holding?

David Cassel has a great recap of the recent Decentralized Web Summit and what it was all about. It’s a follow-up to a similar event in 2016, though now “People are starting to show real working code and real projects. They’re building whole technology stacks that are more decentralized, in large part fueled by the excitement of the cryptocurrency systems. The altcoins and Bitcoins are proving that interesting and complicated systems are starting to work out there.” Click through for lots of quotes and takeaways. I think Changelog might have to get involved if they do this again next year...

Stack Overflow began be telling their community to "be nice," but over time that proved to not be enough to ensure a safe place for the developer community. Tim Post, Director Of Community Strategy, writes on the Stack Overflow blog: Our CoC is what we call a living document. It’s designed to change over time to ensure that it remains relevant by continuing to meet the needs of our communities. Every six months or so, we plan to find out how folks feel about how things are going by asking both new and experienced users about their recent experiences on the site. Hopefully this change leads to a less toxic experience.

While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to me about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.

Jerod, Nick, and Chris talk with Jeff Lembeck about his tweets, the people behind npm, the need for empathy, and things they're excited about.

Thirteen years ago, Ashley Baxter inherited the family insurance business when her Dad passed away. Even though she's a talented photographer, and built a successful photography business, the insurance industry kept calling her name. Ashley talks about what excites her about insurance, the challenges of running a business, and how burnout forced her to focus.

The important thing to remember about leading is you have to have clear lines of communication with those you lead. I love the ideas Lara shared in this guide to writing a "week in review" team update. This doc helped me set records straight, disseminate info to lots of people at once, and open up conversation internally, while reflecting on the themes that had come up in weekly one-on-ones, backchannels, team meetings, etc. What I chose to write about each time widely varied. Though the teams who reported to me were the primary audience for this doc, I kept it internally-public, meaning that anyone at the company could read and comment in it. I found that some other managers just weren’t talking about hard things that were happening...

Adam and Jerod are on location at OSCON and talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he’s doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software, and Abby Cobunoc Mayes about the work she’s doing at Mozilla for open science.

Tigran Hakobyan, remote software engineer at Buffer, writes on the freeCodeCamp blog: Working remotely is very different from working in the office. I don’t think you fully grasp the difference until you actually start being remote. For someone like me who never worked in a remote environment, the beginning wasn’t smooth and it came with challenges. I can clearly remember my very first day at Buffer... Tigran also shares a pretty comprehensive breakdown of a typical workday.

Dion Almaer (Google) writes on the Ben and Dion Medium publication: A few teams within Google have joined forces inside Chrome to focus on improving the Web ecosystem, focused on those who build experiences, and create on the Web. We want to make high quality experiences easy to build as that will enable more meaningful engagement on the Web for users and developers alike. This is an awesome breakdown of all the components required to deliver meaningful engagements and a roadmap to the future of the web platform.

I have to agree with this hard-line stance from Chris Coyier on the subject of view source: I literally don't care at all about View Source and wouldn't miss it if it was removed from browsers. I live in DevTools, and I'll bet you do too. I want my website to arrive at light speed on a tiny spec of magical network packet dust and blossom into a complete website. Or do whatever computer science deems is the absolute fastest way to send website data between computers. I'm much more worried about the state of web performance than I am about web education. But even if I was very worried about web education, I don't think it's the network's job to deliver teachability. What about you? Is view source more important than web performance? Is DevTools a worthy replacement for view source? Chris also cites comments on the subject from Tom Dale, Jonathan Snook, and Chris Heilmann.

This is an interesting 30-hour method for learning a new skill from Azeria Labs (aka Azeria). If you're a fan of flow and you'd like to learn how to apply it to learning a new skill, check this out. We also know and have experienced the feeling of flow. The moment when you’re fully focused on a task. You lose all sense of time, and everything seems to flow effortlessly; you forget everything around you and have a feeling of control over the task. This rewarding feeling of flow is best described by Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

This is how you accomplish step 1 to becoming a Go contributor. Before we can become Go contributors, the very first step is being able to build Go from source. I followed the official doc and filled in the blanks a bit to figure out how to get everything working. This post is part of a series from Carolyn Van Slyck called Adventures in Gopher Source. The goal of the series is "for more of the gopher community to become upstream Go contributors."

Is this really a chance to get $10,000 in equity-free funding just for completing a free online course? Seems there's also $50,000 in credits to a variety of other services too. Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at StartupSchool.org.

In this special episode of JS Party, we're sharing a full-length episode of our new show, Away from Keyboard. This show explores the human side of creative work. In this episode, Tim talks with Justin Jackson about his parents, dealing with depression, and a new business he's co-founded.

This post is a simple, step-by-step explanation of how Patrick created 'an insanely simple “did” file accessible by terminal'. What's interesting about it to me is not how to do it, but the idea of doing it itself. His motiviation: Time flies by when you’re learning how to code. Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge. This is a great truth, and one that applies far beyond learning how to code. Sometimes we need a did.txt just to recognize how much we've accomplished recently. For me, there are days when I get to the end and feel like I didn't really accomplish much. If I'd catalogued my wins throughout the day as they occurred (no matter how small), I bet I'd feel different about that. However, I'm both busy and lazy (a hellacious pairing) and wouldn't keep up with this habit unless it were dead simple. Patrick's 'did.txt' solution is about as simple as it gets...

How do we know whether an open source project is doing well? Number of contributors? Number of users? Number of appearances on The Changelog*? Nadia's been researching these things: A lot of people are interested in measuring the health and velocity of open source projects. After digging through the current research landscape, I’d like to summarize the most common approaches I’ve seen, and my conclusions here. One conclusion she's come to is that our current methods aren't cutting the mustard. Find out why and what some of her suggestions for improvement are in this excellent piece. *yes of course that's a joke

I first heard of Justin Jackson about six years ago. Back then, he was consulting full-time for a company with the dream of going independent. Fast forward to 2018, and after building a successful business, he's now embarking on a new adventure. Justin talks about his parents, dealing with depression, and a new business he's co-founded.

Floor Drees: 6 maintainers of high profile Ruby projects share their thoughts on maintaining and contributing to open source software with ROSS conf Amsterdam. We transcribed the bestest bits from the video interviews. Learn from Katrina Owen of Exercism, Michal Papis of RVM, Hongli Lai of Passenger, and more.

It's been four years since Jason Snell left his job at Macworld and started his own site Six Colors. In that time, Jason is back to what he loves: creating. He talks about the diversity of his work day, finding the right mix of revenue streams, and taking a break when you need one.