Changelog

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.”

In this post Justin Jackson shares his struggles, doubts, and uncertainties about where to take his startup. Sometimes we put too much financial pressure on a startup too soon and it fails — not because of lack of product/market fit, but because of financially poor choices. It’s been exciting to build and grow our app on the side. But it’s also been hard. With hundreds of paying customers, we’re dedicating more of our time to serving them. But, the business isn’t earning enough to pay us for our time. It’s been particularly challenging for me. Since 2016, I’ve supported myself with M4Devs and other courses. But my revenue’s fallen this year as I’ve dedicated more time to Transistor.

Vitaly Friedman, Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, breaks down the broken state of commercial web conferences saying: The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. What lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry. …the general expectation is that speakers should speak for free as they’ve been given a unique opportunity to speak and that neither flights nor expenses should be covered for the very same reason. The details of this post from Vitaly go much deeper than what I’ve shared here. I highly recommend taking 22 minutes to read this.

This op-ed from Bryan Cantrill (CTO at Joyent) goes deep into the details around “service providers’ parasitic relationship with open source,” and the other concerns around open source makers shifting to use licenses like commons clause and others designed to restrict service providers from developing commercial products from their open source. Lots of thoughts shared around the subject and many links as well, so — get to digging.

Adam Jacob (co-founder and creator of Chef) tldr’d his ideas to create sustainable free and open source communities by saying, “we should stop focusing on how to protect the revenue models of open source companies, and instead focus on how to create sustainable communities.” He says this will lead to better software, and that it’s also better for business. In addition to this post, Adam also wrote a short book. When I say “Sustainable Open Source Community”, I mean the following: A unified body of individuals, scattered throughout a larger society, who work in support of the creation, evolution, use, and extension of free and open source software; while ensuring its longevity through meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the community of the future to meet its own needs.

Should I read this 22 minute read on the state of web browsers? Sure. Count me in! Microsoft has confirmed the rumor to be true. We now have one less browser engine, and a last man standing (Firefox) in deep trouble (reasons below). … The web now runs on a single engine. There is not a single browser with a non-Chromium engine on mobile of any significance other than Safari. Which runs webkit, kind of the same engine as Chromium, which is based on webkit.

Jeremy Fuksa has had a rough few years. After deciding to go out on his own, his third year in business was filled with anxiety. Going back to working a full-time job may sound like a failure to some, but Jeremy doesn’t look at it that way. He talks to me about his unique skill set, dealing with anxiety and depression, and how his recent experience has taught him some great lessons.

When you’re looking for a programming job, there are dysfunctional companies you’ll want to avoid. This article will help you recognize one warning sign: a particularly problematic phrase.

This is a short 15 minute talk from Henry Zhu at All Things Open, who just announced their photos and videos from their 2018 conference. In this talk Henry asks: When we think about open source, we think about code. Is it more than that? What do you think? What is open source to you?

Being on call isn’t that bad if you find ways to learn from it and make it worth your time and effort. Henrik covers to “why’s”, alarms and alerting systems, and even compensation and scheduling. Henrik writes: For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on call is a logical way of taking responsibility for your work. You also learn a lot from it. However, it is stressful and an inconvenience, so you should get paid for it.

This hits close to home — I was a heavy user/developer around ExpressionEngine from 2006-2008. I’m happy to see them come around to embrace an open source model. When Rick Ellis, founder of EllisLab, was asked on Twitter “Why open source?” he simply said: Open source has won. It’s not even a contest anymore. Here’s a note shared with us from Derek Jones, CEO of EllisLab: [ExpressionEngine] a popular commercial CMS with 15 years of continuous development has taken a huge leap and gone open source after watching the closed-source CMS market continue to shrink while simultaneously getting more crowded.

The most obvious reason is cost. Developing a custom typeface can eliminate the recurring licensing fees that must be paid to foundries. IBM and Netflix claim to save millions of dollars per year by switching from Helvetica to IBM Plex and Gotham to Netflix Sans, respectively. I hadn’t considered the on going costs of licensing as a factor, but it totally make sense. Although, that’s not where Arun ends this. He goes into the much finer details of the typefaces, the medium, how screen types have changed, and more. Companies like Apple and Samsung, with their wide portfolio of digital and physical products and services, have united their brands and products under a singular typeface. Apple went further and didn’t just work within the numerous constraints posed by both the digital and physical world. In creating San Francisco, it reinvented how type is rendered altogether. I dig the question Arun ends with, “Should custom typefaces exist?”

As the title for the linked post from Cory Doctorow says, all you have to do is “become an admin on dormant, widely-used open source projects” and then do your thing. Many open source projects attain a level of “maturity” where no one really needs any new features and there aren’t a lot of new bugs being found, and the contributors to these projects dwindle, often to a single maintainer who is generally grateful for developers who take an interest in these older projects and offer to share the choresome, intermittent work of keeping the projects alive. Ironically, these are often projects with millions of users, who trust them specifically because of their stolid, unexciting maturity. This presents a scary social-engineering vector for malware… We’ll be talking with Dominic Tarr about the details shared in Issue #116 on event-stream later today on The Changelog (the episode will hit RSS feeds next week). Chime in below if you’d like to add questions/thoughts to our planned discussion.

Claire Jaja (Manager of Data Science) at TalentWorks was curious about how many job requirements are actually required, so they analyzed job postings and resumes for more than 6,000 applications across 118 industries from their database. The results are quite interesting… Your chances of getting an interview start to go up once you meet about 40% of job requirements. and… You’re not any more likely to get an interview matching 90% of job requirements compared to matching just 50%. For women… …these numbers are about 10% lower i.e. women’s interview chances go up once they meet 30% of job requirements, and matching 40% of job requirements is as good as matching 90% for women.

Strong, but important words coming from Clojure’s creator, Rich Hickey: The only people entitled to say how open source ‘ought’ to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects. Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager. And… Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of ‘community-driven-development’ are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement. There’s a lot more said, and undoubtedly some tension in the Clojure community that he’s responding to, but I’m not privy to it so I won’t read between the lines.

Budi Tanrim recently left his “dream job” at Shopify, but learned some extremely important career/life lessons along the way. I put this in the “must read” category. A lot of people asked me, “Budi, are you crazy? Why did you leave Shopify?” I often think about this, leaving behind a fantastic company, an excellent mentor, and free lunch seems like a crazy move for me, too. It still is. But…

Queue this up for your long holiday weekend. Hack the planet!!!

For many people, there is no reason they want to have years old tweets or reddit comments existing and making it easier for online marketers and jilted ex-lovers to profile you. Set the time period you want to keep, whitelist stuff you want to preserve indefinitely, and let Social Amnesia wipe the rest out of memory, MIB-style.

The next big thing for Gitcoin might be coming out of their announcement of Gitcoin Labs. In their words, Gitcoin Labs is “R&D for Busy Developers.” We are excited to expand upon Austin Griffith’s work in the ecosystem, and to formalize it into Gitcoin Labs, which will be a service that provides Research Reports and Toolkits for Busy Developers. Kevin mentioned that they’re “going to continue Austin’s work in the ecosystem” and the first thing listed on their roadmap was “burner wallets”— consider me intrigued.

For all of our #applenerds out there — I haven’t read this fully (though it’s probably a ~3-5 min read) Brad touched on some key sticking points we didn’t fully cover on our recent Spotlight episode on Apple’s Fall 2018 Mac/iPad event. Here’s one pro that stood out to me: The bevel is back, baby. — one of the best things about this machine is the nice slope that doesn’t hurt my writs while typing. This was one of the biggest things I noticed when I switched from my original MacBook Air to a MacBook Pro, and I’m happy to return to a comfortable typing environment. If you’re a MacBook Pro user, have you been considering the switch to a MacBook Air?

The state of the Octoverse has landed and with it a new dataset of top programming languages for 2018. According to languages by contributor (as of Sept 30, 2018)… Ruby dropped from #5 to #10, Python swapped with PHP to take over the #3 spot — plus so much more…if you dig into the data. JavaScript also tops our list for the language with the most contributors in public and private repositories. This is true for organizations of all sizes in every region of the world. However, we’ve also seen the rise of new languages on GitHub. TypeScript entered the top 10 programming languages for public, private, and open source repositories across all regions last year. And projects like DefinitelyTyped help people use common JavaScript libraries with TypeScript, encouraging its adoption. We’ve also seen some languages decline in popularity. Ruby has dropped in rankings over the last few years. While the number of contributors coding in Ruby is still on the rise, other languages like JavaScript and Python have grown faster. New projects are less likely to be written in Ruby, especially projects owned by individual users or small organizations, and much more likely to be written in JavaScript, Java, or Python. Here’s the visual…

Do you love programming for its own sake, or do you just program for the outcomes it enables? Depending on which describes you best you will face different problems in your career as a software developer. Enthusiasts code out of love. If you’re an enthusiast you’d write software just for fun, but one day you discovered your hobby could also be your career, and now you get paid to do what you love. Pragmatists may enjoy coding, but they do it for the outcomes. If you’re a pragmatist, you write software because it’s a good career, or for what it enables you to do and build. Which is your camp and why?

We recently talked with Daniel Stenberg about HTTP/2 and QUIC, so this news comes with little surprise looking back on that conversation with hindsight. The protocol that’s been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3. This was triggered by this original suggestion by Mark Nottingham. On November 7, 2018 Dmitri of Litespeed announced that they and Facebook had successfully done the first interop ever between two HTTP/3 implementations. Mike Bihop’s follow-up presentation in the HTTPbis session on the topic can be seen here. The consensus in the end of that meeting said the new name is HTTP/3!

Andrey Sitnik: No emails left for me to read. Nor write. I’ve sent a message to my family and delegated my open source projects (Autoprefixer and PostCSS) to my friends. With my last tweet sent, I turn off my laptop, phone, and tablet. My Digital Sabbath begins in 10 minutes: no digital devices for the next month. An absolutely fascinating read. You can visualize Andrey’s digital sabbath on his GitHub contribution graph 👇

Tanya leads with this as a disclaimer “This article is for beginners in security or other IT folk, not experts.” — which means this is a 101 level post BUT is a highly important topic. Share as needed. Passwords are awful … software security industry expects us to remember 100+ passwords, that are complex (variations of upper & lowercase, numbers and special characters), that are supposed to be changed every 3 months, with each one being unique. Obviously this is impossible for most people. Tanya goes on to say… If you work in an IT environment, you absolutely must have a password manager. I strongly suggest that anyone who uses a computer regularly and has multiple passwords to remember to get one, even if you don’t consider yourself tech savvy. I fully agree. I also use 1Password and have done so for as long as I can possibly remember.