Aleksandr Krivoshchekov implements a factorial function in different ways as if he was at different stages of Go enlightenment. Stick around to the end for a cheeky Rob Pike moment.

In 2009 I started the Alan Turing petition. Perhaps you read about in WIRED back in 2014. This is my first-hand account of how I started the petition, automated my father with Perl scripts, convinced the UK to apologise to Alan Turing, and received a personal phone call from the British Prime Minister.

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Mireille and Adam discuss shame as an emotional and experiential construct. We dive into the neural structures involved in processing this emotion as well as the factors and implications of our experience of shame. Shame is a natural response to the threat of vulnerability and perception of oneself as defective or inherently “not enough.”

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

The future of work is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The folks at Ars have been living it (to one degree or another) for two decades. In this epic post, Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson walks us through how they do what they do.

But why?

Little bored. Not learning as much as I used to. I’ve been doing the same thing too long and need a change. It’d be nice to primarily work in Go rather than work on Go.

When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I learned Google’s internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages, Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is very popular, stable…

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

Chris Coyier:

The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.

I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.

Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄

Mireille and Adam dig deeper into empathy as a construct. What key brain structures are involved? How can we better understand empathy to be able to better navigate ourselves and our relationships with others both at home and in the workplace?

If Chris Fox had it his way:

• the keyword would be removed from all languages that use it
• only the language runtime and operating system would be allowed to raise exceptions

Click through to find out why he has this beef and what he thinks we should do about it.

Alex Hudson:

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.

We had a great dialog about this topic on our 2020 predictions episode of JS Party. I tend to agree with Alex’s analysis, which is in-depth and well-reasoned. What do you think about the “no code” movement? Hype or reality? Somewhere in between?

Mireille and Adam discuss goal setting and the different types of goals we set. We reflect on how can you set goals that work for you and measure them. We also talk about how you go about building the behaviors that align with your identity and resistance we face when we do this. We also share our 2020 goal for Brain Science. This is a must-listen episode to get a grounded perspective in planning your goals for this year and decade.

Mireille and Adam discuss the role of our thoughts, how they run our lives, and how they make us feel. We talk through alternative ways to think, the power we hold in starving our habitual neural networks, and the ways our thoughts help us to be our best selves. How aware are you of the quality of the soil of your mind?

I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked, “Can I put my logo on the login page?” or “why are the dates formatted like that?” but users of my software over the years.

This story comes from Ars Technica, not The Onion:

In June 2017, Adams drove Hopkins to the domain-name owner’s house “and provided Hopkins with a demand note, which contained instructions for transferring the domain to Adams’ GoDaddy account,” the DOJ said. The heist didn’t go as planned, and both the domain-name owner and Hopkins ended up suffering gunshot wounds.

Can you imagine transferring a domain name at gun point?

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?

Get some wisdom from Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub on building and leading engineering teams that scale.

If building a high-powered engineering team is hard, successfully scaling it through hyper-growth is near impossible.

The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate. Culture isn’t just about the “feels;” it’s about accountability and behavior. Whatever you do as a leader and whatever you tolerate becomes the standard for your entire organization.

Watch out! If you start reading this paper you could be lost for hours following all the interesting links and ideas, and end up even more dissatisfied than you already are with the state of software today. You might also be inspired to help work towards a better future. I’m all in :).

I co-sign that sentiment. When the author says “this paper” they are referring to this paper which they are about to summarize. If you haven’t considered local-first software before, you should know that there are seven key properties to it, which are described in detail in the paper and in brief in the summary.

We plan to dig deep into this topic on Brain Science (listen and subscribe here), but until then, here’s some great advice from Flavio Copes based on many years of working remotely.

I’m an introvert, I am independent and I like doing things alone. This post is heavily influenced by this fact, and you might find that what I say is madness if you’re an extrovert who needs people around to be productive.

The first suggestion I have for you is to have a dedicated office space. It does not need to be in another building, but it might be necessary if you have lots of people in your house. I do have a dedicated room, with a door I can close. It’s very helpful because it avoids.. interruptions.

If you are a leader or someone aspiring to lead, consider this approach to engineering management.

This post is a summary of the approach and tools I’ve used to build an engineering team, where everyone is a leader - including sharing of the project management expectations Google Docs guide that my team uses. It’s also a reflection on the pain points that came with this approach. I can’t advocate for how universally this approach could work. However, based on my results, it is something I suggest engineering leaders - especially frontline managers - consider as an option.

Mireille and Adam discuss empathy, respect, and compassion and the role each of these interpersonal constructs play in strengthening our relationships, both personally and professionally. What exactly is empathy, respect, and compassion? What are key indicator lights to be aware of when any of them are lacking or off-kilter? We also discuss Dr. John Gottman’s research on “The Four Horsemen” in relationships.

In our transcripts, we have 44 results for “Impostor Syndrome” and just 2 results for “Dunning-Kruger effect”. This makes me think that we’re either not that familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, or we don’t talk about it enough. So, what is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

In a word: overconfidence. It is a cognitive bias which leads people to believe they are more competent than they are, due to inability to objectively evaluate oneself.

People experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect are unable to recognize that they are not performing to the standards they think they are. As with impostor syndrome, they feel this way in spite of any evidence, and it can lead to chronic problems in all walks of life.

On this special re-broadcast of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy Larson (freeCodeCamp’s founder) interviewed Adam and Jerod in the ultimate Backstage episode to celebrate a decade of conversations, news, and community here at Changelog. Yes, this month we turn 10 years old! We go deep into our origin stories, our history as a company, becoming and being a leader, the backstory of our branding, our music from Breakmaster Cylinder, and where we might be heading in the future.

Mireille and Adam discuss key aspects of mental health and what it looks like to manage our own mental well-being. What are the key ingredients to managing it? How do our relationships and boundaries impact it? Are sleep, food, and activity really that important? We talk through these questions and more to better understand mental health and the ways in which we contribute to our well being.