We’re helping Atlassian to promote Season 2 of Teamistry. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways, to achieve remarkable things. Today, we’re sharing a full-length episode from Season 1 which tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 spacesuits.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time, we don’t actually see his face. We see his moonsuit. That moonsuit — in effect — is Neil Armstrong; an inseparable part of this historic moment. While the spacesuit kept him alive to tell that story in his own words, what went unnoticed is the extraordinary team that stitched it together.

Antirez on the strange relationship between money, open source, and the code we write on the job:

Open source is different, it’s an artifact, it’s a transposition in code of what you really want to do, of what you feel software should be, or just of all your fun and joy, or even anger you are feeling while coding… It’s not about money. You can ignore bugs if you want, and ignore their complains, you can do that since you don’t have a contract to do otherwise, but they are helping you, they care about the same thing you care: your software quality, grandiosity, perfection.

Most of us have heard how important “self-care” is and how important it can be for healthy living. But what exactly IS self-care? In this episode, not only do we define what self-care is, but we talk through the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of what’s involved in self-care and why this can so often be misunderstood and challenging. While we might be familiar with this term, many may not consider how they can be deliberate around managing themselves by both reflecting on and engaging in activities that help support their brains and bodies. It isn’t enough to simply know that self-care is important, rather discovering practical actions you can take to improve both how you feel and how you engage with the world.

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix…ok, we couldn’t help ourselves with that one. Today we’re joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up…back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. We talk through all the details in this episode with Matthew and Sid.

Stress is something that we will inevitably encounter throughout our lives. It isn’t all bad or maladaptive, but how we manage it can make a significant difference in our lives. The degree of stress we feel impacts how we show up in the world including both how we relate and how we do the work before us each day.

In this episode, Mireille and Adam discuss the impact of stress on our systems including the role of different stress hormones on our immune system, cardiovascular system and our metabolism. Like many other conversations on previous episodes, we provide research relative to the value of relationships as having close connections helps us all combat the stress that loneliness can cause as well. When we utilize resources to support us as well as set limits on what we expose ourselves to and focus our attention to, we have the opportunity to better navigate the stresses of our lives.

I enjoyed reading what Anna had to say about the advice she had been given and the process she created for doing introduction one-to-one meetings with her new team.

When I joined the Financial Times as Technical Director for FT.com, I inherited a team of around 50 engineers. One of the first things I did was meet each of them for a one-to-one. I was initially resistant, but it was extremely valuable, I’m glad I did it, and I would definitely do it again in a future role. I ran each meeting in the same way. Firstly I ran through everything I planned to cover, and then stepped through it…

It has become even more clear to me during the era of COVID-19 that poor communication is the reason systems and relationships fail. Every time I’ve failed to get what myself, my team, or a community wanted out of an engineering team was because I neglected to communicate why and how it would be impactful to them in a digestible way.

In this post, I share a few lessons learned as a non-technical launching hardware and software products over the last decade. We’ll explore tactics and skills teams can use to communicate more effectively.

Ned Batchelder:

Helping people online is difficult. We expect technical questions and discussions, but everyone involved are just people, so it doesn’t always go smoothly. There’s no way to guarantee a good outcome, but there are things we as helpers can do to improve the interactions.

Ned shares a dozen ways we can work to be more helpful online. Excellent stuff. 👌

Here’s a fun rabbit hole to go down if you have some free time to spend.

After a fellow named Zikubi beat the speedrun record for Super Mario Bros 3 by about 8 minutes with a time of just over three minutes, speedrun analyst Bismuth made the video above to explain how he did it…by changing the game with the gameplay itself.

The first couple minutes go exactly as you’d expect, but the speedrun takes a weird turn when, instead of using the second warp whistle to go to level 8, he uses it to go to level 7. And once in level 7, Mario races around randomly, letting opportunity slip away like a blindfolded birthday boy unwittingly steering himself away from the piñata. It’s only later, during the explanation of how he got from level 7 to the final screen so quickly, that you realize Mario’s panicky idiot behavior is actually the player actively reprogramming the game to open up a wormhole to the ending.

When you lack clarity or have uncertainty for a direction or goal, it’s going to be difficult to succeed in your actions. Today Mireille and Adam discuss the topic of clear communication and expectation, two of the most important ingredients of success. How do we create better clarity? Like so many things — clarity begins with awareness, and awareness of yourself. You have to know what you want and what you value in life. We must assume 100% responsibility for creating our own clarity in our lives. After all, “if you don’t have clarity, you are operating from assumption.”

Daniel Moch shared his thoughts on semantic versioning and how he treats external libraries that violate its inherent contract with developers.

So as not to bury the lede, I’ll get to my point: Semantic Versioning is a meta-API, and maintainers who are cavalier about violating it can’t be trusted to created stable contracts. I’ve lost patience for breaking changes making their way to my code bases without the maintainers incrementing the major version of their projects, especially in language ecosystems where Semantic Versioning is expected, and in such cases I’m going to begin exploring alternative options so I can ban such libraries from my projects—personal and professional—altogether.
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If you work in a language ecosystem where Semantic Versioning is the de facto norm, where violating it can wreak havoc downstream, then please play nice and follow its dictates. Instead of viewing it as a straight jacket, try to see it as an algorithm to determine what your next release number should be. We should all like algorithms!

Infinite scroll through 65k Winamp skins with instant search and in-browser interactive preview. This is a cool new addition to Webamp from our long-time friend Jordan Eldredge.

Jared Mauch was tired of waiting for high speed internet access to his very rural house in the outskirts of Ann Arbor, MI so he started a telco to get fiber to his town.

Development was happening in and around Ann Arbor putting new subdivisions nearby. I expected broadband would reach my new home eventually (Cable, DSL, FTTx), but…nothing came. I know…start a telco! – source slides

Jared covers everything in this video – the research, planning, finances, pre-builds, getting customers, internet access, construction, contractors, and running all the fiber.

Conflict is a part of everyday life. If you are connected to other humans, conflict will eventually occur. But what exactly is conflict? Where does it begin? How can it be resolved? In this episode, Mireille and Adam dive deep into those details to examine the framework of conflict end-to-end, to hopefully equip us with the tactics and skills we need to better navigate and resolve the conflict we encounter in our lives.

If you like the topics we cover on Brain Science, then you’ll love this post from Matthieu Cneude based on this study and his own experiences.

Depending on the project, the impact of biases can be completely different, from insignificant to dangerous for the survival of the project itself. … Come with me, I will show you what our enemy looks like, and how to bring it down with a sharp mind.

Thanks to Tom Larkworthy for putting together this “goldmine of tech resources.” The cool thing is you can play with the data yourself and make your own analysis.

The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members. The list skews toward innovative learning resources and tech career tips, but there is a little of everything.

Data was scraped 2020-09-1 from the public favourites lists. This is an observable notebook with the data attached as a file, so you can fork your own analysis if you don’t like how I did it (e.g. you could find the favorited Ask HN posts).

To calculate the top favourites, I give each member 30 votes to divided over their (max) 30 most recent favourited articles. I sum the votes over all articles. The results are a goldmine of tech resources.

Following Git 2.28’s highly sought after ability to configure init.defaultBranch comes GitHub’s support at the platform level.

You can now set the default branch name for newly-created repositories under your username. This setting does not impact any of your existing repositories. Existing repositories will continue to have the same default branch they have now.

But even if you do nothing…

On October 1, 2020, if you haven’t changed the default branch for new repositories for your user, organization, or enterprise, it will automatically change from master to main.

I’m a bit late to the party on this one (was out on vacay last week), but my oh my did Randall Munroe hit the nail on the head. I have a feeling we’ll be referencing xkcd #2347 for years to come…

Oh, and in case you’re not yet aware, xkcd’s image title attributes always carry an additional punch-line/comment (which is a brilliant way to make it worth visiting the site each go-around). I’ll save you a click, just this once:

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we’ll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

Slack and its counterparts ‘create problems, high-school-type problems,’ one CEO said.

What’s your internal Slack like? Does it fuel “drama” or enable greater collaboration? Both…?

Beyond internal politics, executives are also paying attention to how employees use tools like Slack to organize. Workers at companies like Away, Andela, and the New York Times have recently used Slack to put leadership on blast and leaked those conversations to advance their interests. As Slack spreads, this type of action will spread with it. And even the most open companies are unlikely to tolerate it for very long…

BTW, are you on our Slack? Join the community 🤓

Are you craving more of that wisdom you heard from Jessica Kerr on The Changelog #398: The ONE thing every dev should know? Yea me too…here we go…

Software feels more like assembly than craft. What if software used to be a craft? What if the standardization of common tasks in libraries and frameworks means craftsmanship isn’t such a big deal anymore? What matters now is knowledge of all those different materials. Understanding the libraries and frameworks and ecosystems and tools and infrastructure and automation. The implications, considerations, and conglomeration of their use.

What it sounds like Jessica is getting at, is that craftsmanship doesn’t seem to be required for entry anymore in order to thrive as a software developer. But I do believe there is still a place for craftsmanship in software, it’s just not as required as it used to be with the proliferation of standards. What do you think?

Code review is critical to being a software engineer yet there aren’t many resources on how to build up the skill. That’s why Shubheksha wrote what she learned when she first started making the mental shift from writing code to reviewing it.

Remember to be kind and empathetic — Code reviews are very ripe for misunderstanding and lack of empathy on either side. At the heart of code reviews is collaboration. It is as important to remind yourself as a reviewer that you’re reviewing someone’s code and not passing judgments on them as a person and it is equally important to remember that whatever your reviewer tells you is not meant as a personal attack.

Distractions will always exist – managing them is our responsibility. We often talk about the need for new information in order to change the old patterns of our brain. One of the best ways we can do this is through reading good books. In this episode, Mireille and Adam discuss the highlights of Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractible – how to control your attention and choose your life. In his book, Nir highlights this clear connection between people’s distraction and its relationship to psychological discomfort, otherwise known as pain. He says, “all behaviors, whether they tend toward traction or distraction are prompted by triggers, internal or external. When we learn how to recognize these “triggers,” there is opportunity for change. And changing in the direction that you desire, as based on what you value, is key to having the life you want to live.

ppk muses after digesting Mozilla’s big lay off:

To my mind, Mozilla’s core problem is the cult of the free. To my mind, we should eradicate the cult of the free from web development, and Mozilla should take a small step in that direction by requesting donations from inside Firefox — on an entirely voluntary basis.

This conversation hits close to home for a few reasons here at Changelog.

First, we have plenty of friends and acquaintances who were directly affected. Second, we share concern for the future of these bastions of the web (MDN) and open source (Servo). Finally, we’re a small internet-based business that gives away almost everything we create for free and shares a business model with Mozilla.

Changelog++ might be even more integral to our survival than we’ve been thinking it is….

In a post aptly titled “Tripping over the potholes in too many libraries,” Carl Johnson explains his philosophy on using dependencies.

In short, I think it’s become entirely too easy for people using certain programming languages to use libraries from the wide world of clowns that is the Internet. Their ecosystems make it very very easy to become reliant on this stuff. Trouble is, those libraries are frequently 💩. If something about it is broken, you might not be able to code around it, and may have to actually deal with them to get it fixed. Repeat 100 times, and now you have a real problem brewing.

I have a simple rule: never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming.

Today Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, shared news of big changes taking place at Mozilla in the wake of COVID-19. In addition to the changes noted below, Mozilla is also laying off 250 employees while it makes these changes.

…going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.

This internal document includes the details about the restructuring and other specifics.

I’ve reached out to Mitchell via LinkedIn messages to invite her on The Changelog for deep dive into the future of the internet. If you or anyone you might know has a direct connection to Mitchell, please pass this invitation on to her — we’d love to have her on the show.