Changelog

If software is eating the world, who is writing that software? You are. Hongli Lai, Co-founder & CTO of Phusion gave a talk at his local Amsterdam.rb meetup and shared his thoughts on the impending deadline of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the impact of socially unaware software that's eating our world. ...I feel more and more convinced we (as Phusion and as ‘builders of the web’) have a responsibility to provide a framework for thinking about the ethical implication of our creations. Hongli continues: We've seen companies suffer recently for a lack of that social responsibility (data breaches at Equifax, Facebook, Uber, etc). Public outrage was strong but also burned out quickly as the news cycled. For a while, the same quick fizzle seemed to be happening with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. It's up to us to fight back. That doesn't mean go on twitter and rant, but to actually go an do something. Give a talk in your local area to your developer communities to create with social responsibility in mind.

Laziness is one of the three great virtues of a programmer (laziness, impatience, and hubris) Larry Wall talked about in Programming Perl. The "deep thinking," as they call it, which is always required before even a small issue can be resolved, seriously turns me away from programming. Or did turn me away. Until I started to think differently and encourage myself to be lazy. Here is how. Iteration! It's so freeing to operate on the basis of iteration — knowing that today's version is shipping with flaws that can only be resolved through the feedback loop. In this case, incremental is an alias of iteration. Software development is perfect territory for cutting corners, being lazy and remaining calm, because our work is often discrete and can be very incremental.

How you define success influences how and what you build. With that in mind, Cate Huston set out to learn how we developers do. I started with the Stack Overflow survey. Caveat: I hate it and I think it’s riddled with bias. For example, women make up ~fifty percent of the population, around ~twenty percent of technical roles… and 7.2% of the respondents to this survey. The SO survey is imperfect in many ways, but unfortunately it's also one of the only quantitative datasets we have. Cate also asked her followers on Twitter (which she admits is also riddled with bias): Many of the themes from the Stack Overflow survey showed up here – shipping code, learning and developing, autonomy....Another theme, though, was the theme of impact. People using what was built, benefitting others in some way. That's just a few of her findings. Definitely read the entire piece as it's riddled (😏) with insights. Also check out part 1 in this series.

I bet everybody has heard about popular lists such as awesome-python, awesome-shell, awesome-cms and such and find them incredibly valuable. Well... Awesome Dev Fun list is on the other side of that spectrum. It's a curated list of awesome funny libs/packages/languages that have no real value or purpose but to make a developer chuckle. If we can't have fun (and poke fun at ourselves), what's the point of it all? Also this list is embarrassingly short, y'all. Gentlepeople, fire up your PR engines...

Itamar hits the nail on the head: If you think of yourself as a Python programmer, if you identify yourself as an Emacs user, if you know you’re better than those vim-loving Ruby programmers: you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re a worse programmer for it, and you’re harming your career. I've been preaching the gospel of generalization for many years. This industry moves fast. Today's new hotness is tomorrow's old and busted. Learn specific skills, yes. But always keep yourself above the fray. I am not a Rails Developer. I am not an Elixir Guy. Heck, I don't even consider myself a web developer. I solve problems; sometimes by writing software. Back to Itamar: The technologies you use, the tools you build with, are just that: tools. Learn to use them, and learn to use them well. But always remember that those tools are there to serve you, you are not there to serve your tools.

We're rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits on The Changelog. But don't worry, we'll be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It's the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we've had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.

Do you wish you weren’t the only person slaving away on your open source project? Find out how to make your project pull request ready in this guide from our friends at Phusion. Floor Drees, writes on the Phusion blog: Newcomers to your project will turn to your issue tracker and look at (merged) pull requests, discussion forums, mailing lists or chat channels to form an idea of what your project is like and how and where they can best contribute. Optimizing these channels for on-boarding contributors will set you up for success.

Miguel Piedrafita –a 16-year old developer– is building a community for his likeminded-peers. CoderYouth is a teenager-only community, that is, you can only register if you are under 20. This community is exclusive by design. On its face that exclusivity cane be a bit off-putting, but I understand what they're trying to do. In short, when you learn to code at a young age, your friends aren't interested, so in CoderYouth you can connect with others with the same interests as you. Right now CoderYouth consists of just a forum and a GitHub org. The forum has a fair bit of activity happening, so he may be on to something...

Erica Lindberg, writes on the GitLab blog about preventing burnout: Set clear boundaries between work and home — I'm trying to limit how many days I allow myself to work over eight hours by either scheduling other activities in the evening with friends or my partner (it works better when you've committed to someone so they can help hold you accountable. These things can be anything from rock climbing to dinner or watching a movie) or simply blocking out my calendar and setting reminders for when it's time to shut off. And when it is time to shut off I'm come up with a "ritual" of shutting down my computer, turning off my keyboard, monitor, and light in my office – this makes it harder to come back to "just finish up one last thing" I really needed to be reminded of this. It's a shame when you know what to do, but you choose not to, and allow yourself to creep closer to burnout.

Carmen Andoh joined the show and talked with us about inclusivity, the 2017 Go Developer Survey, visualizing abstractions, and other interesting projects and news.

In this finale episode of Request For Commits – we regroup to discuss how we got here, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place now and in the future. This might be the end of this podcast, but the conversation will continue on The Changelog. You should subscribe if you're not already.

Consumers of Stack Overflow content may not feel this way, but the developers who are engaging, commenting, and answering are being "lectured, down-voted, and leave with an empty feeling of wasted time." Constantine Murenin, writes in this OpenBSD mailing list thread: The StackOverflow company routinely deletes your comments, questions and answers, often for very superficial reasons (including automatically based on metrics) and without any regard to the individual quality thereof, and effectively without you having any control over the explicitly human-generated textual data that you entrust them with. (Most folks don't even know this, until they're already hooked and their questions/comments/answers are gone and unfetchable.) Who likes their own well-articulated notes randomly deleted for superficial reasons behind their backs? Why not let you see what got deleted, so you can decide whether it's worth reposting in another venue? The content you contribute to Stack Overflow is not guaranteed to be long-lasting immutable content. To dig deeper, click the headline, read this tweet, and read this post

At this time in 1998 Titanic was winning 11 Oscars, My Heart Will Go On was topping the music charts, and Daniel Stenberg was uploading the first public release of one of the most useful tools in Internet history. In this birthday post, Daniel walks down memory lane and says what those first few years were like: It was far from an immediate success. An old note mentions how curl 4.8 (released the summer of 1998) was downloaded more than 300 times from the site. We talked about curl on The Changelog when it was 17 years old. I think It’s time to bring Daniel back on to celebrate the big Two Oh. 🎊

Ashley McNamara is doing a series of fundraisers starting now and ending on July 1st. The goal is to raise money for GoBridge and WomenWhoGo — two organizations who make it their mission to educate & empower underrepresented communities. I can't wait to see how many of these tees the community will be wearing at GopherCon later this year. I'm imagining a sea of Gophers rocking these shirts!

Hazel Yang, on the GitLab blog shares insights about her last two years working at GitLab: Show gratitude Learn from failure Trust your team and grow with them Befriend managers and colleagues Embrace diversity I'm a HUGE fan of the concept of a "retrospective" which is most known by developers as a practice of agile software development. It is important to look back and review what's going well, what's not going well, and what needs to change or be stopped all together. This post is a product of that type of discipline.

Nikita Sobolev outlines why they're a self-described "mediocre developer" and how they survive in such a state. What follows is a bunch of excellent advice on practical steps toward success as a developer. Ironically, Nikita's self-professed mediocrity and clear path toward defeating it makes them an outstanding developer in my eyes. 🤩 Go and do likewise.

A fun little side project by Mislav Cimperšak where you plug in a few values and it generates a shareable replica of XKCD's famous Compiling comic. Here it is in action with a piece of modern art I call, "Low Hanging Fruit". 😁

The money quote: A 10x engineer isn’t someone who is 10x better than those around them, but someone who makes those around them 10x better. With that as a starting point, Kate goes on to explain 10 ways we can become better teammates. Lots of good advice here. 👌

If you’ve seen how women are treated on Twitter or elsewhere (which I'm sure you have), you can see why projects like this are needed. I started building Leap because I didn’t have a place on the internet where I felt comfortable talking openly. I’ve found that some conversations online escalate to shouting matches quickly and many people opt out, especially women. I wondered what would happen if I created a community where the core culture was set by women, and the software and product decisions were also made by women. I couldn’t think of a social network defined that way, but I wanted to be part of one.

Jordan shared this super fun project in our Slack and hilarity ensued. 10/10 would meme again 🎖

Today (March 6th) is the release day of Broad Band, a new book from Claire L. Evans — member of pop group YACHT and founding editor of Vice’s Terraform. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers. But female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation—they’ve just been erased from the story. Until now. Also, I love this Steve Jobs inspired author photo.

David Cassel: It’s easy to list the achievements of John Perry Barlow — everything from co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation to writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. But it’s harder to quantify the amount of inspiration he delivered to the internet in the early 1990s. In the truest spirit of the word pioneer, he created a vision that helped shape the world that was to come. This is a great compilation of stories, quotes, and personal remembrances of a man to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude. Whether we know it or not.

We all need co-workers. Some get them for free. Others have to pay for them. We’re trending towards paying for them. As workers from home, we often work in complete isolation. Most of us like it that way. The rest of us are lonely. To get some much needed interaction with other like-minded humans we turn to Slack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, iMessage – pretty much anything that gives us hope, connection, acceptance, and value – the four pillars of a healthy human. That works, mostly. But not really. For many, the only option is to pay for co-workers. Need community? Join the Changelog Community for free -- it costs zero.

What a gem. When Letterman asks her how she knew so much about computers back then, Grace quips: I didn't, it was the first one! (Thanks to mcdado for sharing this in our community Slack.)

Did you know you can get a free hoodie when you publish an Alexa skill?! This might be just the motivation I need to get a Changelog skill going...