Changelog

Ken Wheeler (Director of open source at Formidable) shared some pretty helpful words to get you excited about open source and also how to launch your first project. Nothing makes your repo look more legit than badges. Too many badges looks memey as fuck, but if you include useful ones, its a stamp of legitimacy. It shows you care. Things like npm version, test status, coverage numbers. It’s nice flair. Also, Markdown supports raw HTML, so you can make your repo header look nice. Center things, add a quote, jazz it up a bit. Ken even shared his thoughts on the best time to launch. My recommendation is very specific. Release at 12pm EST on a Monday. It’s the end of Europes day, New York’s lunch break and San Franciscos hour in the morning before anything gets done.

One of my favorite jobs in software was when I was a Product Manager for a non-profit startup. In that role I was able to impact and touch pretty much any part of the business I wanted to, it was almost like being an entrepreneur, but doing so from within an already formed company. I also led our agile software development as Scrum Master — it was awesome. I wish I had this list of advice back then. Mike Cohn writes on the Mountain Goat Software blog: Never commit the team to anything without consulting them first — As Scrum Master, you do not have the authority to accept change requests (no matter how small) on behalf of the team. Even if you are absolutely positive that the team can fulfill a request. Always say, “I need to run this by the team before we can say yes.” And certainly don’t commit the team to deadlines, deliverables, or anything else without first talking to team members. You may not need to talk to the whole team--plenty of teams will allow some or all members to say, “Yeah, we can do that” without a whole-team meeting. But it’s still their decision, not yours. This is number 1 on the list, because you should never get this one wrong.

In this post from Casper Beyer titled The Node.js Ecosystem Is Chaotic and Insecure, he cites examples like left-pad, is-odd, is-number — and goes on to say the way to be responsible with dependencies is... ...don’t trust package managers, every dependency is written by some random developer somewhere in the world and is a potential attack vector. ... Is this being too paranoid? Perhaps, or maybe it’s the healthy amount considering the massive reach these trivial packages can have. While this focuses on Node.js, the lessons learned apply anywhere you have dependencies in your code.

André Staltz: I’ve just given my third programming talk where I use only my IDE (integrated development environment) for live coding and no other presentation tool. I noticed the audiences were very pleased with these talks, and I think it’s correlated to using an IDE and not a slides program. If you've ever watched one of André's talks, you know he gives good talks regardless of whether or not he's using an IDE. But he makes a good case for their use in general and goes in to great detail* on how to do it well. *even explaining each individual editor setting and why they were selected

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about 20 years of curl, what’s new with http2, and the backstory of QUIC - a new transport designed by Jim Roskind at Google which offers reduced latency compared to that of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2.

Programming around time is the bane of pretty much every programmer's existence. UTC works most of the time, but still has its flaws. Zach Holman writes on his blog: Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... everything is pretty terrible. The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct...sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider. It's time...to talk about time. Zach includes a lot of time-related puns and whole lot of wisdom about programming time.

Bummer. I've been there. It's so tough to make iterative change to software when those who are "in charge" of what you do everyday keeps interrupting or changing the rules to the game. Sjoerd Nijland writes on the Serious Scrum blog: As Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products, and, if your management isn’t actively engaged in this exercise, it indeed may not make immediate sense for them to adopt the framework. Scrum could thus be perceived to be for developers only. Or perhaps Scrum was introduced by and is still contained to the development organization. In this case it may make sense to talk about the definition of ‘Product’. Would it make sense for the Management Team, to consider the organization itself as a product? If your team does Scrum, you should 100% read this.

I was perusing this popular VS Code feature request yesterday when I spotted a disturbing trend: more than a dozen comments containing nothing more than a +1

Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

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.

I'm a huge fan of well designed feedback loops. In software creation, feedback loops prove to be one of the most important, often overlooked, artifacts of the development lifecycle. Evelyn Van Kelle writes on the O'Reilly Ideas blog: There is a false dichotomy between full automation and human intervention. Successful quality control combines tool-based measurement with manual review and discussion. At the end of the day, the most effective feedback loops are a mixture of daily best practices, automation, tools, and human intervention.

Reading Amjith's git hack reminded me that I wrote up a few techniques I use to retain my dev flow between coding sessions. I wrote this post back in 2011, but I'm happy to report I still use #2 and #3 all the time. ✊

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.

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.

Yegor Bugayenko: Thread-safety is an important quality of classes in languages/platforms like Java, where we frequently share objects between threads. The issues caused by lack of thread-safety are very difficult to debug, since they are sporadic and almost impossible to reproduce on purpose. How do you test your objects to make sure they are thread-safe? Here is how I'm doing it. Great details on a particularly difficult aspect of testing. ✨

Rachel Kroll with some sage advice on how to find interesting things to work on: In concrete terms, go around and find out what kind of little one-off tools people have designed. Talk to them and hear their stories. Look in their personal bin directories. Take notes and look for patterns. See if anything stands out, or if anything particularly compelling grabs you during the interviews.

Olivier Lacan on why we should all stop using cd and start using j (a.k.a. autojump). I've been wasting soooo many keystrokes over the years! 😱

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.

Yegor Bugayenko: Fluent interface, first coined as a term by Martin Fowler, is a very convenient way of communicating with objects in OOP. It makes their facades easier to use and understand. However, it ruins their internal design, making them more difficult to maintain. A few words were said about that by Marco Pivetta in his blog post Fluent Interfaces are Evil; now I will add my few cents. Yegor uses his own HTTP library as an example where the interface designed is fluent (which looks nice and readable to use) and shows how that design goal made the internal code a mess. My gut tells me it's worth the trade-off to provide a better user experience, but Yegor's real-life experience punches me right in the gut: Fluent interfaces are perfect for their users... However, the damage they cause to object design is the price, which is too high. He suggests decorators and smart objects as an alternative. Lots to ponder here, and the conversation going on in the comments is lively as well. 👌

Dimitri Fontaine shares 3 classic data-modeling anti-patterns. The UUID section lacks strong argumentation, but the real gem in this article is his advice at the end. A snippet: My advice is to always normalize your database model first, and then only fix the problems you have with that when you actually have them. Well except in those 3% of cases where really, really, it should be done in the design phase of the project. It’s quite hard to recognize those 3% though, and that ability is hard gained with experience. Experience is the ultimate teacher.

Suz Hinton joined the show to talk about live coding open source on Twitch. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, her goals and aspirations for live streaming, the work she's doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others can get started — and maybe some other fun stuff we have in the works at Changelog.

The subtitle here should have been “We’re all very !#$@%#$ afraid”. The reason I often hold back from doing something or when I self-sabotage a goal — the real reason is because I’m afraid of what will happen if this thing is actually successful??! Then, I’ll have to actually do it. 😱 John Gorman, writes for Personal Growth on Medium: Fear doesn’t manifest itself like you think, because often times we don’t give it the chance to. Fear isn’t always the sweaty palms that stop us cold in a job interview — fear is generally what prevents us from applying in the first place. Spend 8 minutes and read this.

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.