This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

Sualeh Asif from Control (an AI code editor):

We’ve been using GPT-4 for a few months internally, and we thought we’d highlight a few examples](https://github.com/anysphere/gpt-4-for-code) that have been both particularly impressive and really useful to us.

Here it’s converting a Python dict of member functions to esoteric but correct-on-first-try C++ code 👇

A multi-tenant HTTP reverse tunnel solution through remote port forwarding from the SSH protocol.

This is intended for small teams that need to expose the local development environment to the public internet, and you need to bring your own domain name and SSO provider.

It gives stable subdomain for every user, and gated by your SSO through OIDC protocol.

Think this as a bare-bone alternative to the ngrok’s $65/user/month enterprise tier. Try to put this behind a production system will blow up your SLA.

For individuals and production systems, just buy ngrok, it is still my favorite.

You’re so vain, you probably think this cool new web app by Robert van Hoesel is about you… and it is! It’ll track your total followers, interactions & posts over time and provide an overview of your top posts as well.

You know how collaborating with Google Sheets, Airtable & friends is super easy because anybody with a web browser and the correct permissions can get in on it? With Mathesar, you can enable that kind of access to any Postgres database!

Super powerful? I think so. Super risky?! Likely, especially if a lot of your data-related logic is in app code. Worth it? That’s up to you to decide…

The plugin is open source on GitHub. Photoshop is not 😉

A cool microsite by Henri Parviainen that helps you design some scrollbars by pointing-and-clicking then copy/paste the requisite CSS code to recreate in your app.

Andy Jiang and Deno’s content team are really speaking my language lately:

Sites take time to build these days. A large Next.js 11 site will take several minutes to build. This is wasted time in the development cycle. Build tools like Vite or Turbopack highlight their ability to get this number down.

But the deeper question hasn’t been considered:

Why do we even need a build step?

The UI of the open source OKLCH Color Picker & Converter was created with community education in mind as the driving design principle. Beyond being a handy tool, there was a secondary goal: speeding up familiarity and adoption of OKLCH and perceptual color spaces.

To that end, this article explains how the underlying reality of the color space itself guided the UI design.

Yury Molodtsov:

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place?

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

This!

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

What follows is a survey of some of the popular tools and what Yury thinks about them. My advice is this: don’t worry too much about tooling. That’s the easy part. Writing’s the hard part. We often bike shed the easy parts to avoid the hard part. Yuri seems to agree:

Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough.

Sloth is a native Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, pipes, and devices in use by all running processes on your system. This makes it easy to inspect which apps are using which files, etc.

lsof is powerful, but I use it infrequently and its CLI is inscrutable. That’s a perfect setup for a GUI like this.

Tired of pushing to test your .gitlab-ci.yml? With this tool, you can run those pipelines locally in your shell or Docker to make sure everything’s working right before sending it off to GitLab to be processed.

This week we invited our friend Mat Ryer to join us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that’s been on our radar. You may know Mat from Go Time and also Grafana’s Big Tent, which we help to produce. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It’s good fun.

StackQL allows you to create, modify and query the state of services and resources across all three major public cloud providers (Google, AWS and Azure) using a common, widely known DSL…SQL.

I have to admit, it does look pretty darn simple:

SELECT * FROM google.compute.instances 
WHERE zone = 'australia-southeast1-b' 
AND project = 'my-project';

Run displayplacer list to print your current layout’s args so you can create profiles for scripting/hotkeys with Automator, BetterTouchTool, etc.

Jeremia Kimelman:

Datasette is an open source tool that takes an SQLite database and gives you an out-of-the-box, web-based UI built specifically for exploring data. Need an example? Here’s a database of all of Motley Fool’s earning transcripts that I used to look for talk of their California campaign activity. And here’s a bunch of other examples of Datasette from the official site.

And the thing is: I love Datasette. It recently turned 5 years old and I wanted to write down the thing that makes it an absolutely delightful data hammer.

In this post, I will show you some advanced usage patterns for working with Playwright in order to take a screenshot of a specific element and modify the contents of the image, either before taking the screenshot or after, using image preprocessing tools.

I have (re)written my password generator in Rust with support for many different patterns. From completely random ASCII, to memorable diceware-like passphrases, and anything in between, plus extras such as private IP addresses or MACs.

I’ve also classified these patterns for easy accessing, and based on the pattern entropy I provide guesstimates about the effort for a brute force attack.

Wait-for-secrets GitHub Action waits for the developer to enter secrets during a workflow run. Developers can enter secrets using a web browser and use them in the workflow.

This seems like a good enough solution to yet another battle between security and usability.

Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git, with bridges

I love the idea of having your bug repo right there inside your code repo. The terminal UI is a nice touch!

I recently discovered an awesome tool called Coolify that calls itself an open-source Netlify or Heroku alternative that can be self-hosted. Gave it a whirl for my own personal projects and loved it, so I thought I’d share.

As the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the software world, an open source alternative is the sincerest form of imitation. Well, Retool (a Changelog sponsor) can consider themselves flattered, because Openblocks sets out to do openly what they’ve been doing proprietarily. Here’s why:

It’s cumbersome to create a single app. You had to design user interfaces, write code in multiple languages and frameworks, and understand how all of that code works together.

Low-code/No-code platforms are fast to get started with but quickly become unmaintainable and inflexible. This creates more problems than it solves.

Retool-like solutions are great for their simplicity and flexibility, but they can also be limited in different ways compared to frameworks like React/Vue.

Openblocks wants to take a step forward. More specifically, Openblocks is

• An all-in-one IDE to create internal or customer-facing apps.
• A place to create, build and share building blocks of web applications.
• A domain-specific language that UI-configurable block is the first-class citizen.

Fathy Boundjadj new html2svg project is pretty cool. We’ve seen a lot of efforts to convert HTML to raster images like PNG and JPG, but SVG is a different (pixel-independent) story.

This end product took some engineering, and the linked post goes deep into all the steps Fathy had to take along the way. From taking the picture to rendering to SVG to supporting shadows and more.

Use it as a CLI, a server, a library, or inside a container 👌