Changelog

If you’ve been wanting a way to run VS Code as a cloud-IDE, code-server is what you’ve been looking for. Code-server allows VS Code to run on a remote server making it fully accessible through the browser. … Developers ready to embrace the cloud-based IDE can do so without losing features, or control. This means you can code on your Chromebook, tablet and desktop with a completely synchronized environment. You can spill coffee on your laptop without fear of losing work.

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Could this be the future of writing interactive CLI tools? If you know React you know Ink. Ink is a library for building and testing command-line applications using React components. Since it acts as a React renderer, you can use everything that React has to offer: hooks, class components, state, context, everything. Ink lets you build interactive and beautiful CLIs in no time.

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This post from Dan Abramov about why he moved off Medium summarizes both why we’re no longer linking to Medium and why we’ve never put our content there. Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall. I’m not sure what happened and whether that’s still the case. But I didn’t do it myself, and that caused a blow to my confidence in Medium as a platform. I respect their need to monetize, but it felt wrong when done retroactively.

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Sam Soffes Jekyll’s a little differently. This iteration is built on top of Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. Since I write my posts differently than Jekyll expects, I had to write several plugins to make things work correctly. You might wonder why I don’t just write my posts the way Jekyll wants instead of doing all of this work. I want to keep the details of my blogging engine separate from my content. I’d love to hear from you about your blogging stack in the discussion below. Like Sam, I’m also using Jekyll hosted on Netlify, but I’m new to his plugins.

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Well, it depends. But the good news is Jason Etcovitch (Engineer at GitHub) examines the pros and cons of each and where they fit. He even shared a comparison table to help determine which to choose. Should your next automation tool be built in GitHub Actions or as a separate service with Probot? Since GitHub announced the beta release of GitHub Actions in October 2018, there’s been a new excitement around building automation - and that’s awesome! But I wanted to take a look at the various pros and cons of GitHub Actions and Probot, where each excels and where each might not be the best tool for the job. Click through and scroll to the bottom of the post if all you care about is the comparison.

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If you’re looking for a deep dive on GitHub Actions, check out The Changelog #331: GitHub Actions is the next big thing with Kyle Daigle. Patrick Reynolds, writing on the GitHub Engineering blog: Since the beta release of GitHub Actions last October, thousands of users have added workflow files to their repositories. But until now, those files only work with the tools GitHub provided: the Actions editor, the Actions execution platform, and the syntax highlighting built into pull requests. To expand that universe, we need to release the parser and the specification for the Actions workflow language as open source. Today, we’re doing that. I also want to point out this “we believe” section of the post to key in on their intentions and willingness to provide the community with the necessary tools to make GitHub Actions all that it can be for the community. We believe that tools beyond GitHub should be able to run workflows. We believe there should be programs to check, format, compose, and visualize workflow files. We believe that text editors can provide syntax highlighting and autocompletion for Actions workflows. And we believe all that can only happen if the Actions community is empowered to build these tools along with us. That can happen better and faster if there is a single language specification and a free parser implementation.

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This post from Gianluca Arbezzano contains both theory and code with a complete working application to understand how to build your own shared informer to extend Kubernetes beyond applying YAML via kubectl. Kubernetes increases in popularity every day but I don’t think we use all its power just applying YAML via kubectl. Kubernetes is a framework and as every framework, it exposes powerful interfaces and API usable to extend its capability with our needs. Shared Informers are what I see as the easy way to enjoy k8s as an extendible tool to programmatically build and ship containers.

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Operating Kubernetes clusters is becoming more and more taxing in terms of the number of aliases/scripts and single purpose tools one must install/master. K9s is a terminal based CLI to manage and diagnose Kubernetes clusters in a single command. It provides a unified view to navigate and diagnose K8s resources for your local or remote clusters right there in the same CLI.

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From installing Mac’s command line developer tools (Xcode), Homebrew, Git, npm, to your code editor — Michael Uloth walks you through all the steps and details to get a new Mac ready for web development. This guide is a good start and purposely leaves out items that aren’t strictly required for web development. If you’re into automation and tweaking things, then thoughtbot/laptop is another route to consider. It automates most of Michael’s steps and can also be customized to install only exactly what you want.

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This is your one-stop resource for developer tools, with a wrap up of what was hot in 2018 and what to be on the lookout for in 2019. We’ve analyzed over one million data points to bring you these rankings 😱 We’re honored to be included in both the Best Podcasts and Best Newsletters sections. 🥳

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Megan O’Keefe, developer relations engineer at Google, shares her setup for Kubernetes as well as some very helpful tips and tricks from her Terminal setup, navigating clusters, and how she gave kubectl superpowers. As a developer relations engineer for Kubernetes, I work a lot with demo code, samples, and sandbox clusters. This can get interesting to keep track of (read: total chaos). So in this post I’ll show some of the tools that make my Kubernetes life a lot better. This environment can work no matter what flavor of Kubernetes you’re running.

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Follow along as our friends at Phusion walk us through the process of creating a GitHub Actions workflow to build and publish a Ruby gem to the RubyGems registry. One of the actions featured in the version that’s currently exclusively available to GitHub employees and a selected and undisclosed group of Beta testers, is the ‘GitHub Action for npm’, which wraps the npm CLI to enable common npm commands. We set out to instead make an example workflow to build and publish a Ruby library (or: gem) to the default public registry, and created a GitHub repository, with a Docker container for a ‘Rubygems’ action: github.com/scarhand/actions-ruby

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Browser Preview for VS Code enables you to open a real browser preview inside your editor that you can debug. Browser Preview is powered by Chrome Headless, and works by starting a headless Chrome instance in a new process

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Choosing a display is tough. Here’s the tldr, but I suggest you dig into the details if that’s how you roll… tl;dr 43-inch 4K computer monitors should be the new hotness for people who like big monitors. And they should work well with almost any computer made in the last couple of years, as long as you use the proper cables.

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Koen Lageveen has a project on GitHub that let’s you test drive a handful of programming fonts which is pretty awesome if you’re on the hunt for a better font or want to see what other fonts are out there. Here’s the full list of fonts. Did your favorite not make the list yet? Send a PR.

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The thing about taking notes apps is everyone likes ‘em a bit different. Here’s what the author of Notable was after: Notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn’t bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that’s what I was using before). If that resonates with you, click through. 😄

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HTTP View is a desktop tool for supercharged HTTP(S) debugging. It gives you one-click setup for HTTP and HTTPS interception, and all the tools you need to quickly explore, examine and understand the HTTP your code (or anybody else’s) is sending. Open source, cross-platform, and easy on the eyes. This is definitely worth a look.

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What’s cool about this is it’s not a proxy, so you don’t have to futz with certificates, proxy settings, and the like. As long as the iOS device and your Mac are on the same local network, you can view the network traffic of your apps.

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While .env files are very simple it is required to keep them consistent. This tool offers a wide range of consistency rules and best practices. And it integrates perfectly to any existing workflow. Check the docs for the full list of violations.

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Front-enders should check this out! Johan Brandhorst reviews the history of gRPC in the browser, the state of things today, and thoughts on the future of gRPC-Web. gRPC-Web is an excellent choice for web developers. It brings the portability, performance, and engineering of a sophisticated protocol into the browser, and marks an exciting time for frontend developers! So far the benefits have largely only been available to mobile app and backend developers, whilst frontend developers have had to continue to rely on JSON REST interfaces as their primary means of information exchange. However, with the release of gRPC-Web, gRPC is poised to become a valuable addition in the toolbox of frontend developers.

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Aaron Turner (UXE at Google) says “WebAssembly is fast” and has conducted a real-world benchmark between WebAssembly and ES6 to showcase Wasm’s performance on different browsers, devices, and cores. …this benchmark will be utilizing the WasmBoy benchmarking tool (source code). The benchmark features three different cores as of today. AssemblyScript (WebAssembly built with the AssemblyScript compiler), JavaScript (ESNext output by the TypeScript compiler), and the previous JavaScript core except run through Google’s Closure Compiler…

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In an attempt to confirm Kubernetes’ move beyond hype to widespread enterprise adoption, Francesc Campoy and Victor Coisne used source{d} Engine to analyze all the Kubernetes git repositories through SQL queries. Here’s a snapshot of what they learned. At its outset in 2014, the Kubernetes project had 15 programming languages, a number that quickly increased to 35 by the beginning of 2017. Given that Kubernetes came from Google, it’s not surprising to see that Go is by far the dominant language followed by Python, YAML and Markdown. The analysis shows that other languages such as Gradle and Lua have been dropped while some others like Assembly, SQL and Java made a comeback. The full results of the analysis are available upon request via a link shared at the end of the blog post.

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This “Data Color Picker” looks like a spectacular tool for any developer out there (like myself) who appreciates the value of a good color palette, but lacks the ability to put one together. You’re not alone! (This tool is for generating equidistant palettes for data visualizations, but it can most certainly be used generically.) Creating visually equidistant palettes is basically impossible to do by hand, yet hugely important for data visualizations. Why? When colors are not visually equidistant, it’s harder to (a) tell them apart in the chart, and (b) compare the chart to the key. I’m sure we’ve all looked at charts where you can hardly use the key since the data colors are so similar. You pick the “endpoint” colors and it generates all of the colors in-between. Very cool.

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In this blog post we will introduce you to some of out internal best practices we have developed or discovered to simplify and speed up working on open-source and other projects. There’s nothing revolutionary in here for those experienced in open source maintenance, but it’s a good rundown nonetheless. It’s also interesting to see how many teams are now using (and recommending) dependency update services such as dependabot and Greenkeeper.

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We’ve been chronicling Daniel’s work on #curl for some time now. December 11, 2018 will be Daniel’s final official day at Mozilla. He assures us that his work on curl will continue, saying this in regards to his time dedicated to curl and where he works for his full-time income, “I don’t think my choice of future employer should have to affect that negatively too much, except of course in periods.” Here are the main points from Daniel (but you should certainly dig into the details): It’s been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else. …lots of the HTTP/2 development and the publication of that was made while I was employed by Mozilla and I fondly participated in that. …we’re also losing Mozilla as a primary sponsor of the curl project, since that was made up of them allowing me to spend some of my work days on curl and that’s now over. I will continue to follow and work with HTTP and other internet protocols very closely. The future is bright but unknown! “I don’t yet know what to do next.”

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