The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - $100k for indie game devs (News)

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

What up, nerds? It's your boy! I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 29th, 2024, but recorded on the previous Saturday, because on Monday, Adam and I will be hallway tracking it at that conference. Stop by if you'll be there too. We'll also be recording on the main stage at 4pm and front-end feuding at game night. By the way, I am not covering the Apple vs. EU App Store changes story. It's big and complicated. Also, there's lots of good coverage of it,

which I'll link up in the newsletter. Okay, let's get into the news. I volunteered to judge the last couple React game jams. It's a fun way to help out, and all I have to do is play some video games with my kids and talk about which ones I like the best. Too easy. As a result, I've come to know of the Rune platform for multiplayer mobile games. Looks like the folks behind Rune would like more people to know about it. They announced, quote, we at Rune believe that tons of amazing multiplayer games are just waiting to be made by talented indie devs. We've created this $100,000 grants program

to help such indie devs and grow the open source web game community. Based on us searching GitHub, we've only found 25 open-source multiplayer JS games. We hope that these grants will dramatically boost the ecosystem. End quote. $500 Spark grants and $5,000 Ignite grants are both on offer. If you needed a good excuse to finally build that game you've been thinking about forever, this just might be it. Zed, the multiplayer code editor from the creator of Atom, is now open source. Listeners of our

conversation with Nathan Sobo on the changelog know this has been on Nathan's mind for a very long time. From the announcement, quote, we are excited to announce that Zed is now an open source project. The code for Zed itself will be made available under a copy left license to ensure any improvements will benefit the entire community. GPL for the editor and AGPL for server side components. GPUI, the UI framework that powers Zed, will be distributed under the Apache 2 license so that you can use it to build high performance desktop apps and distribute them under any license that you choose. End quote. Thoughtful stuff. They also took this opportunity to introduce Fireside Hacks based on a new Zed feature

called Zed Channels. Quote, starting tomorrow, we'll be using channels to run a new program called Fireside Hacks, in which we'll be streaming into a public channel regularly while we work on Zed Live with whoever shows up. We'll be experimenting with different formats, but we're hoping these regular sessions give us all an opportunity to get to know each other better beyond what's possible in a static pull request. I love this idea. Unfortunately, I missed the first stream, but I'm excited to see if and how this format takes off. O-Lama is an open source effort to help devs run Lama 2,

Mistral, and many, many other language models on your own hardware. This week, they released Python and JavaScript libraries. Quote, both libraries make it possible to integrate new and existing apps with Ollama in a few lines of code and share the features and feel of the Ollama REST API. End quote. Now you can pip install Ollama or npm install Ollama to be up and running in no time. Basic usage requires very little code. Cool stuff. Worth a try.

It is now time for sponsored news. NATS is becoming the go-to open source tech that brings secure, multi-tenant, connectivity-first thinking to distributed systems design that scales with your application and your organization. Use a single developer SDK to build all of your core services and data streams. PubSub, request reply, data streaming, key value storage, object storage. NATS does all of that.

Cynadia helps teams take NATS to the next level with a global multi-cloud, multi-geo, and extensible service that is fully managed. Learn more and try it out for free by going to Cynadia.com slash changelog. Once again, that's Cynadia.com slash changelog. There's a link in your show notes. Check it out. When Taylor Troche was on the changelog last year, I asked him about ScrapScript, his in-development

programming language that solves the software shareability problem. Tell us about it. What is this thing? I hope it comes out in 2024. I just put that there because it's not coming out this year. Because it's a different year. I see you can just put an incrementer on that, and every year it increments by one. You'll be good.

And when I drilled down on the project status, Taylor said. The only reason it's private right now is I'm trying to get I've already been getting some some feedback and trying to tune a few more things in private so that when I put it out, I think everyone can have like a little bit more fruitful discussion. But oh, yeah, definitely. This thing is going to be out in the open. Like, I don't know.

It's hard as a open source person, like trying to make something. That was the beginning of the story from my perspective, but little did I know about Max Bernstein and Chris Gregory. Here's Max. Quote, in April of 2023, I saw a scrap script posted on Hacker News and sent it to Chris. We send each other new programming languages and he's very into functional programming,

so I figured he would enjoy it. He did, but we didn't see any links to download or browse an implementation, so we were a little bummed. We love trying stuff out and getting a feel for how it works. A month or two passed, and there still was not an implementation, so we decided to email Taylor and ask if we could help. End quote. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and new implementation in Python that Max and Chris wrote, and Max shares the details of, in the linked blog post. Pouya Parsa, the creator of Un.js and one of the maintainers of Nuxt, writes in a repo

called Letters from a Tired Maintainer what so many maintainers have, or haven't, but wanted to, write before. Quote, the thing is, maintaining multiple open source projects is not as easy as you might imagine. As a full-time open source maintainer, I roughly receive more than 200 notifications every 12 hours, plus random messages, and they are all expected to be responded to. They often come from completely different people with different contexts, skill levels, priorities, concerns, and so on. End quote. He goes on to describe various circumstances in which messages come to him and responses from him, a tired maintainer. One example, when discussing pull requests you'd like to see merged, Poullius says,

In all cases, please be patient. Be sure that maintainers love nothing more than triaging PRs and moving them forward. Please understand that making decisions in a project is not as easy as you might think. Most of the time, there is more context that you might be less aware of. End quote. Good stuff to know if you are not a maintainer, and even better, send it to your maintainer friends. Maybe they can add some more letters for other tired maintainers. Let's finish up this week's episode with a quick list of new tools for your software trade. Remote storage persists data

across browsers and devices reusing the local storage API. Dive is a tool for exploring each layer in a Docker image. Dead code finds unreachable functions in Go programs. Tart is a virtualization tool set to build, run, and manage macOS and Linux virtual machines on Apple Silicon. Refine is a React framework for building internal tools with unmatched flexibility. WhisperSpeech is a text-to-speech system built by Inverting Whisper. Keyploy converts user traffic to test cases and data stubs. PGXman is like NPM, but for Postgres extensions. And Virto.sh is a directory of open source projects that are beginner friendly.

Find links to all of these tools in our companion newsletter. That's all the news for now. Have a great week. Tell your friends about Changelog News if you dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.