The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - 80% of professional programmers are unhappy (News)

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

The latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey has some concerning results, Joeri Sebrechts helps you do plain vanilla web dev, MIT's "missing semester" course looks pretty amazing, a dive into the fascinating history of CSV & a tool to get request analytics from the nginx access logs.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 5th, 2024. The Pudding, who we've talked to on JS Party, ran an experiment where they used an LLM to make one of their data-driven visual stories. Effectively, they tried replacing themselves with Anthropix Claude. The conclusion? Quote, do we feel replaceable? In short, not right now. I've said it once, I'll say it again. Summaries over slop, y'all. Summaries over slop. Okay, let's get into some human-generated news. 80% of professional programmers are unhappy. The latest Stack Overflow developer survey results,

which included 65,000 developers from 185 countries, had some shocking, but not exactly surprising, findings. Quote, 80% of professional programmers are unhappy. One in three respondents actively hates their job, while almost half survive in survival mode. End quote. According to the survey, the main drivers of developer frustration are technical debt and the complexity of the tech stack that they have to work with. Combine that with the pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines, endless meetings with pointy-haired bosses,

and the recent industry-wide massive layoffs, and yeah, 80% sounds about right, if not a little low. Doing web dev using only vanilla techniques. One way to fend off the complexity of the tech stack factor, which we all know leads to developer unhappiness, is to eschew complex tools and frameworks that set out to help you build websites, but sometimes end up costing you and your users in unnecessary complexity down the road. But how does one go about using plain vanilla tools and techniques in a smart way in 2024? Enter plain vanilla. Quote,

This is an overview of the major techniques used to make websites and web apps without making use of build tools or frameworks with just an editor, a browser, and web standards. End quote. This looks like an excellent explainer. Check it out by following the link in your chapter data and the newsletter. The missing semester of your CS education. MIT's missing semester course looks pretty amazing.

Quote, Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there's one critical subject that's rarely covered and is instead left to students to figure out on their own, proficiency with their tools. and much more. Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex. End quote. The video recordings of the lectures are available on YouTube. Link in the newsletter. It's now time for Sponsored News. Is your next JS app too slow? Front-end issues often have back-end solutions. On Wednesday, September 4th, our friends at Sentry are hosting a workshop to help you identify issues causing slow web pages and poor core web vitals using tracing. You'll leave this event being able to, one. Find back-end issues that might be slowing

down your front-end apps. 2. Set up tracing with Sentry in an XJS project. And 3. Debug and fix poor performance issues using tracing. This is the second edition of this workshop because the first one was so well received. Don't miss it. Sign up for free using the link in your chapter data and in the newsletter, and thanks again to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News. Why CSV is still king. Here's a dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard. Quote, in the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It's simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how did this

happen? End quote. After a brief history lesson, the author lays out four reasons why, despite its many problems, CSV isn't going anywhere anytime soon. One, it's good enough for many situations and dead simple to use. Two, most published datasets today are in CSV format. Three, many data processing tools still output CSV files. And four, its human readability is unmatched among data formats. You know, in real estate, they say the three most important factors

in determining the desirability of a property are location, location, location. In software, I say the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a solution are simplicity, simplicity, and simplicity. NGTOP requests analytics from the NGINX access logs. NGTOP is a command line program to query request counts from NGINX's access.log files. I share this tool because it made me think when you combine additional JS payloads, bloating up web requests, the EU's newish privacy laws, and new tools that should be better at detecting bot requests, maybe it's time for server-side only analytics to make a comeback. Something like Netlify Analytics, but open source and somewhat back-end agnostic would be super cool. Wink wink, nudge nudge. That's the news for now,

but do scroll the newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, including a fun piece by Wired on the history of BASIC, how you can become an Internet Archive Team Warrior, and a movement to promote Hobbit software. If you don't get the newsletter, let's fix that bug by popping your email address in at changelog.com slash news. This week on The Changelog,

Adam's favorite author, Dennis E. Taylor, joins the show on Wednesday, and Ben Johnson joins me for an It Depends About Databases on Friday. Have a great week, leave us a five-star review if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.