The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - A simpler alternative to deleted_at, rules of thumb for better software, faking it until you automate it, the only civilized way to read online & AI and the big five (News)

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Brandur Leach's easy, alternative soft deletion strategy, Lane Wagner's zen of proverbs, Nicolas Carlo says fake it until you can automate it, Felix A. Crux thinks feeds are the only civilized way to read online & Ben Thompson analyzes AI and the big five tech companies.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 9th, 2023. Let's get right to it. First up, this week's top clicked link in yesterday's Changelog Weekly Newsletter and it's Brander Leach's simpler alternative to delete it at for soft record deletion. Real talk, the popularity of this one surprised me. 700-ish people found it interesting enough to click through in the first 24 hours since we shipped the email. Y'all are either super into posts on application and database design, morbidly curious of the details behind

Brander's proposed strategy, or were sold on this epic, quote, Speaking from 30,000 feet, programming is all about trade-offs. However, this is one of those rare places where, as far as I can tell, the cost-benefit skew is so disproportionate that the common platitudes fall flat. End quote. Did you click on this link in ChangeLog Weekly? If so, I'd love to hear from you why you clicked. Let us know in the comments or hit me up with a quick email at jared at changelog.com.

Lane Wagner wrote up 20 rules of thumb for writing better software and my oh my am I a sucker for listicles, especially about software development best practices. I like you a lot. I'll read you five of Lane's rules. If you like them a lot, check out the post for the other 15. One, optimize for simplicity first. Two, the cost of building a feature is its smallest cost.

Three, reading is more important than writing. Four, changing the rules is better than adding exceptions. Five, API surface area is a liability. Okay, here's a bonus one because I don't really get it and maybe you can help me out. He says any style is fine as long as it's black. I don't know what that means. Maybe he's referring to black, the popular Python formatting tool. Beats me, but it does give me an excuse to include this gem of a one-liner from the Fast and Furious movies, whose creators are much better at product placement than they are at writing. You can have any brew you want, as long as it's a Corona.

Thanks, man. That's Vince. You should enjoy it. You've probably heard the popular refrain, fake it till you make it. Well, Nicholas Carlo put a new spin on the old saw. He says, fake it until you automate it. And I'm here for it. In a post detailing how Nicholas automated the deployment process of an old legacy project, he lays out a powerful template for habit creation writ large, especially in software teams. In his case, he wanted a single command to deploy the software, so he created the command that would eventually do all the dirty work, but built it in an iterative fashion, starting

with it just spitting out a step-by-step guide to doing it manually. Then, one step at a time, he could automate the manual parts, replacing the documentation with working code. His post isn't generic at all, though. Nicholas includes actual code that he actually wrote along the way. He then lists the merits of this process. First, it creates a deployment command that your team will get used to calling. It also forces you to collect information about the deployment process and update them. It creates an executable source of truth for deployments, clear next steps for truly automating them, and finally, it splits

the problem of automating deployments into smaller steps that can be addressed incrementally. This idea doesn't only apply to deployments though. Let's see how well you can wield it in your work for great benefit. I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. Now let's see how well you handle it. Felix A. Crux thinks feeds are the only civilized way to read online. An elegant weapon, but a more civilized age. Felix decries social media saying it has a, quote, host of problems like clickbait, outrage amplification,

snooping targeted advertising, radicalizing rabbit holes, echo chambers, and filter bubbles, algorithms choosing what to show you based on engagement rather than what you'd want for yourself, and on and on, end quote. He then says, there's a better way, and there has been for decades, and yes, he's talking about RSS.

I could not agree more, Felix. In fact, this very thing was on my wish list for 2023 when we shared ours on JS Party's fourth annual New Year's episode. I haven't spent that much time on Twitter recently, so I don't know how much things have changed. Maybe they've changed more than I expect, but I feel like Twitter will still be where tech happens.

I don't feel like Mastodon is going to take off. I don't think it's going to be Mastodon. Here's my wishlist item, okay? Every developer goes out, registers a domain name that they own, username, user handle, call it whatever they want. They publish their thoughts on said domain and they provide an rss feed for everybody else to subscribe

yeah basically what if we wrote on our own websites and just like did the web old school tech it's cool yeah that's honestly the best let's do it yeah who here still uses an rss reader and like reads it daily me okay awesome me all of us yeah yeah that is cool use pocket and like everything goes through nice okay so it's feasible i use reader r-e-e-d-e-r it's great well that's heartening for me to know that all of us are doing that hopefully all of our listeners are doing that as well. And everybody gets doing that. And we can just talk to each other from our own websites. And we can use all the cool new web technologies like web mentions and stuff.

I don't know how all that stuff works, but we can try it. We can talk about that. What works, what doesn't. Let's go old school. Back before we centralized all of our thoughts on other people's websites. Yes. We all have our reasons, but for Felix, it comes down to these three. One, it just works really well. Two, in his opinion, it's healthier than social media. And three, it promotes the older, more independent, non-commercial version of what the web could be. The final story for this week, it's Ben Thompson on AI and the Big Five.

Ben says that the big story of 2022 was the emergence of AI with Dolly, MidJourney, Stale Diffusion, followed by ChatGPT. It seems clear to him that this is a new epic in technology, so he took some time to analyze how Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft stand to win or lose in the new age. Ben goes deep on each, and I wouldn't be doing him justice by summarizing, but that's never stopped me before, so here's one-sentence summaries that pale in comparison to their subject. Apple is seizing the opportunity that stability AI dropped in their lap by making stable diffusion

open source. Amazon sits pretty with AWS available to run both training and inference at scale, but that depends on factors like whether they can provide enough GPUs for the demand and how much of these tasks will be run server-side versus on-device. Meta's advertising tools stand to gain, but who knows what will happen if and when the end game for algorithmic timelines is AI content. Are you okay? I'm fine. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Google's position is the most tenuous, since generative AI is a direct threat to search,

their cash cow, and Microsoft seems the best place to ball. It has cloud services like Amazon, deep investments in open AI, and perhaps now a way to make Bing truly compelling over the next few years. Those summaries were not written by an AI, but they also weren't that great. So you should read Ben's words directly, if you ask me. That is the news for now. This week's interview episode features a one-on-one conversation with yours truly and Johanna Tann Charvet, author of Data Oriented Programming. Have a great week and we'll talk to you again on Friday.