The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Apple backs off killing EU web apps (News)

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Apple backs off killing web apps (but the fight continues), Luka Kladaric writes about how to ship quality software in hostile environments, Deno's new package registry is an npm superset, Martin Fowler on the value of periodic face-to-face & Eugene Ghanizadeh wants us to get more decentralized than the Fediverse. Leave us nice words!

What up nerds! I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, March 4th, 2024. March the 4th be with you! Is that right? That's wrong. So we are dreaming up a new landing page for Changelog News and I'd love to feature some nice words from actual readers and or listeners do me a solid and drop one or two lines of high praise into the form linked in the show notes only if you dig my work of course and i'll happily link back to a url of your choosing if we end up using your quote if my math is correct which it was wrong last week that's a win-win-win with win-win-win. With win-win-win, we all win. Okay, let's get into the news.

Apple backs off killing web apps, but the fight continues. This is a long story, and I'm linking to the end of this chapter anyhow. So here's a quick catch-up. As part of their seemingly malicious compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple had removed home screen web apps in the EU in betas of iOS 17.4. The internet erupted, led by the open web advocacy amongst others, and after much backlash, they have reversed this change. In the wake of the reversal, the OWA says, While this is a stunning victory for the web, it is just one part of a longer battle. The fight is not over, and will not be over,

until Apple allows both browsers and web apps to compete fairly on all their platforms globally. End quote. We have members of the Open Web Advocacy booked to join us on J.S. Marty next week, which should be interesting. Shipping quality software in hostile environments. Luca Claderic writes, quote, I once had the opportunity to work for a startup that had fallen from tech debt into tech bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, Michael, is nature's do-over.

It's a fresh start. It's a clean slate. Like the Witness Protection Program. Exactly. Not at all. Although we managed to get it back on the right track, it made me rethink the concept of tech debt and how we ship software, especially in hostile environments. End quote. He goes on to tell this true story in great detail, which is horrifying, yet echoes so many of our experiences. Here's just one of the many horror scenes Luca describes.

Quote, there is also a handcrafted build server, a Jenkins box hosted in the office, but no record of how it's provisioned or configured. If something were to happen to it, the way you build software would just be lost. Each job on it is subtly different, even for the same tech. You have an Android source code that you build three instances out of, End quote. This is a solid essay replete with warnings and a plea at the end to ditch the tech debt concept altogether. Dino's new package registry is an NPM superset. This registry, which lives at jsr.io, was created not to kill NPM, but because quote, the world today is not the same as it was when NPM was originally introduced. End quote. Namely, one, ECMAScript modules have arrived as a standard. Two, there are more JavaScript runtimes than just Node and browsers. And three, TypeScript has emerged as a de facto standard.

Here's a quote from the Why page of their website. The NPM registry has been incredibly successful thanks to the contributions of developers worldwide. We want JSR to build on this success, not fork it. JSR is a superset of NPM, much as TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. JSR is designed to interoperate with NPM-based projects and packages. You can use JSR packages in any runtime environment that uses a NodeModules folder. JSR modules can import dependencies from NPM, end quote. The Deno team is bankrolling this effort for now, but they've set up a separate GitHub org for it and say in the future it may be funded by other means.

However, one of the core design principles, which is not like NPM, was to keep operating costs low. Quote, we expect that the Deno company will be able to continue paying for JSR's hosting bills for the foreseeable future. JSR is designed to be very cheap to run. It's now time for sponsored news. Sentry's launch week is March 18th through the 22nd. All week long, they'll be showing off the major investments they've been making in their already industry-leading suite of offerings. So tune in to their YouTube and Discord daily at 9 p.m. Pacific time to hear the latest scoop.

And if you want to be the first to see their new videos plus a chance to win Sentry swag, enter your email address using the link in the show notes. While you're at it, use code CHANGELOG to save $100 on their team plan when you sign up. Once again, follow the link in the show notes. And thank you to Sentry for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Periodic face-to-face.

Martin Fowler makes the case that remote-first teams still benefit from face-to-face gatherings and should do them every few months. Quote, however capable folks may be at remote working and however nifty modern collaboration tools become, there is still nothing like being in the same place with the other members of a team. Human interactions are always richer when they are face-to-face. Video calls too easily become transactional, with little time for the chit-chat that builds a proper human relationship. Without

those deeper bonds, misunderstandings fester into serious relationship problems effectively resolved if everyone were able to talk in person. End quote. This rings true to me. Our team was remote since day one, so we have a lot of experience, 10 years in fact, working through issues from afar. However, our bond is always strongest right after a conference or other opportunity to hang together in meatspace. Martin says, quote, the most valuable part of a face-to-face gathering isn't the scheduled work. It's chit-chat while getting a coffee and conviviality over lunch. Informal conversations, mostly not about work, forge the human contact that makes the work interactions be more effective. Can we get more decentralized than the Fediverse?

Eugene Ganeseta writes, quote, I guess that the Fediverse will be as decentralized as email. A bit, but not that much. Most people will be dependent on a few major hubs. Some groups might have their own hubs, e.g. company email servers. Personal instances will be pretty

rare. This is in contrast to personal blogging where every Bob can easily host their own, and they often do. I mean, that's already implied by the name. Fediverse is a federated universe, not a distributed one. Why does this matter? Well, I like not being dependent on one entity, but I would like it much more if I was dependent on no entities at all. In other words, I like to publish my own personal blog and get all the goodies of a social network without being dependent on other microblogging slash social content platforms. End quote.

Eugene thinks deeply about this and offers a solution that harmonizes with a Fediverse viral post of mine from last week, which I'll quote for you because it's only so often I have opportunity to quote myself. Quote, you know what doesn't get any spam? My RSS reader. That is the news for now, but you should also scan our companion newsletter for more goodness, like Blazor, an open source Ruby on Rails app for exploring your data with SQL. Ingestor, a CLI that lets you ingest data from any source to any destination using a single command, plus a blog post about surfing blog posts as Linux man pages.

Because why not, right? We have Internet Hall of Famer and DNS legend Paul Vixie coming up next on The Changelog. So stay tuned for that. Have a great week. Leave us some nice words via the form in the show notes

if you dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.