The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Busting the ghost engineers (0.1x-ers) (News)

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Ben Affleck's take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram's CodingFont.com is like Zoolander's Walk Off but for coding fonts.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, November 25th, 2024. Who would have thought that Ben Affleck's take on AI replacing Hollywood actors would so well represent my take on AI replacing software engineers? AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds a little beefy, and it cannot write you Shakespeare. The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct that

is something that currently entirely eludes AI's capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time. What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the more liberal... Well said, Ben. Okay, let's get into the news. Busting the ghost engineers. From ghost jobs to ghost engineers. Is our industry haunted?

Here's Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanche. Quote, I'm at Stanford and I research software engineering productivity. We have data on the performance of greater than 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies. About 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing. How do we know 9.5% of software engineers are ghosts? Our model quantifies productivity by analyzing source code from private Git repos, simulating a panel of 10 experts evaluating each commit across multiple dimensions. We published a paper on this, and I have more on the way.

End quote. Turns out this news gets worse the further away from the office you get. Remote workers, 14% ghosts. Hybrid work, 9% ghosts. In-office work, 6% ghosts. Hybrid work, 9% ghosts. In-office work, 6% ghosts. Maybe studies like this one are helping inform many organizations' return to office policies? I don't know. Fascinating stuff. Check out Yegor's full thread for more findings. ElectroBun is a fresh take on Electron. This ambitious but just getting started project aims to be a complete solution in a box for building, updating, and shipping ultra-fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in TypeScript.

It uses Bunn to execute the main process and has native OS bindings written in Zig. The end result is small app bundles, about 12MB, even smaller app updates using BSDiff, and everything you need in one tightly integrated workflow. But, quote, ElectroBun is in the very early stages. We currently only support development on ARM Macs. It has memory leaks, has no tests, is not available in NPM yet, and many core things are still missing. End quote. If this is attractive to you, now is a good time to start the repo for later, or hop in and start contributing. Handling cookies is a minefield. April King opens this deep dive with an all too familiar phrase. Quote, I had been more than content to ignore the vagaries of how cookies function until the end of time. Except that one day, I stumbled across this innocuous piece of JavaScript.

End quote. You probably want the meat of her post too, but I'll jump to the end for the why this matters part. Quote, When I first discovered this in the real world, it was only through sheer luck that it wasn't a catastrophe. A manual tester was playing around with a third-party library update and had run into a strange set of errors on our testing site.

Without bringing it to my attention, this update, doing something unlikely to be caught in an automated test, would have certainly been pushed to production. As a result, every future website visitor would have received a broken cookie and been locked out with an inscrutable error until the update was reverted and the cookies were cleared out. And that's exactly the problem with this specification ambiguity. It's such an easy mistake to make that millions of websites and companies are only an intern away from a complete meltdown. And it doesn't only affect tiny websites on obscure frameworks, as major websites such as Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Apple are affected. End quote.

One enduring quality of our software systems, it is far too easy to unknowingly make catastrophic mistakes. It's now time for sponsored news. Not your grandma's SQLite. Here's another awesome video from our friend Annie Sexton on Fly's YouTube channel. Annie says, quote, it's entirely possible to have strong disaster recovery and distributed replicas with SQLite when using Lightstream and LightFS. In this video, I chat with Lightstream and LightFS creator Ben Johnson about how this can be done. End quote. Here's a taste of that video.

Let's pause on Lightstream for a second. So is it a server? Is it a second service that runs um as like a proxy i know light fs is a little bit of like a proxy situation but i don't know how light stream works it sounds like it's primarily for like would you say high availability i mean backups obviously um i'd say disaster recovery disaster recovery cool yeah so essentially if you can if you can spend backup your your instance and recover quickly enough it's sort of high availability in its own sense. Medium availability.

It's medium availability. I would definitely call it that. Yeah, exactly. Watch the rest on Fly's awesome YouTube channel, link in the newsletter, and chapter data. And thanks, of course, to Fly.io for sponsoring ChangeLog News. A career-ending mistake. John Arundel says, when it comes to this post, you came for the schadenfreude, but you'll stay for the thought-provoking advice. Quote, this isn't about the time I inadvertently shut down one of Britain's nuclear power stations, an entirely true story for which the world is nevertheless not yet prepared.

Nor is it about the poor junior developer who accidentally destroyed the production database on their first day. They'll be fine. Bless them. Instead, I want to talk about another kind of career-ending mistake, one that affects more than just the unlucky few. Indeed, it's a mistake we're probably all making right now, and that's not planning the end of our careers. End quote. Kudos to John on the excellent wordplay there. The career ending mistake is not planning the end of our careers. Got it. Now, what exactly does that mean to plan the end of your career? He describes that by answering questions like these. Where will you be when you realize that this is where you've always wanted to be? Where do you want to end up?

And is that where you're currently heading? If not, what should you do about it? It's a codeine font-off. Do you remember in Ben Stiller's classic comedy Zoolander, when Derek and Hansel, so hot right now, wanted to determine who was really the hottest male model? The only way to know the truth was a walk-off. Now this would be a straight walk-off. Old school rules.

First model walks, second model duplicates, then elaborates. Okay, boys, let's go to work. Each before beauty coachees. Whatever. Replace Zoolander with Source Code Pro and Hansel with FiraCode and you immediately get the point of Typogram's codingfont.com. Our conversation last week with Departure Mono folks have me re-evaluated my coding font,

and this site's blind taste test game was the perfect tool to pick my new coding font, which is JetBrains Mono, by the way, at least for the next few weeks. That's the news for now, but do scan our companion changelog newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, such as a Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game,

a website hosted entirely on Blue Sky, and our world-famous order list of additional links. Get the newsletter at changelog.com slash news. So hot right now. Have yourself a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you're thankful for our shows, and I'll talk to you again real soon.