The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Chapters, PiBox, using one big server, oncall compensation, being swamped is normal, Tabler & Gum (News)

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

We add episode chapters to the website, KubeSail sells a PiBox, Nima Badizadegan wants you to use one big server, Gergeloy Orosz details oncall compensation across the software industry, Greg Kogan isn't impressed with how swamped you are at work, a dashboard template built on Bootstrap & Charm releases a CLI tool for shell scripts.

What up nerds? Nerds! Nerds! Nerds! I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 8th, 2022. We start with a little bit of news from us, your friends at Changelog. Last week we added chapters to the episode pages on Changelog.com. Excellent!

Let's do this! You'll find them between the show notes and the transcript. Each chapter is titled alongside its time offset that's clickable of course so you can play the episode starting from right there. Next on the roadmap we are working on adding the very same chapters to our mp3s so you can use them in your podcast app of choice. People are calling it the single greatest technical improvement to changelog podcasts since transcripts. And when I say people, I mean me. I've been calling it that. There's no ETA on those mp3 chapters because no self-respecting developer would opt into a deadline that's easily avoidable, but hopefully they'll ship real soon now. Okay, let's get into the rest of the news.

First up, it's the Pi Box. Designed for hackers, tinkers, and self-hosters, the Pi Box combines a Raspberry Pi CM4, Wi-Fi, 8 gigs of RAM, up to 16 terabytes of SSD storage, and a suite of software that includes an app store, backups, remote access, and more. They call it the most versatile personal server ever. It's powered by CubeSale, which works on any Linux OS that can run Kubernetes. CubeSale looks sorta open source. There's a lot of open source repos on their GitHub org,

but there's a CubeSale.com control panel and other private parts, as far as I can tell. However, since it's all about self-hosting, they aren't running your apps as a service. So that's nice. Entry-level pricing is $159 US dollars with the plug-and-play maxed-out offering at $529. Batch 1 of the Pi boxes are shipping now, but they're taking pre-orders for Batch 2, which is expected to ship in October.

Speaking of hosting, Nima, with a last name that is too difficult for me to pronounce, writes, Now, say my name. Badazadegan? Badizegan? Badizedegan? Badizedegan? I tried Nima. I really tried. Nima B. writes, on the advantages of using one big server over a distributed system architecture. He says, quote, We have all gotten so familiar with virtualization and abstractions between our software and the servers that run it. These days, serverless computing is all the rage and even bare metal is a class of virtual machine. However, every piece of software runs on a server. Since we now live in a world of virtualization,

most of these servers are a lot bigger and a lot cheaper than we actually think. End quote. His article covers the capabilities of one server, what it'll cost you, how scaling up is easier than scaling out, and rebuts a bunch of common objections to the one big server approach. It's an argument that is definitely worthy of your consideration. Our friend Gerge Arose has a two-part series about how the software

industry approaches on-call. Part one covers healthy on-call practices and part two dives into on-call compensation for software engineers. The article goes through more than 80 data points on how much different companies pay for on-call. So you can find out which companies pay the most, which companies pay the least, and which companies don't pay at all. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no job is too big, no fee is too big. A valuable resource for sure if and when you're job shopping. Are you always swamped with work? Greg Kogan says that's normal and

not impressive. Ouch. This guy's really hurting me. And it hurt. Quote, I used to think being swamped was a good sign. I'm doing stuff. I'm making progress. I'm important. I have an excuse to make others wait. Then I realized being swamped just means I'm stuck in the default state, like a ball that's settled to a stop in the deepest part of an empty pool, the spot where rainwater has collected into a puddle. End quote. Reading this reminded me of Woody Sewell's distinction between productivity and effectiveness. There's so much more than thinking productivity is important. I don't think productivity is important at all. I think being effective is important.

So productivity is like another proxy measurement that a lot of managers need to use because that's how they think work should be. And they do it. But there's a famous quote from Russell Akoff, I think, who said, because managers can't figure out how to measure what they want, they start wanting what they can measure. This is like a critical thing to think about. What do we do in our daily work that we do because we can't really figure out how to do things a better way? And so here's the thing. If we're focused on flow, that is taking something from beginning to end directly, there are many benefits we get from that. When he first said that to us on the show, I thought it was a distinction without a difference. But the more I thought about it, the more I think Woody and Greg are

onto something. Have you heard of Tabler? It's a premium open source dashboard template with a responsive and high quality UI. It works cross browser, of course, uses modern HTML and CSS, and it's built with Bootstrap. Remember that? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time. There are also React components available for Tabler in a separate repo. Links to both are in the show notes. Last but certainly not least, our friends at Charm Bracelet released a new tool for glamming up your shell scripts. It's called

Gum, which gives you the power of their bubbles and lip gloss tools without having to write any Go code. When Toby Padilla from Charm was on the show, he sang Go's praises for writing CLIs. We think Go is a good language to build command line tools in for a number of reasons. One is you get a compilable binary that you can ship, right? A single file. And you don't have to force all of your users to install all of

the dependencies that you've used to develop all Node.js or Python or something like that, right? And so it's sort of a natural fit for this type of tooling. Two, it's just a nice language. It's got a really good standard library. So a lot of stuff that you might want to do to make a really cool command line app is just straight up available in the Go standard library. It's got an HTTP server. It's got an HTTP client. It's got a lot of stuff

inside of it. And so that was why we focused on and we we like lots of languages and we come from backgrounds where i was a closure developer for six years um i was doing rust actually for two years before i moved to go and i got um muesli i follow him on github and i got jealous of all the cool libraries that he was starring all the time i'm like i want that i because he's a golang developer and he's like super super cool crypto thing or whatever. And I'm like, hey, that looks neat. I'm in Rust writing my own Ben coding library because such a thing doesn't exist. At some point, I just I'm like, you know, I love Rust. That's really cool. It's a super exciting language. I jump ship. I'm like, I want to be more productive. I want to use all the fun toys. And so I started doing Go.

But it's super cool to see Toby and the team bringing their CLI tools to the broader community. That is the news for now. Stay tuned for our regular edition of the Change Log on Friday when I go one-on-one with Liz Rice. If you've been living under a cloud native rock, Liz is the chief open source officer with eBPF pioneers, Isovalent. If there's one person on earth who could best school us on the power of EBPF, it'd be Liz Rice. And she'll do just that on Friday. Have a great week and we'll talk to you then.