The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Death by a thousand microservices (News)

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.

What up nerds! I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday, September 18th, 2023. We're packing our bags and flying out on Wednesday to sunny St. Louis for the last Strangeloop conference. If you're to be there, leave us a comment and let us know so we can connect IRL. If not, stay tuned for some awesome conversations with the creators and users of the languages, libraries, tools, and techniques at the forefront of the industry. Okay, let's get into the news, shall we? Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills. And he wonders, how did we get here?

How did our aim become not addressing the task at hand, but instead setting a pile of cash on fire by solving problems we don't have? He's talking about microservices, of course. And in an attempt to answer this question, Andre takes aim at JavaScript and Node.js, which I tend to disagree with and may trigger you if you're of that ilk. But what he's really saying is this, quote, My point really was more about the dangers of hermetically sealed software ecosystems

that seem hellbent on relearning the lessons that we had just finished learning. End quote. He then turns his attention to the VC-funded tech startup boom that only recently busted, saying, Investors needed to see explosive growth, but not in profitability, no. They just needed to see how quickly the company could hire ultra-expensive software engineers to do... something. And now that you have these developers, what do you do with them? Well, they could build a simpler system that is easier to grow and maintain, or they could conjure up a monstrous constellation of microservices that no one really understands. End quote. This post is salty for sure, but there's also a lot of level-headed reasoning that's worth your consideration.

KC Muratori wasn't too surprised last week when Unity announced a retroactive change to its pricing model from charging per seat to charging per install. Quote, I do follow game business trends to a certain extent, and for well over a year now I've been warning that Unity's relationship with game developers would inexorably change for the worse. This was not based on any inside knowledge, it was based solely on the financials they report and the kinds of statements they make to investors in their earnings calls, end quote. The move by Unity sent shockwaves through the developer community, so much so that they have since announced they will soon be making changes to the new policy. Stay tuned for that.

But they left many people looking for alternatives. In the linked post, Casey outlines a long list of options for folks, depending on your particular situation. Unreal, Godot, Defold, Raylib, Open3D, Bevy, and many more. Like, a whole bunch more. Casey isn't the only one to write about this. Many people have opinions and advice on the subject. Check in the newsletter for links to further reading.

It is now time for Sponsored News, brought to you by Sentry. Are your users facing embarrassingly slow page loads and rendering? Let's put a stop to that. Learn the basics of front-end application performance monitoring with Sentry in this upcoming live stream. In less than 30 minutes, you'll be able to install and configure performance monitoring, interpret key metrics, and troubleshoot a performance issue. With visibility into end-user experience, you can build a blazing fast app in record time. This live tutorial is happening this Wednesday, September 20th. Sign up early using the

link in the show notes to have your questions answered in the live Q&A. Once again, that's this coming Wednesday, September 20th. Sign up now to get your questions answered. Thanks again to Sentry for sponsoring this episode of ChangeLog News. Pineapple One is a functioning 32-bit RISC-V macro processor built by a 19-year-old, Philip Scandera, over the course of two years. Quote, we chose to build a CPU only out of discrete off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that designing a modern CPU isn't that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source.

Philip calls this groundbreaking for homebrew CPUs and put together a great video demonstrating the hardware. My CPU is fully compatible with the RV32i standard, which means that it can use off-the-shelf compilers. So anybody can make a program for this CPU very easily. This is groundbreaking for homebrew CPUs, because almost every one of what I saw used a custom compiler or just an assembler. With RISC-V we can achieve much more with much less components and this is what I have demonstrated here. My CPU is built only out of discrete logic components and memories so you won't find any FPGAs nor any microcontrollers on board. I managed to fit all that into this tower

which I don't think would be possible with any other popular architecture. At this point, it runs at... Matt Bosta tells a fascinating tale of the time he single-handedly built a web-based Excel clone for the data scientists inside Uber, only to have the entire division sold to another company a week later. He learned a lot about how Excel works and shares some of the interesting bits, and he also has a super healthy outlook on what happened to all this hard work. Quote, my first reaction was to publish the code on GitHub, which he did. My second reaction was to move on. There was maybe a part of me, my younger self, that was disappointed

that this major piece of code that I labored over had been so gently used before being retired. I wasn't recognized for it in any material way. My manager didn't even know what I'd built. On the other hand, we as engineers need to be real with ourselves. Every piece of code you write as an engineer is legacy code. Maybe not right now, but it will be. Someone will take joy in ripping it out someday. Every masterpiece will be gleefully replaced. It's just a matter of time.

So why get precious about how long that period of time is? PageFind looks pretty cool. It's a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites while using as little of your user's bandwidth as possible and without hosting any infrastructure. It runs after your static site generator, like Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, etc., and generates a search bundle to add to your built files. It then exposes a JavaScript search API that can be used anywhere on your site. Quote, the goal of PageFind is that websites with tens of thousands of pages should be searchable

by someone in their browser while consuming as little bandwidth as possible. PageFind's search index is split into chunks so that searching in the browser only ever needs to load a small subset of the search index. PageFind can run a full-text search on a 10,000 page site with a total network payload under 300 kilobytes, including the PageFind library itself. For most sites, this will be closer to 100 kilobytes. End quote. I'd love to see a comparison, link me up if you know of one, but my guess is that this could easily replace Algolia on lots of open source docs and websites. One less service to depend on. Why not, right? That's the news for now, but we have an excellent interview for you coming up on Wednesday.

Red Monk's Stephen O'Grady joins us in the wake of Lama 2 and HashiCorp's re-license to discuss why he believes the open source definition really matters. Have a great week. Tell your friends about changelog news if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.