The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Forking SQLite, generative AI for music, saying no to sprints, awesome diagramming tools & state machine facts (News)

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

The libSQL community is forking SQLite, StabilityAI announces Haromai and Dance Diffusion, Robin Rendle doesn't believe in sprints, Shubham Garg curates some awesome diagramming tools & Chris Pressey writes up some must-read facts about state machines.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 10th, 2022. You know, it's been months since we've heard a significantly unpopular opinion on GoTime. Well, except this one. Pineapple on pizza is good. Fight me. Catch me outside. So yesterday on Twitter,

we asked GoTime's followers to help us out and post their most unpopular tech opinions. That resulted in a fun thread of spicy takes, such as user at Miles Christopher, who said, infrastructure as code is almost always a waste of time at roberto guera 19 said tdd is a cult you did not just say that to which at britney yellick replied okay maybe but it's a good cult boom roasted and at a4w underscore m6h said your choice of database is more important than your choice of programming language.

I actually kind of agree with that one. There's a link to the thread in your show notes. Hop on there and add your unpopular opinion. Who knows? Maybe we'll feature it in a future episode. Okay, let's get into the news. LibSQL is a fork of SQLite that is both open source and open contributions. Everyone loves SQLite, and there's a lot to love, but not everyone is in love with its contribution

model, which is pretty much limited to Richard Hipp and his team. The creators of this fork want to see a world where everyone can benefit from all of the great ideas and hard work that the SQLite community contributes back to the codebase. Who forms this new community? Right now it appears to be just Gladwell Costa and his team at ChiselStrike, but they're hoping others will join them. Their siren call asks, what do you think SQLite could become?

Could it become a distributed database? Could it be optimized with an async API? Could it be embedded into the Linux kernel? Could it support WASM user-defined functions? If these are questions you'd like to see answered, join the LibSQL community and start hacking. Stability AI is back in the news already. This time they're announcing harmonite harm harmon ai

a community-driven organization that releases open source generative audio tools to make music production more accessible and fun for everyone the first of these tools is called dance diffusion and it's a little bit like stable diffusion but for music when you're working with these you're not a program anymore you're a wizard right you're a wizard you're working with these, you're not a program anymore. You're a wizard, right? You're a wizard. You're learning spells. I've always wanted to be a wizard. Right. We get to be wizards now.

What kind of music are these tools capable of today? Here's one sample audio file generated by Harmon.ai. And here's another. That second one sound familiar? I think Dance Diffusion might have just journey rolled us. Definitely a work in progress. Robin Rendell doesn't believe in sprints. Has he been listening to the changelog?

Robin says, quote, I've never seen a good team improved by sprints, and I've never seen a crappy team improved by them either. In fact, every efficient and productive team I've worked on has ignored the concept of sprints altogether. People are more focused without them. They communicate better. When you're on a team like that, then it's easy to see how everyone else mistakes the bureaucracy around the work for the work itself. End quote. He goes on,

as you can imagine, and if you appreciate a solid rant, definitely read the whole thing. What I love about these kinds of posts is that they question the status quo, which is healthy. Reminds me of Lucas Da Costa questioning our stand-up practices. When it comes to stand-ups, I think that I find that people ramble a lot. So when you follow a model where you're trying to say what you've done in the previous day and what you're going to do today and all that, people are going to inevitably start to ramble.

And a lot of that information is not important for your peers, especially if you're, so if you're working a two or three people team, yeah, it's easier for everyone to pay attention to what you did yesterday and what you're going to do tomorrow. But like, if you're working a two or three people team, yeah, it's easy for everyone to pay attention to what you did yesterday and what you're going to do tomorrow. But like, if you're working a team that has more than three people,

it's going to be very hard for you to pay attention to all this small granular level of detail that everyone has. So to avoid rambling and to avoid making meetings long and unproductive, what I'd say is just get your camera on board, go from left to right, and then look at the tasks that are there and ask people whether they're blocked, whether they need any answers, or if

everything's okay. Because if everything's okay, people don't need to tell you what they were doing yesterday. You're probably going to review the code anyway. You don't need to know all the granular detail of what they did, because stand-ups are not made for people to prove they're productive. Stand-ups are made for people to get blockers out of the way. In a way, daily stand-ups, what they do is produce... Speaking of Lucas, he praised accumulation charts on the pod. He thinks they're an awesome diagram for managing software production systems. Meanwhile, Shubham Garg created an entire repo of awesome diagramming tools used by software engineering teams. His list lays out different factors you should consider

when picking a tool such as cost, open or closed source, ease of use, code versus hand-drawn, and visual appearance. Bookmark this one for the next time you need an awesome tool to help create that awesome diagram. While we're talking about tooling, let's talk about state machines real quick. Bookmark this one for the next time you need an awesome tool to help create that awesome diagram. While we're talking about tooling, let's talk about state machines real quick. Chris Pressy's Facts About State Machines repo is a must-read for anyone unfamiliar with the tech. Chris says, quote, I hold the opinion that state machines are often misunderstood and underapplied.

And that's why I wrote this. The goal of this list of facts is not to teach you what state machines are or how to use them. There are plenty of other resources for that. Rather, the goal here is to motivate their usage and to highlight things about them that are frequently overlooked, but nonetheless relevant. End quote. This is not your typical primer or intro only write up. It starts there, but quickly goes deep into state charts, implementation strategies, nesting state machines, and so much more. The guy knows his stuff,

and you can know it too by giving this a read. I know Kung Fu. Show me. That's the news for now. We'll be back with a fresh show on Friday. The topic of conversation, taking Postgres serverless. That is what Nikita Shamganov and his team at Neon are trying to do. And they're off to a great start having already separated compute

and storage. This is a great episode for anyone with a vested interest in both data storage, which is pretty much all of us, and the future, which again, all of us. Have a great week. We'll talk to you then.