The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Harmonai revisited, lessons learned from public salary, Open Core Ventures, Stripe is Paypal in 2010 & Helix (News)

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

We revisit our Harmonai story from last week, Jamie Tanna reviews posting his salary history publicly, Sid Sijbrandij's new (open core) venture fund, Zed Shaw thinks Stripe is like Paypal in 2010 & Helix is a new Rust-based terminal.

Hello again. I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 17th, 2022. Let's do it. We start with a quick update on the Harmon.ai story from last week. After listening to the pod, Harmon.ai director Zach Evans informed me that the audio samples I shared aren't actually from Dance Diffusion. The author of the article I referenced mislabeled some style transfer attempts as original output from the model. So that explains why that one sample included Journey's Don't Stop Believing track. They were testing out some style transfers on

their Discord server, which is where the journalists obtained them. My apologies to Zach and the Harmony AI team for perpetuating that mistake, but I'm not going to apologize for that Journey Rolled joke. Wow, how'd you fall for it again? Journey rolled. Just over a year ago, Jamie Tana did something quite out there, even for him. He posted his salary history publicly. When he did that, he made a note to himself to come back in a year for a review. His review post is now live and was the top clicked link in this week's newsletter. Jamie's high level takeaways are the following. A bunch of people have seen it. He got a lot of private thank you notes from folks that helped. More people have begun sharing theirs. He doesn't believe it's had any negative impact on his

career. It's been great for his employers at Deliveroo because they compensate so well. And he has no regrets. My only regret is that I have bonitis. Okay, that one is obscure. If you got the reference without checking the transcript, we should be friends. GitLab CEO Sid Sabrandage is putting his money to work at OpenCore Ventures, a new approach to venture capital. Instead of looking for companies to fund, OCV identifies promising open source projects and creates companies around them.

So far, Sid and the team have invested in five companies around projects OSQuery, NodeD, Rook, OBS, and Mermaid. And their plan is to add one company every month. If this excites you enough to get your pitch deck all ready to present, don't. You don't pitch OCV. OCV identifies open source projects with traction and potential and then seeks out builders and technologists to launch their ideas. No, I don't wash the towel. The towel washes me. Who washes a towel? and potential and then seeks out builders and technologists to launch their ideas. No, I don't wash the towel.

The towel washes me. Who washes a towel? I never wash. You wash your towel? You never wash the towel? What am I going to do? Wash the shower next? Wash a bar of soap?

You got to think here, pal. I'm furious. Zed Shaw thinks Stripe is PayPal circa 2010. And no, that is not a compliment. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry. Zed used Stripe about 10 years ago, but switched to PayPal for chargeback fee and fraud non-prevention reasons. Now he's back on Stripe and has this to say about the experience.

Quote, I honestly do not understand the belief that Stripe is better than PayPal. Everyone who begged me for an alternative to PayPal would recommend Stripe, but my experience so far, and that of other people, is that Stripe is not better than PayPal. They're both moderately terrible. This review is an attempt to make sense of why Stripe's documentation doesn't work, why it's the same for PayPal, and how Stripe's only real advantage now is mostly smoke and mirrors. Hopefully, this helps people who are running straight to Stripe avoid a painful lesson. End quote. Zed doesn't pull any punches,

and this post goes deep on the shortcomings of both PayPal and Stripe. The nugget of gold is buried all the way at the end, though, where he gives this advice. Quote, I advocate to people to be ready to switch payment processing at a moment's notice. Right now, I could flip two options and I'd be back on PayPal. If I was pressed, I could probably implement any other payment processor in about a week or a day. The ability to quickly switch payments is your only defense against frozen accounts, fraud, and rogue employees, end quote. That's good advice for almost all third-party integrations.

Keep an abstraction layer between your app and their API that can be swapped with minimal effort because... My mom always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. Helix is a postmodern modal text editor. It's written in Rust, inspired by Niovim and Kakune, a pronunciation I'm not even going to apologize for, and it's terminal based. Helix is quite easy on the eyes as well. Check your chapter image or the show notes to see what I mean. So what's so postmodern about it? Nothing

really. That part's just a joke. But from what I can tell, it's kind of like NeoVim after somebody who has a lot of time on their hands has pimped it out all the way. So you want to be a player, but your wheels ain't fly. You got to hit us up to get a pimped out ride. You've got to pimp my ride. When Helix hit Hacker News' front page recently, one commenter boldly proclaimed, I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, NeoVim, and Kakune for most users in the long run.

To which another commenter replied, yeah, that's not going to happen. Regardless of who's right, if you enjoy trying out different editors to see which one maps best to the way your brain works, give Helix a look. That is the news for now. If you're a fan of these news episodes that we produce for you each Monday, I would be absolutely thrilled if you'd share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. We'll be back in your ear holes on Friday talking with Will McGugan about Textual. It's a text user interface framework for Pythonistas inspired by modern web dev. Have a great week. We'll talk to you then.