The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Hyperswitch, the future of programming, Thoughtworks' latest tech radar & your docs aren't "simple" (News)

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Hyperswitch is like the adapter pattern for payments, Austin Henley writes about the future of programming by summarizing recent research papers, Thoughtworks published their 28th volume of their Tech Radar, the team at General Products reminds devs to scan our technical writing for words such as "easy", "painless", "straightforward", "trivial", "simple" and "just" & we finish with a lightning round of cool tools.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, May 1st, 2023. Adam and I will be in Vancouver next week at Open Source Summit. We'll be hanging out with our friends at GitHub in or near their booth. We'll be recording conversations, of course, and connecting with the community. So if you're attending Open Source Summit, come say hi. Okay, let's get into the news. According to the team behind it, HyperSwitch is, quote, an open-source financial switch written in Rust to make payments fast, reliable, and affordable. It lets you connect with multiple

payment processors and route traffic effortlessly, all with a single API integration, end quote. Remember when Segment took the adapter pattern and applied it to third-party scripts? From what I can tell, that's what HyperSwitch is trying to do with payments. It supports processors like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal, all the major credit cards including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and buy now, pay later providers like Klarna and Affirm. I've mentioned Hyperswitch here on ChangeLog News in the past, but I thought it was worth

covering again now that the project seems to be maturing both in breadth and depth. Austin Henley was jealous that he couldn't attend ACM's esteemed CHI 2023 conference last week, saying, quote, instead, I'm going through the proceedings and reading all the papers related to programming, of which many involve AI. Austin then listed and summarized eight of the talks that stood out to him. This conference is for researchers, so the work they're doing today may very well help produce the future of programming. Here's one example. The talk is called Why Johnny Can't Prompt, How Non-AI Experts Try and Fail to Design LLM Prompts. Austin's summary is, prompt engineering is quite the craze right now, but can non-AI experts write effective prompts? The researchers investigated the challenges that people face while writing prompts

and designed a tool to help these non-experts do so. My takeaway is, tools that improve the UX of interacting with various AIs will provide outsized value over the next few years. That's just one of the talks covered. Check his post for the other seven and see what you can see about the future of programming. The 28th volume, yes, 28th of ThoughtWorks' excellent technology radar has been published, and it's always fun to look at it to see what's new and what's moving in and out of Vogue. If you've never seen their radar, there are four major sections,

techniques, tools, platforms, and languages slash frameworks. And they're categorized into four major quadrants, adopt, trial, assess, or hold. It's definitely worth sitting down and considering the entire report. But for a taste, here's a quick list of everything in the ADOPT quadrant. Techniques include applying product management to internal platforms, CICD infrastructure as a service, dependency pruning, and run cost as architecture fitness function. Side note, I have no idea what that last one means. There's only one tool on the ADOPT list, DVC, which is an open source Git-based data science tool. Adoptable platforms are Contentful, GitHub Actions, and K3S.

And two languages slash frameworks made the list this time, Gradle Kotlin DSL and PyTorch. The full report can be downloaded as a PDF, and the link to that PDF is in today's companion newsletter. Big thanks to the team at Postman for sponsoring this week's Changelog News. And if you don't want to hear sponsored stories on our pods, Changelog++! It's better! Ken Lane writes, quote, As chief evangelist here at Postman, I recognize how important API First discussions are. There's a significant meaning and purpose wrapped up in the API First concept. With the right

approach, API First will save your team pain and suffering and save your organization time and money. This can ultimately spell the difference between remaining competitive or falling behind in today's digital landscape. End quote. API First is a journey. The design takes more time up front to plan and gain alignment among stakeholders, but once the design is agreed upon, it can save time auto-generating deliverables throughout the rest of the API lifecycle. Read the rest of Ken's post to wrap your head around different paths you can take to become API first. Here's some cold hard truth. If someone's having to read your docs, it's not quote unquote simple. The team at General Products Limited put together an awesome microsite to remind us devs to scan our technical writing for words such as easy, painless,

straightforward, trivial, simple, and just because they're not helpful. They say, quote, if someone's been driven to Google something you've written, they're stuck. Being stuck is, to one degree or another, upsetting and annoying. So try not to make them feel worse by telling them just how straightforward they should be finding it. It gets in the way of them learning what you want them to learn. End quote. I could not agree more, and I do find myself using just and simple often

in my writings and explanations to people. If you have that same inclination, just remember to visit justsimply.dev and read this excellent post one more time. Last up for today, a quick lightning round of cool tools. That's what the crowd wants. Quick SSH is a quick proxy that allows you to use quick to connect to an SSH server without needing to patch the client or the server.

Nice. Bullet Train is an MIT licensed Rails based Rails-based software-as-a-service framework. Sweet! Frogmouth is a markdown viewer slash browser for your terminal built with Textual. Ah, tasty! And Killport is a command line utility for killing processes listening on specific ports. That's the news for now. The companion changelog newsletter has a lot more interesting links.

If you're still wanting more, give it a read. On this week's interview episode of the changelog, I'm joined by Elixir creator, Jose Valim, to discuss all the cool new stuff his team announced during Livebook's big launch week. I leave you with this gem of a quote from Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. New is easy. Right is hard. Have a great week. Share ChangeLog news with your friends if you

dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.