The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - If not React, then what? (News)

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Alex Russell answers the question, "If not React, then what?" Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch's Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare's R2 competitor.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, December 2nd, 2024. We've arrived at month's sub-11, which means everyone's breaking out their year-end content. First up, Oxford, you know, the dictionary? They've selected their word of the year, brain rot, which is a noun. Supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material, particularly online content, considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

Hopefully we do not contribute to brain rot. But speaking of year-end content, we are preparing for our seventh annual State of the Log episode, and we need your help. Please go to changelog.fm slash s-o-t-l, that's short for State of the Log, and leave us a voicemail. If your audio is used on the show, we'll hook you up with your very own Breakmaster Cylinder Remix. Okay, let's get into this week's news. If not React, then what? In the hopes of steering the next team away from the rocks, Alex Russell dives deep on why he believes nobody should start a new project in the 2020s based on React. full stop. His overarching message, quote, frameworkism isn't delivering.

The answer isn't a different tool. It's the courage to do engineering, end quote. I've been preaching similar things around these parts basically forever, not against frameworks per se, but against the belief that the next framework will deliver us from whatever self-constructed hellscape of a codebase we are currently abiding in. This statement by Alex rings particularly true, quote, a shocking fraction of

decent, well-meaning product managers and engineers haven't thought through the whys and wherefores of their architectures, opting instead to go with what's popular in a sort of responsibility fire brigade. The real cost of knowledge silos. Kasaba Okrana takes note that the Stack Overflow survey revealed 45% of developers hit knowledge silos three or more times per week. Here's what keeps him up at night. One, engineers feeling frustrated and isolated. Two, innovation dying in departmental dead ends. And three, your best people solving the same problems over and over. After years of scaling engineering teams, he has identified four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos.

One, the vertical information trap. Two, the documentation curse. Three, the onboarding gap. And four, the vertical information trap. Two, the documentation curse. Three, the onboarding gap. And four, the tribal mindset. Check his article for descriptions of each. What's the path forward? Kasaba says, quote, want to break this cycle? Start rewarding the sharing of knowledge more than its possession.

Make multiplier effects part of your promotion criteria. Celebrate the engineers who make others better. Mark When is like Markdown for timelines. This project by Rob Cook looks really well made and full featured. Quote, a Markdown-like journal language for plainly writing logs, Gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, to-dos, timelines, calendars, or anything that happens over time. End quote. Rob hasn't merely designed the MarkWin language. He also created Meridium, a collaborative editor for it that supports custom commands, snippets, visualizations, autocomplete, and more.

Oh, and he built a CLI an obsidian plugin and a VS Code extension cool stuff Rob check it out it's now time for sponsored news debug faster with Sentry's

AI tools next Tuesday join Jen Muang and Ram Senthamari the engineers behind Sentry's

latest AI power tools they'll walk you through Sentry's approach to AI and share how they're seeing it reshape the developer experience. This session is all about debugging faster with Sentry's AI tools and includes a live demo of what they've built. No AI hype here, just smarter alerts, issue summaries,

and suggested fixes to get you back to building faster. During the session, you'll learn how priority alerts and issue grouping work to highlight what matters, how to use anomaly detection to spot issues before they blow up, and how to integrate automatic issue fixes right into your workflow. It will close with a live Q&A where they'll answer your questions, dive deeper into how these features work, and show you how to make the most of them in your workflow. Don't miss it. Link in the chapter data and the newsletter. M4 Mac Mini's efficiency is incredible. Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac Mini.

Quote, I expected M4 to be better than M1 and M2. I haven't personally tested M3. And I hoped it would at least match the previous total system power efficiency king, a tiny ARM SBC, with an RK3588 system on a chip. But I didn't expect it to jump forward 32%. Efficiency gains on the ARM systems I tested typically look like 2-5% year over year. The M4 Mini I just bought reaches 6.74 gigaflops per watt on the HPL benchmark. The chip isn't the fastest at everything, but it's certainly the most efficient CPU I've ever tested. And that scales down to idle power too.

It hovers between 3 to 4 watts at idle, which is about the same as a Raspberry Pi. Comparing AWS S3 with Cloudflare R2. Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's OG S3 with Cloudflare R2. Sylvain Kerkor took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's OG S3 service with Cloudflare's competitor across price, performance, and user experience. I'll leave the details for you to plumb on your own time. Here's Sylvain's conclusion after all the hard work had been put in. Quote, I see only a few reasons to use S3 today. If about 40 millisecond of latency really matters, if you already have a mature AWS-only architecture and inter-region traffic fees are

not making a dent in your profits, or if it's really hard to bring another vendor into your infrastructure for organizational reasons. That's all. Maybe 90% plus of projects and organizations will be better served by Cloudflare R2, end quote. We've been on R2 for over a year, and while it has a few rough edges, namely reduced third-party client support, custom domain requirement, yeah, just those two off the top of my head, it has saved us a bunch of money on egress fees. That's the news for now, but also scan the companion issue of our changelog newsletter

for even more news worth your attention, including good software development habits, the skill that is not doing, can you measure a tech team's efficiency, DHH talking BDFLs, WordPress, SQLite, and Rails, and a whole lot more. Get in on that action at changelog.com slash news. We have some great episodes coming up this week. Akon joins me from Hat Club's new high seas competition on Wednesday. And on Friday, we talk shop with Shop Talks,

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. Have a great week. Leave us a voicemail at changelog.fm slash SOTL. And I'll talk to you again real soon.