The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Introducing Changelog Beats (News)

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Changelog drops full-length musical albums in collaboration with Breakmaster Cylinder, Justin Searls on why the right tools fail for the wrong reasons, The Unix Sheikh says we have too many level of abstractions, Adam at PiCockpit compares the newly-announced Raspberry Pi 5 to the competition & Jorge Medina assures us that we're not lacking creativity, we're just overwhelmed by content.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 23rd, 2023. Shout out to the many new and old friends we saw in Raleigh at All Things Open last week. It was a great event, and we recorded a bunch of awesome conversations, which we'll be shipping to your ear holes real soon. Let's get straight into it. We have some big news this week. It might even warrant a... It's... It's... It's showtime! You may or may not know that all the music on all of our pods has been produced in collaboration with Breakmaster Cylinder. BMC is famous for cranking out podcast themes,

but most people do those as one-offs. We've been working with Breakmaster on a continual basis for many years, producing new theme songs, outros, ad music, ins, outs,

stabs, robot noises, jingles, you name it, and BMC has produced it for us. Eventually, we ended up with a deep catalog of tracks that only live on our podcasts and on our hard drives. But...

Who likes good news, everyone? Today, we are excited to announce the release of two full-length musical albums for your purchasing and streaming pleasure. Nice combo. We are releasing them under the artist Changelog Beats. Volume 0 is called Theme Songs and it features, well, our theme songs, of course.

We're not going to bait and switch you. All of our themes are on there, even from retired shows like Request for Commits. We included some funky versions as well, such as Gotime's Icy Bars remix. Icy Bars and Kilobytes. Kilobytes. Kilobytes, sites, sites, sites, sites. And at the end of the album, six Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired remixes of our current lineup of shows. Here's Changelog News' remix. That's Theme Songs, and you can buy it on Bandcamp

or stream it on Apple Music, Spotify, and all the usual places. Volume 1 is called Next Level. Adam and I both grew up in the age of the NES, Super NES, and Sega Genesis. It's no surprise that so many of our tracks are inspired by the 8-bit and 16-bit video game music of our youth. Next level is 25 awesome tracks of video game goodness, including a few of my faves, Thickerbush Symphony, Running free. And Cubit. That's Next Level, and you can buy it on Bandcamp or stream it on Apple Music, Spotify, all the places. But we'll also drop the full-length album

right into the Changelog feed for you, so you won't miss it. Bam! But that's not all. We have more albums in the works. Two, actually, ongoing. So follow Changelog Beats on your platform of choice and share it with your friends, too.

One time, LinemanJS purveyor Justin Searles reflects on the tool's 10th anniversary. Quote, Lineman was our attempt to create a pleasant developer experience for building single-page JavaScript apps without tying developers to any particular back-end language or framework. I'm biased, but I really believe Lineman was the best tool available at the time for what is now an incredibly common job. End quote. He goes on to

ask himself, and tries to answer, a question many of us ask ourselves often. Quote, when I noticed the upcoming anniversary in my calendar, I could only think of one question to reflect on. Why did linemen fail, and what can we learn from it today? I don't know if Justin's analysis is correct or not, but it's an interesting read. Regardless, he throws in a how to pick your best tool for the job section near the end, and that's worth the price of admission, and then some. The Unix Chic thinks we've used too many levels of abstractions. Quote, a steering wheel is an abstraction that makes it easier for me to drive my car. Power steering is yet another level of abstraction that further improves the driving experience. Abstractions are nice. They generally improve the quality of life.

However, in Denmark, we have a proverb that says, too little and too much spoils everything. What good does an abstraction do when it breaks and nobody any longer understands how the technology under the hood works? End quote. That's a good question. In my experience, all abstractions leak at some point.

So you've either taken the time to understand how it works under the hood, or you're going to soon. The author isn't arguing that abstractions are bad per se, but that, quote, we need abstractions, no doubt about it, but every level of abstraction comes with a price which, ironically enough, eventually can cause a massive loss in profit, end quote. The Sheik goes on to provide a specific example case, some advice to people studying technology, and an update on the point of the post after receiving reader feedback.

Adam at Pi Cockpit compares the newly announced Raspberry Pi 5 to the Orange Pi 5 Plus and the Rock 5 Model B. In brief, the Raspberry Pi 5 is underpowered in the CPU, GPU, and RAM specs. It also comes in last in video because of the micro HDMI ports instead of the full HDMI ports of the other two devices, and it lacks an audio jack, which you may or may not care about. The Raspberry Pi 5 is smaller than the other two devices, so it has that going for it.

It gets smoked in all of Jeff Geerling's benchmarks, but it also is the cheapest of the three options, which you probably do care about. It's now time for Sponsored News. There's so much going on in the data and machine learning space, it's hard to keep up. Example, did you know that graph technology lets you connect the dots across your data and ground your LLM in actual

knowledge? To learn about this new approach, don't miss Neo4j's Nodes online conference on October 26th. At this free online conference, developers and data scientists from all around the world share how they use graph technology for everything from building intelligent apps and APIs to enhancing machine learning and improving data visualizations. There are 90 talks over 24 hours. So no matter where you are, you can attend live sessions. To register for this free conference, visit neo4j.com slash nodes. That's N-E-O, the number four, j.com slash nodes. Or just follow the link in your chapter data and in the newsletter. Thanks once again to Neo4j for sponsoring Changelog News. Jorge Medina hits far too close to home with this post. Quote,

you come home from work, tired and looking to disconnect a bit with some entertainment. But you're faced with the choice. Which streaming service do I use? I have five. You choose one. Let's say Netflix. Now what? The home screen welcomes you to a selection of titles. The thumbnails and titles all hyper-optimized for you to feel enticed to watch them. So you end up browsing mindlessly for 30 minutes until you settle on watching Friends again for the 894th time. That's called decision fatigue, where the mental effort required to evaluate and choose between many options can be exhausting. It's exhausting, it's an epidemic, and it has turned us into digital hoarders. End quote.

His advice? Curate to create. And how do you go about that? By building a curation system, of course. He goes on to lay out the code framework. Capture, organize, distill, express. And he provides practical steps toward building your own curation system. That is the news for now. But check the companion newsletter for more goodies,

including NVIDIUS, an open source alternative front end to YouTube, 37signals new disk backed cache that's saving them money, and a collection of Docker images to solve all your debugging needs. If you aren't a newsletter subscriber, fix that bug at changelog.com slash news. It's totally free. We have a big week of pods coming up. On Wednesday, our All Things Open 2023 coverage begins with Matthew Sanabria, Nitya Ruff, and Jordan Harband. On Thursday, Nick and I host the first winners of React Jam on JS Party. And Friday brings Jared Henderson to Changelog and Friends. We're discussing protecting our local networks from unwanted content.

Have a great week. Spread the word about Changelog Beats if you dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.