The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - OpenTF sticks a fork in Terraform (News)

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

OpenTF announces they're forking Terraform and joining the Linux Foundation, Meta gets in the LLM-for-codegen game with Code Llama, Matt Mullenweg announces WordPress.com's new 100-year plan, Paul Gichuki from Thinkst learns that default behaviors stick (and so do examples) & Marco Otte-Witte makes his case for Rust on the web.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 28th, 2023. So here's an idea for you. What if we created a special edition of Changelog News exclusively for Changelog++ members? In addition to the five top stories we cover in the public feed, it would exclude a sponsored story, of course, and include three additional stories from the newsletter in audio form. Would that be cool? Cool enough for you to sign up for Changelog++ if you haven't? Let us know in the comments.

I'm very curious. Okay, let's get into the news. When we covered the OpenTF manifesto last week, I said, the group's goal is to ensure Terraform stays truly open source forever, and they're asking HashiCorp to switch the license back. Well, according to OpenTF, there has been no indication by HashiCorp that they plan to revert the license, so they moved forward with the fork and they filled out all the paperwork necessary to join the Linux Foundation.

Quote, We completed all documents required for OpenTF to become part of the Linux Foundation with the end goal of having OpenTF as part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. By making a foundation responsible for the project, we will ensure the tool stays truly open source and vendor neutral, end quote. To me, this is the open source community doing exactly what it does best, stepping up and taking action to fill a void for and by the community that relies upon a project. And if you're wondering about the sustainability story for this fork, here's a note from the FAQ.

Quote, so far, four companies pledged the equivalent of 14 full-time engineers to the OpenTF initiative. We expect this number to at least double in the following few weeks. To give you some perspective, Terraform was effectively maintained by about five full-time employees from HashiCorp in the last two years. If you don't believe us, look at the repo. You can add Meta's CodeLlama to the ever-expanding list of code generating LLMs. Based on LLAMA2, CodeLlama comes in three sizes, 7 billion parameters, 13 billion, and 34 billion. And it comes in three different varieties. A general model, one tuned for NLP instructions, and one fine-tuned for Python. How does it stack up?

Well, Meta claims it outperforms other publicly available LLMs, and it shares the same open-ish license as Lama itself, which is free for research and commercial use, unless you compete with Meta. All right, it's time for some sponsored news. Scheduled jobs are supposed to be predictable, but sometimes predictable does not equal reliable. Sentry's cron monitoring, now in beta,

helps you monitor the uptime and performance of any scheduled or recurring job in Sentry. Whether you're running your recurring jobs using Python, PHP, Node,.NET, Ruby, or another SDK, the linked 20-minute webinar will show you how to get started with crons. They'll cover effectively customizing your monitors, automatically registering monitors through Celery Beat and Vercel, notifications and triaging, tracking job performance, and tracing failed check-ins to errors. Sign up for free using the link in your show notes and learn how to get started and manage your recurring jobs with Kranz. Thank you to Sentry for sponsoring this week's ChangeLog News. Matt Mullenweg proved he's a long-term thinker. Here he is announcing WordPress.com's new 100-year plan.

Quote, for almost 20 years, WordPress.com has been committed to providing a user-friendly and stable platform where anyone with a story to tell can do so freely and securely. Many of our customers have been with us from the beginning and we're proud to have been a partner in their digital journeys. Now we are thrilled to announce something truly new and exceptional, a plan designed exclusively for those seeking the ultimate in security and longevity for their This new plan locks in your domain name, ensures backups run, provides facilities for gifting and transfer of ownership, and offers premium support for the duration of the 100 years. Sounds like Matt is confident that WordPress.com is going to be around for a while. Paul Juchuki from Thinkist recently bumped into something in their product design that made them rethink their use of examples.

In a DNS configuration setting, they used the string SUMPREFIX as a default subdomain, which was meant to instruct their users to pick a prefix for their subdomain. Can you guess what happened next? Two out of every five people chose some prefix, like the literal string, some prefix, for their subdomain. Here's what they learned through that process. Quote, this is not an individual customer problem. Looking at other configuration options present in our UI, the pattern is clear. When given an example, a significant number of users default to using that same example in their customization. The behavior is consistent across customers and configurations.

This surprised us. For this particular case, their plan is to show multiple prefix examples to the user so it's clear that you need to select one. The bigger picture takeaway, though, is this. Quote, what seemed like a very minor placeholder choice we made years ago had an outsized impact and helped us to re-evaluate how we select the examples that we show our customers. It's a strong reminder that sweating every small detail in the UI, we were surprised at the oversized effect of our examples. I'm reminded of the old meme where you tell someone to press any key to continue, and they scour their keyboard searching for the any key. Something to think about this week while you're out there picking defaults and examples for your software projects.

Marco Ott Witt and his team at MainMatter have been investing heavily in Rust for web development. And in a linked post, he shares why they're so confident making that investment and why he believes that Rust has a great future ahead of it in the web and cloud space. Quote, what could motivate a team that already uses Ruby, Java, Elixir, TypeScript, Go, or whatever else to adopt Rust? There are two key aspects that make Rust a great choice for building for the web. One, its efficiency and performance, and two, the reliability and maintainability gains brought by its type system. Marco explains each of those bullet points in detail and goes on to describe how and where he thinks Rust fits best in the web world.

Check out Marco's article and then let us know if this might make for a good episode of The Change Log. That is the news for now. This week on the changelog, Adam sits down with Warp founder Zach Lloyd to talk all about the terminal of the future. Have a great week. Tell your friends about changelog news if you dig it. And please do let us know if an extended edition would entice you to join changelog++. Alright, that's it. But I'll talk to you again real soon. If an extended edition would entice you to join changelog plus plus. All right,

that's it. But I'll talk to you again real soon.