The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Premium PCB cheat sheets, a disappearing AWS dev, HyperSwitch, Servo is back at it & Cloudflare Wildebeest (News)

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

WestArtFactory's premium PCB cheat sheets, Maxime Topolov tells of a disappearing AWS dev, Juspay Technologies releases HyperSwitch for payment processing, Servo gets new funding for 2023 & Cloudflare's open source Wildebeest.

What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 16th, 2023. Did you know? Changelog News is a labor of love. We don't make a dime on it. If you get value from this show, return some value with a Changelog++ membership. Sign up today at changelog.com slash plus plus. Changelog++! It's better!

Okay, let's get into the news. First up, this is too cool. West Art Factory creates premium cheat sheets made out of real printed circuit boards. You heard that right. They design and produce real PCBs that go through various processes until, in the end, a real circuit board with tracks made of real gold and a unique look and feel is created. That sounds a lot like an ad. This is not an ad.

We don't roll like that. I just think these things are super cool and wanted to share them with you there are cheat sheets for git linux python vim and more i'll embed the vim one in the chapter image so you can see it for yourself oh and if you're listening to this on a podcast app that doesn't support chapter images spotify maybe it's time to upgrade to one that does. Let me upgrade. I hear you be the block, but I'm the life that keep the streets on fire. The most clicked story in yesterday's edition of our Changelog Weekly newsletter, subscribe now at changelog.com slash weekly,

was the story of a single developer that dropped AWS costs by 90% then disappeared. Six months later, the costs skyrocketed again back to where they were before the dev did their thing. Maxim Topolov was brought in to figure out exactly what happened. Get out, I need to go to my mind palace. It's a modern day mystery with a juicy reveal that includes an accounts.yaml file containing 1 million Google accounts. 1 billion, gajillion, fifillion. We'll have more for you soon. A few months back, I covered Zed Shah's post about Stripe being like PayPal in 2010.

Maybe you recall. 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. If that advice speaks to you, check out HyperSwitch.

Written in Rust, HyperSwitch is a, quote, payment switch that lets you connect with multiple payment processors with a single API integration. Once integrated, you can add new payment processors and route traffic effortlessly, end quote. If you're already using Stripe, HyperSwitch is said to be fun, fast, and easy. Those are three words not

usually associated with payment processing. You can try it out either in their sandbox environment or on your local system with Docker Compose or by setting up a Rust dev environment. While we're talking Rust, this could be huge news. The Servo project is back in 2023. If you're out of the loop, Servo is an experimental browser engine written in Rust that Mozilla started in 2012. We talked about it with Jack Moffat on the changelog back in 2016. Then, in 2020, it was moved from Mozilla to the Linux Foundation. That move was literally the last post on the server blog until today, where they shared that thanks to new external funding, a team of developers will be actively working on it again.

We're putting the band back together. I haven't been able to confirm who is behind this new funding, but early speculation links it to Igalia, a free software consultancy headquartered in Spain that's involved with projects like GNOME, QT, WebKit, Chromium, and more. Last one for today, Wildebeest. It's an activity pub and Mastodon-compatible server that runs on Cloudflare's various services, built by Cloudflare, of course.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, if you're at all curious about the newfangled way these CDNs turned edge compute platforms wire together a production application, Wildebeest should be a great example of that, at least how Cloudflare's doing it. Second, it is yet another hat thrown into the ring in favor of federated social networking. Could Mastodon and ActivityPub have staying power this time around? A few other hats that have been thrown in the ring. Matt Mullenweg has said Tumblr will add support. Medium last week announced they will operate a Mastodon instance for their authors. The Vite team is building a view-based Mastodon web client called Elk.

And the Podcasting 2.0 guys are shifting their perhaps doomed from the start but still interesting cross-app comments initiative to leverage Mastodon. Things do seem to be heating up. It's going to be interesting to watch. Yes! Look what I have created! I have made fire! I have made fire! That is the news for now. I hope you have a great week. We'll be back in your podcast feed on Friday with a return guest.

Craig Kirsteins, the longtime Postgres educator and advocate, joins us to catch up with our favorite open source database. Maybe just Postgres is good enough? Find out with us on Friday.