The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Programming advice for my younger self (News)

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can't fund Firefox & Hyrum's Law.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, July 8th, 2024. Fast Company has a fun piece which will link up on what the internet looked like back in 1994, featuring 15 webpages born that year, including Yahoo, Whitehouse.gov, Microsoft, and more. My favorite one is a page that lived on Microsoft.com, which shows the server and the webmaster at Microsoft. It says, here is a picture of the server and the webmaster here at Microsoft. Clicking on the image will download a larger JPEG image. We are sending JPEG images with a MIME type slash subtype of image slash JPEG. See it for yourself in this chapter's image, or here's my best attempt at describing it.

A smiling, plump man in blue t-shirt and black shorts stands next to a white server rack housing a single computer and CRT display. My how times have changed. Okay, let's get into the news. Programming advice for my younger self. Marcus Buffett finally thinks he's a decent programmer, so he rounded up a bunch of his learnings and wrote them down with the idea of

what would have gotten me to this point faster? Here's a sampler. One, if you or your team are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun. Two, assess the trade-offs you're making between quality and pace. Make sure it's appropriate for your context. Three, spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it. Four, if you can't easily explain why something is difficult, then it's incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing. Five, bad code gives you feedback. Perfect code doesn't.

Error on the side of writing bad code. Marcus unpacks each of these conclusions and provides more as well. Good reading, especially if you want to catch up quickly. DevRel's death as zero interest rate phenomenon. Swix asks and answers a question that's been bandied about lately. Is DevRel dead? His answer, no, but quote, I prefer to think of the DevRel excesses of 2020 through 2022 as a zero interest rate phenomenon, and that we are now seeing a relative right sizing of expectations, one that perhaps has a lot more room to go, end quote. He goes on to back this conclusion up with five bullet points and a list of dev tools that are succeeding with

no or minimal DevRel staff. In conclusion, DevRel is not dead, but Zerp DevRel is. Folks need to adjust accordingly. Stay tuned. We're having Swix on ChangeLogin, friends, to unpack the implications in great detail this coming Friday. The Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server. The linked repo is a multi-tenant ActivityPub server for ghost built with Fedify. This service makes it possible for independent websites to publish their content directly to the Fediverse, enabling networked publishing to the open social web. This repository is being actively developed and is currently in early alpha. Expect many breaking changes. It is not suitable for production use. End quote. Very cool for them to share their

progress. I still have no idea when or if ActivityPub will deliver on its potential, but the builders keep on building. This news came by way of Andy Piper on Mastodon. If you have news you want me to cover, hit me up. I'm Jared at changelog.social, Jared Santo on X, Jared Santo on LinkedIn, or Jared at changelog.com. It's now time for sponsored news. How Neo.tax accelerated their development lifecycle. Neon has been a game changer for the engineering team at Neo.tax, reducing their dev lifecycle from days to minutes thanks to branching. Here's what Miguel Hernandez, a backend tech lead for Neo.tax, has to say about it. Quote, Neon shortened the lifecycle for us between making a change in the product,

validating it, and generating the PDFs we expect. Before, it used to be terrible, resetting your database, running migrations, all of that. With Neon, we just create a database branch, link it with the ticket, and use that URL in local development. This has significantly streamlined our end-to-end testing process, end quote. Miguel also calls Neon's database branching the best quality of life improvement to my tech stack that I can think of in recent years, second to maybe only Copilot. Read the full case study and experiment with data branching for yourself by following the links in your chapter data and the newsletter.

Thank you again to Neon for sponsoring Changelog News. Pongo is like Mongo, but on Postgres. Quote, Pongo treats Postgres as a document database benefiting from JSONB support. Unlike This simple change brings significant advantages in terms of performance and storage efficiency. End quote. Essentially, Pongo takes the MongoDB API and translates it to native Postgres queries. This could serve as a nice temporary shim layer while transitioning a Mongo project over to Postgres one bit at a time. Not saying that you'd want to do that, but you might want to do that. Maybe. Wouldn't you?

Perhaps. Perchance. Probably. Yeah. You probably do. I'm funding Lady Bird because I can't fund Firefox. Jack Kelly, in light of last week's announcement of the Lady Bird browser initiative, quote, Chrome is eating the web.

I have wanted to help fund a serious alternative browser for quite some time, and while Firefox remains the largest potential alternative, Mozilla has never let me. Since I can't fund Firefox, I'm going to show there's money in user-funded web browsers by funding Lady Bird instead. You should too. End quote. If you're curious why Jack can't fund Firefox, today I learned they won't let you. Quote, despite desperately trying to find more revenue sources, Mozilla Corporation stubbornly refuses to just let users fund Firefox. Mozilla Foundation even has a specific donation form for Thunderbird, Mozilla's male client,

but not Firefox. I'm sure they could have found some way of making it work with their corporate structure, and it baffles me that they haven't. End quote. Adam and I discussed the Lady Bird news on last week's Friends, and we're hoping to get Andreas back on the show for an even deeper dive. That is the news for now, but I leave you with Hiram's Law. I hadn't heard of Hiram's Law until Chris Kreicho brought it up on our Semver discussion, but now I can't stop thinking about this law. Put succinctly, the observation is this. With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract, all observable behaviors of your system

will be depended on by somebody. While listening back to our recent combo with Daniel Stenberg, I couldn't help but conclude that if Hiram's Law holds, somebody is depending on each of Curl's 263 command line flags. Have a great week.

Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon. Now, I don't want to linger here too long, but bidets, totally worth it or not worth the effort? What's your view? Totally worth it. I mean, if you think about it, you know, the sales pitch for bidets is that everything else we clean with water. You wash your car with water. You take a shower with water.

You brush your teeth with water. But the only thing we do in some societies, because apparently a large portion of the world uses bidets as cultural things from a long with water. You brush your teeth with water. But the only thing we do in some societies, because apparently a large portion of the world uses bidets as cultural things from a long time ago. But this idea that you're going to wipe with this two-ply, some of y'all out here on that one ply getting your fingers dirty. You're going to wipe a few times and throw it all in the toilet and flush it. And then you know you ain't clean. You know what I mean? Like, you know, people will think back to their teenage years. Hopefully this is not the case

for you beyond your teenage years. You look in those underwear after you take them off, you're like, hey man, I haven't been, I haven't been wiping thoroughly. So that bidet,

that whole experience of using water to also wash down there changes like what it means to be clean.