The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Qalculate is awesome, Restic adds compression, CS teachers coping with Copilot & Heroku's next non-free chapter (News)

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Qalculate has a command-line interface, Michael Eischer adds compression to Restic, Emery Berger warns his fellow CS professors about Copilot, and Heroku GM Bob Wise details Heroku's next chapter (which excludes free accounts).

Hey, hey, guess who's back? Guess who's back? Adam did a mighty fine job while I was out. In fact, listener Lars Ellingson in our Slack channel even reveled in the fact that he was finally able to understand 100% of the references on Changelog News. You reckless child! Apologies

in advance to Lars and other fans of HBO's Silicon Valley. Reaching 100% references acknowledged on this episode might be painful. Do you find me sadistic? No, kiddo.

I'd like to believe you're aware enough, even now, to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions. This moment, this is me and my most masochistic. Did you catch that one? It's from one of my favorite Quentin Tarantino films, Kill Bill.

Not his best film, that's Pulp Fiction, but if I could watch just one Tarantino flick for the rest of my days, I'm pretty sure I'd pick Kill Bill. But that's pulp fiction but if i could watch just one tarantino flick for the rest of my days i'm pretty sure i'd pick kill bill but that's neither here nor there let's get into the news first up it's a calculator yeah a calculator 82 82 82. 82 what a lot more than two toothpicks. 246 total. Change. How many toothpicks do you need? 250.

Pretty close. Come on, let's go, Ray. 246. There's four left in the box. It's called Calculate with a Q. This ain't your grandma's calculator. It's an open-source, multi-purpose, cross-platform desktop calculator that provides power and versatility normally reserved for complicated math packages.

It also has useful tools for everyday needs such as currency conversion and percent calculations. Here's something cool about Calculate that I learned on the Command Line subreddit. It has a companion CLI, Calc, Q-A-L-C. It can handle stuff like $1,500 per week to BTC per year, or 5 apples plus 3 oranges minus 1 apples. The coolest part is it doesn't merely give you the answer, it shows the broken down steps along the way. For instance, if you give it 100 over 1,000,

it will give you back 100 over 1,000 equals 1 over 10, which equals 0.1. I love that. A link to the Reddit thread, which has more examples, is in the show notes. Restick 0.14 has been released with a much-anticipated feature, compression. Don't you dare insert a Pied Piper joke, Jared.

Don't do it. Error. E. Too many Silicon Valley references. What's RESTIC? It's a backup program that can backup your files from Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows to nearly anywhere you'd want. We've had RESTIC's creator, Alex Neumann, on both the changelog and GoTime.

It's some seriously impressive software, and Alex is a thoughtful dev and a kind open source maintainer. Here's a moment from my conversation with him on the changelog. This was one of the very interesting discoveries when I discussed it initially with my friends and my co workers that the most important thing about the RESTIC project is not the implementation itself, but it is the repository format. Because users expect that they can restore their backups even like 10 years or 20 years from now.

So the most important thing is not what features does the backup program have, but how good is the specification of the storage format. And there are toy implementations that re-implement all the things needed to access data in a RESTic repository from scratch just by using the design document. And this is somehow like the, I think there is a FreeBSD manual, which explains the design of the operating system FreeBSD

from the ground up, which is, I haven't read it, but it's on my bucket list to do that. And this is something like that for the repository format. Well said. You obviously saw where I was driving to when I said you need RESTIC to restore RESTIC. Because if restore is the feature and it's not stored as like an operating system level primitive, although it is at the end of the day, but it has its own format, then you obviously need, you know, you want RESTIC to be around. But it sounds like you guys have well prepared for a backwards compatibility and even this specification where, you know, you want RESTIC to be around, but it sounds like you guys have well prepared for backwards compatibility and even this specification where, you know, you could disappear, RESTIC could disappear, it could be completely changed or something, but somebody could go out and

re-implement the restore because it's been documented so well. Hearing how careful Alex is with the repository format leads me to believe that adding compression was no small task for the team. We'll link to both the announcement blog post, which will give you details of the new feature, as well as that episode of the changelog if you want to hear more on the topic. Emery Berger, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes a warning to their fellow computer science educators. AI-based dev tools are gunning for your assignments. Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us.

Emery says, quote, Using Copilot, students can instantly generate code solutions as autocompletions, given just the problem statement or even just the function name or even by concentrating really hard and staring at the screen. Okay, not actually that last one, but I expect that feature any day now. End quote. This is an interesting phenomenon and something to think about. AI-based tools will continue to proliferate and disrupt most areas of our work-slash-life.

But I'm not too worried about it. Resistance is futile, but adaptation is not. So, CS teachers can adapt. You know, like math teachers did, when students started showing up to class with calculators in their pockets. I'm the operator with my pocket calculator. I'm the operator with my pocket calculator. Heroku's next chapter does not include free plans. You're enjoying your day, everything's going your way, when alone comes Debbie Downer. Always there to tell you about a new disease,

a car accident or killer bees. You beg her to spare you, Debbie, please, but you can't stop Debbie Downer. Salesforce EVP and Heroku's general manager, Bob Weiss, writes, quote, End quote. November 28th, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services, end quote. One of our listeners, Joe Rick, commented on the story on changelog.com asking, quote, has the hacker culture left Heroku? In the blog post, I see a lot of language focused on small slash medium-sized businesses, but not about celebrating the creativity

of individuals and tiny teams. This is confusing to me, because I always felt that Heroku's key strength was that as a single developer, you could focus entirely on your product and outsource all the ops to the service. And it's fantastic for that. So then the question is, if not the hackers, where are Heroku going to get new customers from? Because cloud ops is a hella crowded market, end quote. I agree, Joe. And as one of those solo developers, this change in direction makes me sad. But all is not lost. The good news is other players will step in to fill this gap that Heroku's leaving in the market.

That is the news for now. So how many of the seven pop culture references did you catch? Let us know in the market. That is the news for now. So, how many of the seven pop culture references did you catch? Let us know in the comments. There's a link to the thread at the top of your show notes. Oh, and while you're there, suggest an awesome soundbite we should use in future episodes. If your suggestion makes the show, I'll send you some pre-changelog stickers. How about that? Hope you have a great week.

Talk to you again soon.