The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Quantum computing gets a reality check (News)

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Ship It is back! IEEE Spectrum writes about quantum computing's reality check, Maxim Dounin announces freenginx, Nadia Asparouhova goes deep on AI & the "effective accelerationism" movement, Angie Byron helps first time open source contributors avoid common pitfalls & Miroslav Nikolov writes up his advice for high-risk refactoring.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News. For the week of Monday, February 19th, 2024, our much-anticipated Ship It reboot has launched its first episode, and early reviews are positive, to say the least. Very good start on Ship It 2.0, posted Lars. Thomas writes, Justin and Autumn are a fantastic pair. And Conrad says, quite cool first episode and happy to see Ship It continue.

Three, two, one. Give it a listen for yourself at shipit.show. Okay, let's get into the news. In a piece titled, Quantum Computing's Hard Cold Reality Check, IEEE Spectrum lays out the bear case for near-term quantum computing applications, some of which has been hype-driven. Surprised? Quote, some of the more ambitious timelines proposed by quantum computing companies have suggested these machines could be impacting

real-world problems in just a handful of years, but there's growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology. End quote. While being overall pessimistic, the article also quotes folks who are more optimistic about it. I guess we can add quantum computing to the list alongside cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, generative AI, and more,

of computing endeavors with smart people on either side debating their validity, timeliness, and long-term effects on the human race. Me? I'm not holding my breath. Or my cubits. On a post to the NGINX mailing list, Maxime Downen announced a fork of the massively popular web server that lives at freeenginex.org. Maxime is one of the earliest and still most active NGINX contributors who worked for F5 after they acquired NGINX Inc. in 2019. There's a lot of history here, which Ars Technica covers quite well, link in the newsletter. Here's what Maxime says about the fork. Quote, Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects.

In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy NGINX uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developer's position. As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in NGINX development as run by F5. Instead, I'm starting an alternative project which is going to be run by developers and not corporate entities. End quote. The free in Free NGINX for Maxime isn't free as in Libre. Neither is it free as in beer, it is free as in free from arbitrary corporate actions. Nadia, previously Ekbal, now Asparahova, goes deep on AI and the effective accelerationism movement, which is abbreviated E slash ACC and pronounced EAC, which I learned

from Nadia's piece, which also says, quote, artificial intelligence is a rare domain where technologists themselves are being proactively cautious about their own power before any demonstrable harm has been done. The moral panic now comes from within a stark deviation from how technological revolutions historically influenced society, end quote. I've been reading Nadia's writing for a long time, and I find it to be deep, easily consumed, and thought-provoking, regardless of her subject. Here's another quote, which will hopefully intrigue you enough to read it for yourself. It was the tech backlash of the 2010s that tore a hole through tech's image as it previously saw itself. A burgeoning industry composed of startups and their financiers, whose members would grind away writing code on their MacBooks and attending Y Combinator's demo days, whose hardest decision every year was whether to go to Burning Man.

Though a founder's life was filled with highs and lows, the cycle of tech seemed stable and predictable. Most importantly, tech was beloved by the outside world, who gleefully consume stories of young founders and their mythical overnight successes. What went wrong? It's now time for Sponsored News. Is your code getting dragged down by joins and long query times? The problem might be your database. Try simplifying the complex with graphs. A graph database lets you model data the way it looks in the real world instead of forcing it into rows and columns. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections

like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and Gen AI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it's easy to integrate into your tech stack. People are solving some of the world's biggest problems with graphs. Now it's your turn. Visit neo4j.com slash developer to get started. That's N-E-O, the number four, j.com slash developer. One more time, Neo4j dot com slash developer. Angie Byron, a longtime member of the Drupal community and a lovely person who we've had the pleasure of knowing a little bit around here, writes up some advice on how to get started in open source. This is a great primer for

anybody on the subject matter. Here's her high-level bullet points you can click through for the details. Link in the newsletter. One, start with your interests. Two, find a welcoming project. Three, community before code. And four, start with the docs. On that last point, Angie says this, which is so true, somebody should put it on a billboard or a t-shirt or something. Quote, you might not know it yet, but as a newcomer to an open source project, you have this amazing superpower. You are oftentimes the only one in that whole project capable of reading the documentation through new eyes. Because I can guarantee the people who wrote that documentation are not new.

Miroslav Nikolov knows the cost of a refactoring gone wrong, so he took some time to lay out the risks and how you can effectively address them and give some solid advice on whether or not you should refactor. Here's four pieces of advice with caveats. One, refactor if things are getting too complicated, but stop if you can't prove it works. Two, accompany new features with refactoring for areas you foresee to be subject to a change, but copy-pasting is okay until patterns arise. Three, be proactive in finding new ways to ensure refactoring predictability, but be conservative about the assumption QA will find all the bugs.

Four, move business logic out of busy components but be brave enough to keep the legacy code intact if the only argument is this code looks wrong. That is the news for now. Have a great week. Tell your friends about ChangeLog News if you dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.