The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Self-hosting in 2023, no more Alpine Linux, type constraints in 65 lines of SQL, Initial V, Minimal Gallery, the legacy of Visual Basic, tracking fake GitHub stars & Mastodon's 10M (News)

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Michal Warda on self-hosting in 2023, Martin Heinz will never use Alpine Linux again, Oliver Rice at Supabase creates type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL, Aaron Patterson converted a BMW shifter into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim, Piet Terheyden has been curating beautiful & functional websites daily since 2013, Ryan Lucas put together a history of Visual Basic, turns out it's easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars & Mastodon hit 10 million accounts.

What up nerds? Hi-de-lee-ho, neighborinos! I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, March 20th, 2023. Let's do it. Let's start today with a lightning round. Why not, right? That's what the crowd wants! The topic, awesome things you should know about that have absolutely nothing to do with AI.

Michal Warda wrote about self-hosting in 2023, and he published said writing on his website that's hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4B at his house. The Pi server, according to Michal, is still doing great in terms of speed, costing close to nothing, and having endless possibilities of extending for free. Martin Hines says he will never use Alpine Linux in his containers again. His reason for this is the many minor differences between Musel, which Alpine uses, and glibc, used by other Linux distros, such as Ubuntu. Martin's conclusion, quote,

By using Alpine Linux, you get free chaos engineering for your cluster. Ouch. Oliver Rice at Supabase details how you can create type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL. With a little effort, Oliver says, a user-defined type can feel indistinguishable from a built-in.

To illustrate this, he walks you through creating a SemVer data type to represent semantic versioning values. If that data type could also force developers to use SemVer consistently, that'd be something. That concludes our lightning wrap. You know what? I'm digging this. Let's just make this entire episode one big GPT-free lightning round. But right now they gotta do what's right for them. Cause it's their time. Their time. Up there. Down here it's our time. It's our time down here. Aaron Tenderlove Patterson took a BMW shifter and converted it into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim. There's an image in your chapter data and Aaron says a promo video is coming soon.

For now, you can think of it as a very over-engineered Vim clutch. Piet Terheden has been curating beautiful and functional websites daily since 2013. That's a long time. Check the site out at minimal.gallery if you're in need of some inspiration, or subscribe to the weekly newsletter to keep up with the latest in minimal design. Retools' Ryan Lucas put together a gorgeous and comprehensive treatment of the history and legacy of Visual Basic. The lead, how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment,

its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. This is a must-see, if not a must-read. Turns out it's easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars, and the fine folks at Dagster share two approaches to detecting them. This might help explain the somewhat extreme lengths I've had to go to recently to keep spammers and malware authors out of changelog nightly. Changelog nightly, by the way, is our automated nightly email that unearths the top new and top-starred projects on GitHub before they blow up.

But lately, it's been unearthing these fakesters. Mastodon hit 10 million accounts yesterday after gaining 151,000-plus in the last week alone. Why the sudden growth in accounts? Medium? Tech crunch? A bug? There are many theories in the announcement week alone. Why the sudden growth in accounts? Medium? Tech crunch? A bug? There are many theories in the announcement post replies. Whew, that's the news for now. Lightning round style. Which do you prefer?

Having more but shorter stories and links like this? Or having less stories with more time spent on each one? Let me know in the comments. Oh, and if you were disappointed by the utter lack of AI content in today's episode, don't worry. We are talking Whisper.cpp and Llama.cpp with Georgi Gerganov. Yes, I've been saying it wrong the whole time. On Wednesday's interview show. Have a great week.

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