The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Spicy designs, more open source opinions, privacy-focused services, the real cost of context switching & jqq (News)

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Anthony Hobday has 37 ways to spice up your designs, James Bennett has opinions on open source and PyPi security, Alicia Sykes compiled some awesome security/privacy options, ContextKeeper layouts out the real price of context switching, and Nick Nisi tells us all about jqq. Bam! Bam! Bam!

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, July 18th, 2022. You might be wondering why this super short episode of the Changelog is in your feed. It's our new experimental Monday news brief companion to the regular long form interview show you know and hopefully love. Early reviews are positive, like this one from Justin Dorfman, who writes, Whatever this is, I want more. Well, we are still figuring out exactly what this is, but here's some more for you. Eric Kennedy submitted a new post by Anthony Hobday called 37 Easy Ways to Spice Up Your UI Designs. Side note, you too can submit articles and projects to be featured on Changelog News.

Find the form at changelog.com slash submit. Now, Changelog Weekly subscribers clicked the dog do out of this link because who doesn't want to take their designs and spice them up a notch? Every now and then you want to knock it up a notch with a blast from your spice weasel. Bam! Oh yeah! Bam it again, Ozai! Knock it up another notch!

Anthony writes, quote, Ever been working on a design that feels too plain? Let's look at a few dozen simple ways to spice things up. Get ready to bookmark this page because you'll want to reference this list in the future. It's unbelievable how many incredible, pro-level designs feature solid foundations plus a few techniques listed below. End quote. Bookmark away for the next time you could use some spice. Just grab a little pinch like this. Yeah. Okay. And you just like that. James Bennett says, yes, I have opinions on your open source contributions.

This is a reaction blog to Armin Ronacher's post that we covered last week. Remember that one? Congratulations, we now have opinions on your open source contributions. Armin was not happy with how the Python package index declared his package quote unquote critical, soon requiring 2FA and who knows what else in the future. James disagrees with a lot of what Armin had to say, so he wrote it up. Side note, reaction blogs. Remember these? So cool. So fun. James had a lot to say on the matter, so I'll just include one snippet to whet your appetite.

Quote, if you believe nobody has the right to demand an open source maintainer do something or abide by some policy or restriction, then that ends the argument in more ways than people are appreciating. If you just want to say nobody can demand I do this, then okay, but you also can't demand PyPy, which is an open source project too, do any particular thing or abide by any particular policy you like, which more or less removes any grounds you might have had to criticize their account security approach. They don't owe you anything and don't have to do what you want them to do. The end. End quote. Follow the link in the show notes to read his full argument. There's a lot in there. Alicia Sykes compiled an excellent list of awesome privacy and security focused software and services. Excellent. The repo's intro paragraph says,

large data hungry corporations dominate the digital world, but with little or no respect for your privacy. Boy, that's the story of my life. No respect. Migrating to open source applications with a strong emphasis on security will help stop corporations, governments and hackers from logging, storing or selling your personal data. End quote. In this list, you'll find everything from essentials like password managers and private browsers to home automation and voice assistants to encrypted cloud storage and file drop utilities. Good stuff. We all know what it's like to get ripped out of our flow state,

but what's the real cost of interruption and context switching? According to a new post on the Context Keeper blog, it takes at least 10 to 15 minutes to get back into the zone after an interruption. And it can take more than that if the task is particularly complex and or you're low on mental energy. If you are interested in improving how you spend mental energy throughout the day, the author suggests David Rock's book, Your Brain at Work. He also lays out some handy techniques to rebuild context after task switching so you can get back to moving fast and taking names. Prepare shift for light speed. No, no, no, light speed is too slow. Light speed too slow?

Yes, we're going to have to go right to ludicrous speed. You may have heard of and used JQ, but have you heard of JQQ? I hadn't until Nick Nisi told me about it during our Today I Learn segment on JS Party. Have you ever heard of another tool called JQ? JQ for searching in JSON. Yeah. Yes. It's like a query language, so it kind of ties into what you were talking about a little bit. Yeah. But it It's like a query language. So it kind of ties into what you were talking about a little bit, but it's for Jason files. And so you can type the syntax and search through a Jason file and get out like a specific piece of that. You could modify the Jason file in different ways. But when

I use that, I constantly have to have the reference open to, to figure out what I'm actually doing. There's also like a online tools that let you like paste some Jason in one side and then write a query and it'll show you the results on the other side, kind of like a tool that you'd use for like doing regular expressions. And that's really cool. But like kind of marrying the two of those together is a tool that I just found the other day called JQQ. And it is a visual wrapper around JQ that kind of does the FZF type thing, where as you're writing out your query, it's live showing you like a preview in like virtual text of exactly what would get returned by what you're, you're querying as you

go. So you can kind of use that as a nice tool to build out your JQ syntax or your JQ query and in real time, get that feedback. That sounds super useful because I've never found JQ syntax to be good for me. How do I say it? I didn't want to say it. Easy. Well, just for me, it's not like blaming anybody. It just doesn't make sense in my head. No. I'll just cap my JSON and pipe it in the grep and find what I'm looking for or something. Or open it up in Sublime Text, which handles JSON files quite easily, and do Command F inside of there.

Because every time I have to use JQ, I have to feel like I'm learning the query language for the first time because I use it infrequently. I think if I use it daily, it would be less so. So it sounds like this is really great for discovering how that query language works more in a tactile way. Absolutely. That's what's new for now. We'll be back in your podcast feed on Friday. I don't want to overly hype Friday's episode,

but let me say this. If you watched We Crashed on Apple TV+, you know, the fictionalization of the rise and fall of WeWork with Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, if you watch that, we have a special treat for you. If you didn't watch it, you'll still enjoy the episode

or maybe binge watch it before Friday. Your call, totally your call. Either way, we'll talk to you then. Game on!