The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The new $30,000 side hustle (News)

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift's original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard's duopoly.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 13th, 2025. One way folks pinch pennies these days is by downgrading their streaming subscriptions to the ad-supported plan. But just how many ads might you have to endure from any given streamer? According to some Sherwood News research, Disney Plus will likely subject you to more ads than anyone else, eating up about 13 to 16 percent of your watch time. Netflix, on the other hand, shows you ads about 3-4% of the time. These numbers

are different depending on what you're watching, and they may change at any moment, but I found them interesting nonetheless. Okay, let's get into this week's news. The new $30,000 side hustle. Bloomberg reports, but I linked to Megan McDonough's commentary on LinkedIn because paywall, that employee referrals have become a lucrative side hustle for tech workers. Quote, platforms like Blind and Refer Market are connecting job seekers with company insiders willing to offer referrals for a fee. End quote. I'm not surprised that this is a thing, but I'm certainly disappointed. How can you feel good about making money by referring a complete stranger for a position?

I guess you get over it because it's an easy 30K. Crazy times. While this phenomenon is likely rare, it is indicative of a job market that is way out of whack. The 30K income referenced in the headline is one individual who produced more than a half a dozen successful hires for the company after referring more than 1,000 job candidates to his employer. Mistakes engineers make in large codebases. Sean Godecki has spent a decade

working on large established codebases, which he defines as having single-digit million lines of code, like 5 million, somewhere between 100 and 1,000 engineers working on the same codebase, and the first working version of the codebase is at least 10 years old. I can't say I've ever worked on a codebase in this category, so I'll have to take Sean's word for it. And that word is, quote, there's one mistake I see more often than anything else,

and it's absolutely deadly. Ignoring the rest of the code base and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing code base in order to keep your nice, clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it.

In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible in order to maintain consistency. Apple is killing Swift. Jacob Bartlett tells the brief history of Swift and why he believes, and its creator, Chris Lattner, seems to agree, that it has fallen from its original great vision. Quote, today we're going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. I'll explain how Swift's dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible and demonstrate to you how bad the Jacob describes Python's BDFL roots, Rust's community-driven roots, and Kotlin's corporate-backed roots. Then he compares these to Swift, which he calls corporate dictator for life.

Quote, Modern Swift is a slave to the top-down whims of the Apple MBA cabal, who prize secrecy and sneer at community input. Unshackled from Lattner's influence, or even the relentless drive to craftsmanship imposed from jobs, it's all about shipping the latest proprietary profit driver. It's now time for Sponsored News.

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outreach, and our data warehouse connected to Retool. End quote. Learn more and start for free or get a demo at retool.com slash AI. And thank you to Retool for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Turn any GitHub repo into an interactive diagram. Git diagram is an awesome site by Ahmed Khalil that uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet to take the contents of any GitHub repo you pass it and turn it into an interactive

mermaid diagram. Here's the diagram it created when I passed it changelog.com source code. Check the chapter image if you're listening audio only, or look at your screen if you're watching the video. You can click on each component to go straight to the code it represents, and you can export the mermaid code for use elsewhere. Exploring a stablecoin bank. Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and MasterCard's duopoly. Quote, Right now, Visa and MasterCard charge merchants an egregious 2-3% swipe fees,

which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe fees. This is partly why Visa and MasterCard's profit margins are each higher than 50%. Small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and MasterCard since they control 80% of the credit card market. A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees, rightfully so, and if they could opt for a lower fee network that wouldn't limit their TAM, total addressable market, they'd switch in a heartbeat.

End quote. I've long asked cryptocurrency bulls to point me to the killer apps. First, it was ICOs, which didn't really pan out. Too many scammy founders. Then it was NFTs, which were a lot like the pogs of my youth. Fun for a day or two. More recently, it's been prediction markets, I'm sorry, gambling, which I admit is a legit app, just not one that I'm interested in. But knocking 3% off every transaction in the world, that dog could hunt. Unfortunately, it's also going to require government intervention, of which I'm a perma-bear. That is the news for now, but also scan this week's companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, such as

Introducing Work, a simplistic build system like Make and Command Runner like Just. Awareness Syndrome, which is kind of like Imposter Syndrome, but not. And of course, our award-worthy, unordered list of awesome links. Get in on the action at changelog.com slash news. In case you missed it, we had Rachel Blotnick talking buttons and Matt Reier singing songs on the show last week, both of which are available in full video on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash changelog. And coming up this week, we are joined by Embedded FM's Alicia White to talk all about programming things that are not computers. Have a great week, leave us a five-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you

again real soon.