The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Was Jamstack a zero interest rate phenomenon? (News)

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, November 27th, 2023. Our sixth annual State of the Log episode is right around the corner, and we need your help to make it extra special. Leave us a voice message with your favorite moments, your favorite guests, topics, or episodes from the past year. If your audio is used on the show, we'll hook you up with a free Changelog t-shirt. Brilliant!

Submit yours at changelog.fm slash s-o-t-l. Once again, that's changelog.fm slash s-o-t-l. That's short for State of the log. Okay, let's get into the news. Eleventy creator and former Netlify employee Zach Leatherman writes about the tension and future of Jamstack. Quote, some stakeholders and detractors have declared the Jamstack dead, in part evidenced by the recent shuttering of the JAMstack Discord, the discontinuation of JAMstack Conf, as Netlify pivots toward the marketing term Composable and a new conference under that name, and the end of the JAMstack community survey.

Netlify coined the term, but it seems pretty clear that they are done with it. Where does that leave everyone else who is keen on building websites stacked with jam? Zach thinks a post-Netlify jam stack opens up opportunities to refocus the definition and strengthen the community with a broader group of leaders and stakeholders. I agree that a refocus is necessary. The term had been loosened to the point of meaning, I don't know what. What the French call a certain, I don't know what. If you agree with Zach and want to partake in the future of this once thriving, but perhaps propped up by Zerp-enabled marketing dollars community, join them by filling out the survey on thefutureofjamstack.org.

Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs is the name of an opinionated essay by Chen Chen Li laying out 13 bad practices in data visualization and how good friends help their friends avoid these easy-to-make graphing foibles. If you ever made a pie chart or used a bar plot for mean separation, violin plots for small sample sizes, bidirectional color scales for unidirectional data, or have no idea what it is that I'm talking about. You'll definitely want to skim through Lee's examples and explanations. Laravel creator Taylor Otwell recently teased a new admin tool that is coming soon to GitHub, saying, quote, Laravel Pulse delivers at-a-glance insights into your production application's performance and usage. Track down slow jobs and endpoints, find your most active users, and more, end quote.

This very much reminds me of Phoenix Live Dashboard, but extra spit-polished and perhaps more useful out of the box. The idea was born when Otwell and co. were frustrated that they couldn't quickly identify individual users that were overloading their queues on Forge. Then they riffed on the idea from there. Pulse will be open source, of course, and officially the Laravel team's 25th first party package. It's now time for Sponsored New... Wait a second. There's no sponsor this week? That's weird. Podcast and newsletter sponsorships are an excellent way to bring awareness to your company and the awesome work that you're doing.

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Once again, that's changelog.com slash sponsor. We again, that's changelog.com slash sponsor. We would love to work with you in 2024. Max Cherniak has a theory that long refactors get a bad rap because most of them take far longer than we expect. The length leads to stress, an awkward code base, a confused team, and often no end in sight. A few years ago, he began trying a method where he would prepare an intentionally long-term refactor instead. The results were surprisingly positive. Max says, quote, long-term refactors involve the whole team from the

beginning, which is one of their most powerful aspects. So far, I've participated in about 10 big refactors using this method across two companies with at least three different teams, and I've yet to see it go wrong. End quote. He details the approach and its drawbacks so you can try it for yourself with eyes wide open. But before you even start, Max says you will need the following. One, an experienced software engineer with a vision for the refactor. Two, a team of software engineers at various levels of expertise. Three, an internal knowledge base.

And four, less than five to ten long-term refactors already in progress. Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks. Quote, a service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A library instead moves these costs to the user of the library. For any developer with limited resources, this means a library, where viable, can provide the same functionality to the user at a lower cost to the developer than a service. End quote. By library, he means any software that can be run by the user, like shared objects, modules, servers, command line utilities, stuff like that.

By service, he means any software which the user cannot run on their own. Spencer's stance harmonizes with what Justin Searles and I discussed on our recent It Dependencies episode of Change Talking to Friends. There's a theme here that I think, you know, something about dependency shopping that we haven't really dug into that I have identified as being a big motivator for me personally, in terms of like, what is the principle that's driving my decision-making process around dependencies and what I use and whether built versus buy. And I think it's self-reliance. If you go to like the self-hosted subreddit, you know, it's kind of like the digital equivalent of

prepper culture of like, you know, people trying to cordon themselves off from the rest of the world. And I don't typically identify with that group or that instinct when people talk about you know privacy rights extremists or or people who say you know like i want to own my data yeah i think that is a these are sufficiently confusing flags to plant in the ground and just how kind of you know online everything is these days but when i think of it through the frame of self-reliance, like at the end of the day, how many other people could knock over my sandcastle? And I want to keep that number as low as possible. And I want to keep the gross

likelihood that my sandcastle gets knocked over to be as small as possible. Self-reliance is a virtue. Libraries afford it. Services don't. That's the news for now. But do scan the companion newsletter for more stories, such as finding a job as a software engineer in 2023, the best cities for techies in 2024, and the case for putting all of your dependencies, like all of your dependencies, in version control.

If you aren't yet receiving our companion newsletter, fix that bug by popping your email address in at changelog.com slash news. We have some great pods coming up this week. Our anthology episode from KubeCon featuring Dagger, Talos OS, and Super Orbital. Daniel and Chris summarize and sound off on last week's OpenAI fiasco on Practical AI. And Gerge Arose is back for his annual check-in on the state of the tech industry.

Have a great week. Share ChangeLog news with your friends who might dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.