The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Why GitHub actually won (News)

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Scott Chacon writes up his insider take on GitHub's success, Sentry wants other companies to take the Open Source Pledge, Benj Edwards used AI to reproduce his late father's handwriting, Dave Kiss explains the current hype that PHP is getting & Taylor Otwell raises $57 million series A from Accel.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, September 16th, 2024. A dear friend of mine fell prey to a post-acquisition layoff alongside about 30% of the company and he's looking for work. He's a super solid network engineer who taught me a bunch with decades of experience. I'll take any leads you might have. Please hit me up. Okay, let's get into this week's news. Why GitHub actually won. Scott Chacon writes up his insider's take on why GitHub became the de facto code collaboration site. Here's the quick version.

Quote, I can boil it down to exactly two reasons that happen to resonate with each other at the perfect frequency. One, GitHub started at the right time. Two, GitHub had good taste. All four GitHub co-founders had flops both before and after GitHub. Chris and PJ couldn't quite make fam spam work before GitHub. Tom and I couldn't quite make Chatterbug explode after GitHub. I think both of these ventures had good taste and great product, but it wasn't the right place or time or market or whatever for them to become GitHub level.

End quote. One of the problems with success is that so much of it relies on timing, which is one of the big things we cannot control. What we can control, however, is what we decide to build. Here's Scott again. We cared about the developer experience and had the creativity to throw away assumptions about what it was supposed to be and build how we wanted to work. Everyone else tried to build what they thought they could sell to advertisers or CTOs.

End quote. This DevEx-focused strategy is commonplace today, but it was avant-garde back in 2008. Definitely read Scott's entire post for the full history lesson on what developer tooling looked like back when GitHub entered the scene. The open source pledge. Chad Whitaker and our longtime sponsors slash friends at Sentry have been leading the way on corporate open source support for a while. Now they've created a pledge for other orgs to join them in putting their money where their source is. Quote, whether you're a CEO, CFO, CTO, or just a dev, your company surely depends on open source software. It's time to pay

the maintainers. Our companies feast at the open source table year after year. Through the open source pledge, we pay the maintainers of the software that we consume. This prevents the maintainer burnout that flares up in high profile security incidents such as XZ, Log4J, and Heartbleed. End quote. Send this link to decision makers in your org and join the growing list of member companies who have taken the open source pledge. My dead father is writing me notes again. File this one under AI. Things are getting weird. Benj Edwards used an image synthesis model to reproduce his late father's handwriting. He fed it a bunch of journals his dad left behind, and now part of him will live on in a dynamic way that was impossible a decade ago.

I have a feeling this is just the beginning of a trend that will end with people recreating their dead loved ones almost entirely. Benj's thoughts after accomplishing this goal, quote, The results astounded me and raised deep questions about ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the personal meaning behind handwriting itself. It's now time for Sponsored News. WarpStream lets you bring your own cloud. WarpStream's BYOC deployment model for Kafka-compatible data streaming gives you the best of both worlds between self-hosted and cloud. This model also

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and get started for free. Once again, that's warpstream.com slash BYOC. Look out, kids. PHP is the new JavaScript. Dave Kiss explains the current hype and traction that PHP is getting mostly on X and a few YouTube channels. Quote, there's been a palpable shift in the air. You can sense it. People seem excited about PHP. What happened? Well, Laravel happened and has been happening. End quote. He goes on to build a trivial Laravel app,

with help from the Cursor AI code generator, of course, and sums up the experience as thus. Am I a convert? A newly minted PHP web artisan? You bet your bottom dollar I am. Depending on how critical you are of my AI coding approach, you might argue that I've still literally never touched a Laravel application. But I'll tell you what, Laravel makes PHP fun again. I'm here for it. Maybe you should

be too. Laravel raises a $57 million Series A. Speaking of PHP, Taylor Otwell and the Laravel team have decided to take a big step with their wildly successful web framework. Fortune.com published an exclusive on the raise, as well as some background on Taylor's history, Laravel's history, and what it all means. Quote, Otwell is originally from Arkansas and early in his career worked at a trucking company as a programmer where he was first exposed to open source. He still lives in Arkansas, and rather than a rip roaring growth story, Otwell started Laravel as a personal

project more than a decade ago as he sought to build something he wanted. End quote. Taylor didn't just build something he wanted, he built something that has brought success to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of developers all around the world. Here's hoping he can navigate venture-funded open source as well as he's done so far. That is the news for now, but give the companion ChangeLog newsletter a quick scan for even more stories worth your attention, such as Lucas DaCosta, ongoing open source as a VC-backed company, a customizable select element for the web is in the works, and RedMonk's latest programming language rankings. Sign up if you haven't yet at changelog.com slash news.

We have some great episodes coming up this week. On Wednesday, Jimmy Miller tells us about the best, worst codebase. And on Friday, Gerhard Lazu is back for Kaizen 16. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work. And I'll talk to you again real soon.