Changelog

Go Time 169: Go at Clever

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 16:30:00 GMT

In this episode we explore how Clever started using Go. What technologies did Clever start with, how did they transition to Go, and what were the motivations behind those changes? We then explore some of the OS tech written by the team at Clever.

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Featuring

Rafael Garcia – Twitter, GitHub
Nathan Leiby – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
Jon Calhoun – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

wag - a tool for generating Go web APIs using a subset of Swagger v2.
sphinx - http rate limiting tool.
leakybucket - leaky bucket implemented in Go.
microplane - CLI used to make git changes across multiple repos.
optimus - a library used to concurrently manipulate collections of data.
reposync
gitbot
Mo Repos, Mo Problems? How We Make Changes Across Many Git Repositories - a writeup by Nathan about how Clever uses the microplane CLI.

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 19:07:00 GMT

Smart move by Brendan Eich and the Brave team:

Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people’s privacy by not tracking or profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles.

The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option – for those who want to pay for search results without ads – though its more common incarnation is likely to be ad-supported, in conjunction with Brave Ads.

Privacy as a first-class feature continues to trend up! ????

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A semantic diffing tool for tree-like structures (JSON, XML, HTML, etc)

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 16:27:00 GMT

Graphtage is a commandline utility and underlying library for semantically comparing and merging tree-like structures, such as JSON, XML, HTML, YAML, plist, and CSS files. Its name is a portmanteau of “graph” and “graftage”—the latter being the horticultural practice of joining two trees together such that they grow as one.

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A gradient generator tool with CSS/SVG exports

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 15:36:00 GMT

Erik Kennedy’s Gradient Generator is full-featured and (of course) he teaches you how to design “beautiful, butter-smooth” gradients on the same page.

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Speed is the killer feature

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 22:14:00 GMT

Brad Dickason:

… teams consistently overlook speed. Instead, they add more features (which ironically make things slower). Products bloat over time and performance goes downhill.

New features might help your users accomplish something extra in your product. Latency stops your users from doing the job they already hire your product for.

Slow ui acts like tiny papercuts. Every time we have to wait, we get impatient, frustrated, and lose our flow.

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Practical AI 124: Green AI ????

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 15:40:00 GMT

Empirical analysis from Roy Schwartz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Jesse Dodge (AI2) suggests the AI research community has paid relatively little attention to computational efficiency. A focus on accuracy rather than efficiency increases the carbon footprint of AI research and increases research inequality. In this episode, Jesse and Roy advocate for increased research activity in Green AI (AI research that is more environmentally friendly and inclusive). They highlight success stories and help us understand the practicalities of making our workflows more efficient.

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Featuring

Roy Schwartz – Twitter, Website
Jesse Dodge – Twitter
Chris Benson – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Daniel Whitenack – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

An opinionated list of resources for CTOs

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 15:21:00 GMT

Hiring, management, handbooks, technologies, and a whole lot more. I like this particular list because of the opinionated bit. In other words, it’s not overly stuffed with resources.

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Communicate important updates to your team via git commit messages

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 14:33:00 GMT

Sometimes you need to communicate changes to other developers on your project. In a small team, a Slack message works okay, but in larger teams and distributed organizations (such as open source projects), reaching everyone can be a pain.

Logging this because it’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Is this a good idea?

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In Go-land you pay even for what you don't use

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:49:00 GMT

While I was trying to identify why my-Go-based project took more than three times to execute than a similar Bash script (for a code-path that amounted to just a few stderr writes), I found that many of the Go packages (including some in the built-in library) have quite “heavy” static initializers, which due to how Go initialization works are always executed regardless if I use them for a particular code-path or not.

Also, with the newly introduced GODEBUG=inittrace=1 in Go 1.16 developers can now investigate the cost of static initializers of their dependencies, thus I wanted to raise the awareness of this issue.

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WordPress is still pretty darn great

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:01:00 GMT

Austin Gil:

For building applications, I like to use a “modern” tech stack (Vue.js, Express.js, Node, PostgreSQL). Sexy, new technology is fun to work with and makes me feel smart. However, I see a lot of folks in the dev community speak poorly about WordPress, and I just don’t get it.

He goes on to explain why he continues to use WordPress, things he doesn’t love about it, and provides a few tips for using WordPress effectively.

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"Open source software can potentially increase EU’s GDP by over $100 billion"

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:15:00 GMT

The the OpenForum Europe think tank conducted a study to highlight the potential benefit of embracing open source:

To analyze the impact of open source software in terms of economics, OFE engaged economists who had prior experience illustrating the effect of technology in tangible terms.

Here’s how they calculated said benefit:

the economists estimated that in 2018 there were at least 260,000 open source contributors in the EU. Together they produced a volume of code equivalent to the full-time work of 16,000 developers. In terms of economics, these contributions stood between €65 billion ($77.8 billion) and €95 billion ($113.7 billion).

Based on this, the OFE report concluded that even an increase of 10% could potentially increase the EU’s GDP by almost €100 billion ($120 billion) per year.

Are these numbers 100% accurate? No. Are they provocative when considering open source impact? I think so.

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Flameshot – powerful (yet simple) screenshot software

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 15:23:00 GMT

Holy moly this thing looks useful. It’s cross-platform with the following disclaimer:

Flameshot can be installed on Linux and Microsoft Windows currently.

There is no macOS port of Flameshot currently that can be easily installed. But you can build Flameshot yourself and use it. Please participate in the development of Flameshot and help us make a macOS version.

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The Changelog 430: Darklang Diaries

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 20:00:00 GMT

This week on The Changelog, Jerod is joined by Paul Biggar the creator of Dark, a new way to build serverless backends. Paul shares all the details about this all-in-one language, editor, and infrastructure, why he decided to make Dark in the first place, his view on programming language design, the advantages Dark has as an integrated solution, and also why it’s source available, but NOT open source.

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Featuring

Paul Biggar – Twitter, GitHub
Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

Special thanks to Jon Stodle for requesting this episode.

JS Party 164: We really needed new jingles

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:00:00 GMT

Go Time’s Mat Ryer joins Jerod, KBall, and Nick to play Story of the Week, Today I Learned, Unpopular Opinions, and Shout Outs!

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Featuring

Mat Ryer – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub
Kevin Ball – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Nick Nisi – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

Story of the Week

TIL

Shout Outs

Miscellany

GamestonkTerminal (because of course)

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 15:30:00 GMT

I can’t imagine why anybody would be building an awesome stock market terminal right now with loads of features such as stock discovery, market sentiment analysis, research tools, FA, TA, DD, and more.

Maybe they just like the stock? ????

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A game to help you learn FP visually

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 14:41:00 GMT

In this game, your goal is to create a sequence of functions which transforms the colored cubes into the desired pattern.

It starts off pretty easy, but there’s plenty of challenge once you get past the first few levels. A wonderful companion to our recent FP episode of JS Party with Eric Normand (a must-listen if you’re FP curious, IMHO).

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Did I learn anything from 10 years of D3.js?

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:55:00 GMT

Mike Bostock celebrates D3’s 10th by reflecting on what he’s learned over the years. There’s a lot to glean from Mike’s reflections. I really enjoyed this sentiment under the “Don’t go it alone” section:

To avoid entrusting your emotional wellbeing to internet randos (see #8), you must develop relationships with a small, stable group of people that you respect. In other words, find a team (or community) that can provide validation, feedback, support, and mentorship. Maybe this is obvious to everyone but me — yes, Mike, friends are good — but I feel like it’s worth repeating today when so much human interaction happens at a distance.

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Search inside YouTube videos using natural language

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 19:57:00 GMT

Use OpenAI’s CLIP neural network to search inside YouTube videos. You can try it by running the notebook on Google Colab.

The README has a bunch of examples of things you might search for and the results you’d get back. (“The Transamerica Pyramid”, anyone?)

The author also has another related project where you can search Unsplash in like manner.

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Mistakes I've made as an engineering manager

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 19:11:00 GMT

Sarah Drasner:

I’ve been a manager for many years at companies of different scale. Through these experiences, I’ve done my share of learning, and made some mistakes along that way that were important lessons for me. I want to share those with you.

The four mistakes that Sarah details, which we can all learn from:

Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it
Trying to do everything yourself as a manager is the best way to help
Communicating something one time is enough
You have to have everything together all the time

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Go Time 168: Indecent (language) Proposals: Part 2

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 18:15:00 GMT

This is the second part of a discussion about Go language proposals that may or may not make it into the language. Listen to part one as well!

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Featuring

Daniel Martí – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Roberto Clapis – Twitter, GitHub
Mat Ryer – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Johnny Boursiquot – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

The proposals discussed in this episode are:

20733 - Redefine range loop variables in each iteration
12854 - Type inferred composite literals
35304 - Anonymous struct literals
21496 - [Even narrower: permit type elision in nested composite literals](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21496
6386 - Constants of arbitrary types
27975 - Immutable type qualifier
29036 - Make imported symbols predictable