Cloudflare has a lot more to offer than merely DDoS protection and CDN services. On this episode, Jon Kuperman joins Amal & Jerod to talk through many of their cool new things like Workers, KV, Durable Objects, and R2 Storage. Thanks to listener Matt Mannucci for requesting this episode!

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• Raygun – Never miss another mission-critical issue again — Raygun Alerting is now available for Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring, to make sure you are quickly notified of the errors, crashes, and front-end performance issues that matter most to you and your business. Set thresholds for your alert based on an increase in error count, a spike in load time, or new issues introduced in the latest deployment. Start your free 14-day trial at Raygun.com
• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring

• Jon Kuperman – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Amal Hussein – Twitter, GitHub
• Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

• Workers
• Workers Chat Demo
• Argo Smart Routing
• R2 announcement
• Durable Objects
• KV

If you landed here hoping this project isn’t serious… fear not. It’s just for fun, but it really works!

Have you ever thought to yourself: Why don’t we have an immersive 3D sandbox user interface to manage workloads on my favorite container orchestrator? No? Well here it is anyway.

Pigs are pods. Cows are ReplicaSets. Chickens are services. You get the drift.

Discuss on Changelog News

Jesse O’Brien from Test Double wants us to stop using the term “Tech Debt”

There’s loads of reasons why unmaintainable code ends up running in the systems our products are built on, but none of these fit the definition of debt.

Instead, I propose we drop the term Tech Debt and start talking about maintenance tasks. Maintenance is what we’re really talking about. When parts on our car or bicycle suffers wear from driving them around, we don’t talk to our mechanic about “mechanical debt”. (Go back and re-read that sentence, but replace things with “software” and “programmers”). We talk about maintenance.

This post starts as mostly a semantic debate, and I’m not convinced by his arguments there. I think the debt metaphor is useful when you’re talking about trading quality for speed. That’s what you do when you take on debt: you trade higher cost at a future date (principle + interest) to gain access to the money today (speed).

That being said, I really like where Jesse ends this piece talking about software maintenance and methods of going about it. Lots of actionable advice there and I’m 100% onboard with talking about software maintenance early and often. One of the first things I consider when somebody approaches me with a feature idea is ask myself: what will this cost to maintain?

Discuss on Changelog News

Andrew Kutz:

After spending some time playing with them, I began to appreciate how generics in Go have been designed and implemented with the same elegance and simplicity as Go itself. I hope you will agree, and to that end, this repository is a hands-on approach to learning all about generics in Go.

Discuss on Changelog News

Gerhard loves simple ideas executed well, which is why he is excited to be speaking today with Ildar Iskhakov & Matvey Kukuy about their startup Amixr, a.k.a. Grafana OnCall.

Ildar & Matvey started with a simple idea and a simple stack - Django, Celery, RabbitMQ & MySQL - all running on Kubernetes. Because they kept their main thing their main thing, and kept improving it every day for a couple of years, now your on-call can be simple too.

This is another Big Tent philosophy story with a Black Swan moment towards the end.

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• MongoDB – An integrated suite of cloud database and services — They have a FREE forever tier, so you can prove to yourself and to your team that they have everything you need. Check it out today at mongodb.com/changelog
• FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
• Datadog – SaaS monitoring and security platform enabling full-stack observability for developers, IT operations, security and business teams in the cloud age. Their unified platform, along with 500+ vendor backed integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs and security signals across your applications, infrastructure and third-party services in a single pane of glass. Learn more at datadog.com/changleog
• GitLab – The DevOps platform that empowers organizations to maximize the overall return on software development by delivering software faster, more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. Identify and address blockers immediately, focus on delivering value — not maintaining integrations, automate security and compliance. Get started with their free tier (no credit card required). Learn more at about.gitlab.com/solutions/devops-platform

Featuring

• Ildar Iskhakov – GitHub, LinkedIn
• Matvey Kukuy – GitHub, LinkedIn
• Gerhard Lazu – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

• Announcing Grafana OnCall
• Amixr, Matvey’s & Ildar’s startup that joined the Grafana family
• Wikipedia - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Eleventy creator, Zach Leatherman:

This project would not be possible without our lovely community. Thank you to everyone that built something with Eleventy (×476 authors on our web site!), wrote a blog post about Eleventy, contributed code to core or plugins, documentation, asked questions, answered questions, braved The Leaderboards, participated on Discord, filed issues, attended (or organized!) a meetup, said a kind word on Twitter ❤️.

Congrats to Zach and the entire Eleventy community on the big 1.0! 🎉

Discuss on Changelog News

Alexey Palazhchenko joins Natalie to discuss the implications of GitHub’s Copilot on code generation. Go’s design lends itself nicely to computer generated authoring: thanks to go fmt, there’s already only one Go style. This means AI-generated code will be consistent and seamless. Its focus on simplicity & readability make it tailor made for this new approach to software creation. Where might this take us?

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• GitLab – The DevOps platform that empowers organizations to maximize the overall return on software development by delivering software faster, more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. Identify and address blockers immediately, focus on delivering value — not maintaining integrations, automate security and compliance. Get started with their free tier (no credit card required). Learn more at about.gitlab.com/solutions/devops-platform
• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring

• Alexey Palazhchenko – Twitter, GitHub
• Natalie Pistunovich – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

• FerretDB
• OpenAI Codex
• GitHub Copilot

Imagine this: you’ve been paged to investigate a production incident, and after some digging, you identify the commit with the breaking code. You decide to revert the change:

git revert 1a2b3c

Unfortunately, in doing so, a new bug is introduced! As it turns out, hidden in that old “broken” commit was some code that another part of the app depended upon, and when you reverted those lines, it left the site once again in a broken state. 🙃 Oh dear.

How can situations like this be avoided? To answer this question, we first need to examine how these types of commits come to be.

If you’ve never heard of or used git reset… this article is a must-read.

Discuss on Changelog News

Arnold Galovics’ follow-up to his excellent monoliths are your friend post from late last year.

Starting a greenfield project with microservices is easy. The promises are wonderful but often they are far from reality. This time I’ll share my experience on the truth about microservices when starting a project from scratch.

Discuss on Changelog News

Jakob Greenfeld:

I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.

It costs $0 and no, it’s not some note-taking or to-do list system.

The steps are:

1. develop meta-awareness of your state of mind.
2. pattern-match to identify your mind’s most common modes.
3. learn to pick activities that match each mode.

But that probably won’t hit home until you read through his explanation of each step.

Discuss on Changelog News

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!
• The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token. Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring

• David Kanter – Twitter, GitHub
• Chris Benson – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Daniel Whitenack – Twitter, GitHub, Website

Notes and Links

• Press Release about MLCommons datasets: MLCommons™ Association Unveils Open Datasets and Tools to Drive Democratization of Machine Learning
• NeurIPS Papers:
  • People’s Speech Dataset
  • Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)
• Gradient article: New Datasets to Democratize Speech Recognition Technology
• Blog posts for more insight:
  • People’s Speech
  • Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)
• Downloads:
  • People’s Speech
  • Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store.

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
• InfluxData – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog
• MongoDB – MongoDB Atlas is an integrated suite of cloud database and services. Try Atlas today. They have a FREE forever tier, so you can prove to yourself and to your team that they have everything you need. Check it out today at mongodb.com/changelog
• Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog

Featuring

• Matthew Ahrens – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Notes and Links

• Matt Ahrens on openzfs.org
• State of OpenZFS 2021 by Matt Ahrens
• ZFS RAIDZ stripe width, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love RAIDZ
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
• Common Development and Distribution License 1.0
• Linus Torvalds: Avoid Oracle’s ZFS kernel code on Linux until ‘litigious’ Larry signs off

This is an excellent explanation of the difference between these styles of programming and why declarative is all the rage these days.

Discuss on Changelog News

This post by Shayon Mukherjee is in response to the recently logged post by Mike Coutermarsh in praise of MySQL for infra folks:

This is not a MySQL vs PostgreSQL post. This is just a small summary of what I have come to appreciate about PostgreSQL as an Infrastructure Engineer.

Always good to keep in mind whenever comparing technologies: trade-offs abound and certain people in certain situations will value certain things about different technologies differently. That’s for certain. 😉

Discuss on Changelog News

If you’re using GitHub as your version control system of choice then GitHub Apps can be incredibly useful for many tasks including building CI/CD, managing repositories, querying statistical data and much more. In this article we will walk through the process of building such an app in Go including setting up the GitHub integration, authenticating with GitHub, listening to webhooks, querying GitHub API and more.

Discuss on Changelog News

From Mike Coutermarsh:

For years I’ve been noticing this pattern of infrastructure engineers I really respect preferring MySQL and product engineers preferring Postgres. It took quite a while for me to understand it. Especially coming from my background as a product engineer. Infrastructure engineers generally…

Read on to hear why (from Mike’s perspective).

Discuss on Changelog News

Daniel Stenberg lays out how he thinks we can view the world of software and open source in light of supply chain security, maintainer sustainability, and the like:

Inside the pyramid there is a hierarchy where things using software are build on top of others, in layers. The higher up you go, the more you stand on the shoulders of open source components below you.

At the very bottom of the pyramid are the foundational components. Operating systems and libraries. The stuff virtually everything runs or depends upon. The components you really don’t want to have serious security vulnerabilities.

Discuss on Changelog News

Jim Hall used grep and some fancy regular expressions to get a leg up on Wordle, the word game that keeps you guessing… but only once per day. Some people may think of Jim’s technique as cheating. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.

But it’s a lot better than View Source-ing to get at the answer, which you can also do in a pinch. 😉

(Also there’s zero point to Wordle other than having fun, so it’s really only cheating if your answer-finding-method is less fun than you’d have otherwise. Even then, you’re only cheating yourself.)

Discuss on Changelog News

This is an excellent machine learning primer where you scroll the page and the author(s) walk you through the process of creating a model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

Discuss on Changelog News

Eight people have stepped up to take over maintenance of the suddenly abandoned JS library that generates fake data. These transitions are tricky to make smoothly. Props to the new team on being very careful and thoughtful each step along the way, especially when it comes to funding the project. Here’s a nice note from the new team:

We’re excited to give new life to this idea and project.

This project can have a fresh start and it will become even cooler.

We felt we needed to do a public announcement because of all of the attention the project received in the media and from the community.

We believe that we have acted in the way that is best for the community.

Discuss on Changelog News