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This the first majorly bearish case I’ve read on remote work:

… remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth. The lack of scrutiny our remote future faces is going to result in frustrated workers and ineffective companies.

Let’s tackle these issues one at a time.

John D. Cook:

I don’t recall where I read this, but someone recommended that if you need a tool, buy the cheapest one you can find. If it’s inadequate, or breaks, or you use it a lot, then buy the best one you can afford.

If you follow this strategy, you’ll sometimes waste a little money by buying a cheap tool before buying a good one. But you won’t waste money buying expensive tools that you rarely use. And you won’t waste money by buying a sequence of incrementally better tools until you finally buy a good one.

What follows is an application of that idea to software tools.

You can use this set of guidelines, fork them or make your own - the key here is that you pick a style and stick to it.

This is a great guide, but the 🔑 is definitely in the highlight above. Consistency is tantamount to readability.

In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy. We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of the problems encountered on the way.

Envoy, for the uninitiated, is a proxy server “designed for cloud-native applications”. It was created by Lyft and used by a lot of big players in the cloud/services world.

Not only is this article interesting as a “switching” story, it’s also fascinating because of the scale of the migration:

When we moved most of Dropbox traffic to Envoy, we had to seamlessly migrate a system that already handles tens of millions of open connections, millions of requests per second, and terabits of bandwidth.

High stakes!

Michel Terhar:

In the search for a comfy and portable developer experience, I’ve made a lot of compromises in the past. The experience has gotten significantly better recently thanks to VS Code and Kubernetes. This workflow also does a good job for underpowered laptops or when working with lots of different and conflicting versions of python or ruby.

This is a solid, balanced piece that doesn’t overly sell the workflow and walks you through setting it up for yourself.

You’ve likely heard a lot about Google’s monorepo and how it impacts the org’s development productivity, but have you heard how it makes managing their open source efforts easier as well?

First things first… does it actually work?!

Yes! Quite well, actually - on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Bear in mind that this is written entirely in JavaScript, so please adjust your expectations. The virtual machine is emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with a Motorola CPU, which Apple used before switching to IBM’s PowerPC architecture in the late 1990s.

Ok, cool. Does it run my favorite game?!

The short answer is “Yes”. In fact, you’ll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.

There are also various apps and trials preinstalled, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, the Apple Web Page Construction Kit, and more.

Yes, you can do keybindings directly. But for a mere ~400 bytes you can do keybindings like this instead:

import tinykeys from "tinykeys"
tinykeys(window, {
  "Shift+D": () => {
    alert("The 'Shift' and 'd' keys were pressed at the same time")
  },
  "y e e t": () => {
    alert("The keys 'y', 'e', 'e', and 't' were pressed in order")
  },
  "$mod+KeyD": () => {
    alert("Either 'Control+d' or 'Meta+d' were pressed")
  },
})

I’m not sure what makes this lightweight (their word, not mine), but it does load pretty fast from where I’m accessing it. I definitely see what they mean by powerful, though, as wiki.js boasts many features: multiple editors, multiple auth schemes, search functions, comments, multiple locales, the list goes on…

The demo is worth a thousand words.

Two days ago on this repo appeared on the top starred repositories first timers list on Changelog Nightly…

In this repository, you can find the official GitHub public product roadmap. Our product roadmap is where you can learn about what features we’re working on, what stage they’re in, and when we expect to bring them to you.

The roadmap repository is for communicating GitHub’s roadmap. Existing issues are currently read-only, and we are locking conversations, as we get started. Interaction limits are also in place to ensure issues originate from GitHub. We’re planning to iterate on the format of the roadmap itself, and we see potential to engage more in discussions about the future of GitHub products and features.

Leading off the updates for Git 2.28 is the highly sought after ability to configure init.defaultBranch so folks can move from master to main as their default branch name.

From Taylor Blau on the GitHub blog:

When you initialize a new Git repository from scratch with git init, Git has always created an initial first branch with the name master. In Git 2.28, a new configuration option, init.defaultBranch is being introduced to replace the hard-coded term. (For more background on this change, this statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy is an excellent place to look).

Starting in Git 2.28, git init will instead look to the value of init.defaultBranch when creating the first branch in a new repository. If that value is unset, init.defaultBranch defaults to master…

Also check out github/renaming to learn more about the complementary changes GitHub is making. GitLab and Bitbucket are making similar changes.

A nice primer on JavaScript’s abstract syntax tree (AST), how to understand it, and what you can do with it. If this is a subject that interests you, also take a listen to this episode of The Changelog with Amal Hussein.