Changelog.com - 🎧 Working in Public

Whether you’re preparing for an interview or you want to design a distributed/microservice oriented application, this list will definitely help you achieve that.

Jonas Lundberg:

Hands on tips for learning a new codebase within a short time frame enough to be able to say: “Steve’s legacy ends here. I’ll figure it out.”

This is a great piece filled with actionable details and particulars.

Stephanie Morillo:

Developers encounter technical writing everywhere: product & API docs, manpages, tutorials & more. We know it matters but what is technical writing exactly? And how does it differ from other writing?

In this brief post, I define what technical writing is, provide examples of technical writing in software and beyond, and explore other skills technical writers must develop to create successful and effective documentation.

Lane Wagner:

I built a new go Playground that uses Web Assembly to run Go code right in the browser. One of the cool things about this is is that it made it way easier to build a secure server execution environment because the server doesn’t execute anything, it just compiles.

gix is a command-line interface (CLI) to access git repositories. It’s written to optimize the
user-experience, and perform as good or better than the canonical implementation.

Furthermore it provides an easy and safe to use API in the form of various small crates for implementing your own tools in a breeze.

The author describes this as “idiomatic, modern, lean, fast, safe, & pure” but that was too many superlatives to put in the headline. It does look nice, though. I dig the libraries + CLI that leverages them approach. Demo video on Asciinema.

If you’re using and loving Zeno Rocha’s dark mode theme, you might be interested in pairing it with a dark mode wallpaper. These were created by Dracula user kajwski and collected by Zeno for easier sharing.

A 6-step guide to pairing fonts in all sorts of sites, covering brand, legibility, common mistakes, and more.

Find yourself stuck indoors during a pandemic? Why not build an open source settop box and connect to the only microcontroller powered video streaming service?

If you haven’t heard of the ESP32, it’s a low-cost/low-power SoC with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth integrated. So this is like your own little open source Amazon Fire Stick or Chromecast.

A solid interview with Steve Klabnik from the Rust core team:

We sat down with Steve to hear from him first-hand about his professional activities at the moment, the design success of Rust, a little about the “full-stack” development hype, and overcoming burnouts.

They’ve split the dataset up into two bundles:

1. Lite, which you can download w/ a click, but is limited to 25K image
2. Full, which you have to request access to and is limited to non-commercial use

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a great resource for anyone training models for image classification, etc. Second, it’s a nice business model for Unsplash as a startup.

Bevy has the following design goals:

• Capable: Offer a complete 2D and 3D feature set
• Simple: Easy for newbies to pick up, but infinitely flexible for power users
• Data Focused: Data-oriented architecture using the Entity Component System paradigm
• Modular: Use only what you need. Replace what you don’t like
• Fast: App logic should run quickly, and when possible, in parallel
• Productive: Changes should compile quickly … waiting isn’t fun

Before you get too excited, a word of warning 🚨

Bevy is still in the very early stages of development. APIs can and will change (now is the time to make suggestions!). Important features are missing. Documentation is sparse. Please don’t build any serious projects in Bevy unless you are prepared to be broken by api changes constantly.

ppk muses after digesting Mozilla’s big lay off:

To my mind, Mozilla’s core problem is the cult of the free. To my mind, we should eradicate the cult of the free from web development, and Mozilla should take a small step in that direction by requesting donations from inside Firefox — on an entirely voluntary basis.

This conversation hits close to home for a few reasons here at Changelog.

First, we have plenty of friends and acquaintances who were directly affected. Second, we share concern for the future of these bastions of the web (MDN) and open source (Servo). Finally, we’re a small internet-based business that gives away almost everything we create for free and shares a business model with Mozilla.

Changelog++ might be even more integral to our survival than we’ve been thinking it is….

Greetings, Go devs!

I often find myself thinking that I often encounter a situation when I need to do some small prototyping (playing with goroutines, etc.) and Go’s playground often is a faster solution than a dedicated IDE window. Unfortunately play.golang.org is very primitive (goplay.space is better but not much), so I’ve decided to try to create something a bit better.

A few months ago I decided to try to create a better version of Go playground that will have a small valuable set of features that make prototyping comfortable enough, such as basic code autocomplete (stdlib only supported), syntax check, snippets and examples. Also as Go in WebAssembly trend starts to grow, WebAssembly support was added.

In addition, users can customize the editor by enabling font ligatures, selecting editor font, and some other small subset of options.

I would like to know your opinion and get some feedback. Source code here. Contribution is appreciated!

Today Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, shared news of big changes taking place at Mozilla in the wake of COVID-19. In addition to the changes noted below, Mozilla is also laying off 250 employees while it makes these changes.

…going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.

This internal document includes the details about the restructuring and other specifics.

I’ve reached out to Mitchell via LinkedIn messages to invite her on The Changelog for deep dive into the future of the internet. If you or anyone you might know has a direct connection to Mitchell, please pass this invitation on to her — we’d love to have her on the show.