Celebrating Practical AI turning 100!! 🎉

RSSHub is an open source, easy to use, and extensible RSS feed aggregator, it’s capable of generating RSS feeds from pretty much everything. RSSHub delivers millions of contents aggregated from all kinds of sources…

Maxime Vaillancourt shared the background and details of how Shopify reduced their storefront response times with a rewrite.

The Rails monolith still handles checkout, admin, and API traffic, but storefront traffic is handled by the new implementation.

Designing the new storefront implementation from the ground up allowed us to think about the guarantees we could provide: we took the opportunity of this evergreen project to set us up on strong primitives that can be extended in the future, which would have been much more difficult to retrofit in the legacy implementation. An example of these foundations is the decision to design the new implementation on top of an active-active replication setup. As a result, the new implementation always reads from dedicated read replicas, improving performance and reducing load on the primary writers.

Similarly, by rebuilding and extracting the storefront-related code in a dedicated application, we took the opportunity to think about building the best developer experience possible: great debugging tools, simple onboarding setup, welcoming documentation, and so on.

What’s Kapow!?

Say we have a nice cozy shell command that solves our problem. Kapow! lets us easily turn that into an HTTP API.

Wow – huge thanks to Lauren Tan for pulling together all the links that summarize RustConf 2020!

All the talks, all the links…all in one place. PRs are welcome too.

The Rust core team has addressed the concerns raised by the significant changes at Mozilla.

On Tuesday, August 11th 2020, Mozilla announced their decision to restructure the company and to lay off around 250 people, including folks who are active members of the Rust project and the Rust community. Understandably, these layoffs have generated a lot of uncertainty and confusion about the impact on the Rust project itself. Our goal in this post is to address those concerns. We’ve also got a big announcement to make, so read on!

Code review is critical to being a software engineer yet there aren’t many resources on how to build up the skill. That’s why Shubheksha wrote what she learned when she first started making the mental shift from writing code to reviewing it.

Remember to be kind and empathetic — Code reviews are very ripe for misunderstanding and lack of empathy on either side. At the heart of code reviews is collaboration. It is as important to remind yourself as a reviewer that you’re reviewing someone’s code and not passing judgments on them as a person and it is equally important to remember that whatever your reviewer tells you is not meant as a personal attack.

Slack and its counterparts ‘create problems, high-school-type problems,’ one CEO said.

What’s your internal Slack like? Does it fuel “drama” or enable greater collaboration? Both…?

Beyond internal politics, executives are also paying attention to how employees use tools like Slack to organize. Workers at companies like Away, Andela, and the New York Times have recently used Slack to put leadership on blast and leaked those conversations to advance their interests. As Slack spreads, this type of action will spread with it. And even the most open companies are unlikely to tolerate it for very long…

BTW, are you on our Slack? Join the community 🤓

Are you craving more of that wisdom you heard from Jessica Kerr on The Changelog #398: The ONE thing every dev should know? Yea me too…here we go…

Software feels more like assembly than craft. What if software used to be a craft? What if the standardization of common tasks in libraries and frameworks means craftsmanship isn’t such a big deal anymore? What matters now is knowledge of all those different materials. Understanding the libraries and frameworks and ecosystems and tools and infrastructure and automation. The implications, considerations, and conglomeration of their use.

What it sounds like Jessica is getting at, is that craftsmanship doesn’t seem to be required for entry anymore in order to thrive as a software developer. But I do believe there is still a place for craftsmanship in software, it’s just not as required as it used to be with the proliferation of standards. What do you think?

Rina Jensen shares more details on the future of MDN Web Docs in this post on Mozilla Hacks.

First we want to be clear, MDN is not going away. The core engineering team will continue to run the MDN site and Mozilla will continue to develop the platform.

However, because of Mozilla’s restructuring, we have had to scale back our overall investment in developer outreach, including MDN. Our Co-Founder and CEO Mitchell Baker outlines the reasons why here. As a result, we will be pausing support for DevRel sponsorship, Hacks blog and Tech Speakers. The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing.

I wanted to surface this just in case your podcast queue is stacking up and won’t have a chance to listen to our Working in Public episode before September 1st. Hear all about it 👇