Bringing beauty to the world of code sharing

Learn the good parts of Vim.

This book from Igor Irianto is in progress with 11 of 20 chapters are ready to read as of right now.

Twitter has officially released its new API, aka version 2. Introduced with an astonishing video and proudly promoted as a rebuild “from the ground up to better support developers”, including business, academic researchers, students, and makers.

I was really excited to see the new opportunities that it brings. While still in an early access phase, I must say that I’m a bit disappointed so far…

Arwes is a web framework to build user interfaces for web applications based on science fiction and cyberpunk styles guidelines, animations and sounds effects. The idea is to provide an user experience as if you were using futuristic out of a movie interfaces for your project.

The sounds are perfect.

Shubheksha Jalan (whom you may recall from Go Time #142) shares some hard-won wisdom after 3 years in software engineering, such as:

1. Titles do matter, even if they’d like you to believe that they don’t
2. Sponsors are like cheat codes in the career game
3. Programming gets easier over time

She explains those plus a few more.

An ambitious attempt to create an open source device for reading. But why?

As a society, we need an open source device for reading. Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading — the Kobo, the Nook, the Kindle and even the iPad — are closed devices, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’.

It’s still early days, but the project got a boost of support by winning Hackaday’s Take Flight with Feather contest in January.

Tightly integrated with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket, Gitpod automatically and continuously prebuilds dev environments for all your branches. As a result, team members can instantly start coding with fresh, ephemeral and fully-compiled dev environments - no matter if you are building a new feature, want to fix a bug or do a code review.

There’s a SaaS offering that’s free for open source or you can self-host it if you prefer.

If you develop for the web, this article might be too elementary for you. But it’s a great reference for curious friends/family who aren’t familiar with things like TCP, TLS, MAC addresses, etc.

(It’s also a nice refresher if you’ve been chilling solely at the application layer for awhile.)

How do you respond when someone asks:

Is Kubernetes right for us?

Where do you start? Let’s talk about IT modernisation, beginning with the problem that needs to be solved, and exploring any constraints that are obvious.

According to FBM, there are three things we need to do something:

• Motivation
• Ability
• Trigger

The key is that we need to have all three at the same time in order to act. Since our problem is procrastination, we’ll focus on how we fail at each one of these.

There’s more good discussion about overcoming the sources of procrastination on Brain Science’s episodes on navigating procrastination and being indistractible.

I’m a bit late to the party on this one (was out on vacay last week), but my oh my did Randall Munroe hit the nail on the head. I have a feeling we’ll be referencing xkcd #2347 for years to come…

Oh, and in case you’re not yet aware, xkcd’s image title attributes always carry an additional punch-line/comment (which is a brilliant way to make it worth visiting the site each go-around). I’ll save you a click, just this once:

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we’ll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

Following Git 2.28’s highly sought after ability to configure init.defaultBranch comes GitHub’s support at the platform level.

You can now set the default branch name for newly-created repositories under your username. This setting does not impact any of your existing repositories. Existing repositories will continue to have the same default branch they have now.

But even if you do nothing…

On October 1, 2020, if you haven’t changed the default branch for new repositories for your user, organization, or enterprise, it will automatically change from master to main.

Troy Hunt:

Let me just cut straight to it: I’m going to open source the Have I Been Pwned code base. The decision has been a while coming and it took a failed M&A process to get here, but the code will be turned over to the public for the betterment of the project and frankly, for the betterment of everyone who uses it. Let me explain why and how.

It’s not open source yet, but it will be and Troy lays out his thinking and the process in this excellent write-up. Since HIBP’s data is both sensitive and the entire point of the software, there will be special consideration taken with it:

I need to really clearly break this part of the discussion out because whilst open sourcing the code base is one thing, how the data is handled is quite another. There’s no way to sugar coat this so I’ll just lay it out bluntly: HIBP only exists due to a whole bunch of criminal activity resulting in data that’s ultimately ended up in my possession.

Then there’s the privacy side of it all: my own personal data is in those breaches and your data almost certainly is too because there are literally billions of people that have been impacted by data breaches. Regardless of how broadly that information is circling, I still need to ensure the same privacy controls prevail across the breach data itself even as the code base becomes more transparent. That’s non-trivial. Doable, but non-trivial.

ts-migrate is a tool for helping migrate code to TypeScript. It takes a JavaScript, or a partial TypeScript, project in and gives a compiling TypeScript project out.

ts-migrate is intended to accelerate the TypeScript migration process. The resulting code will pass the build, but a followup is required to improve type safety. There will be lots of // @ts-expect-error, and any that will need to be fixed over time. In general, it is a lot nicer than starting from scratch.

ts-migrate is designed as a set of plugins so that it can be pretty customizable for different use-cases. Potentially, more plugins can be added for addressing things like improvements of type quality or libraries-related things (like prop-types in React).

From Rob Pike on Google’s Open Source Blog:

In the past year, we’ve posted sixteen case studies from end users around the world talking about how they use Go to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale. Today, we are adding three new case studies from teams inside Google:

• Core Data Solutions: Google’s Core Data team replaced a monolithic indexing pipeline written in C++ with a more flexible system of microservices, the majority of them written in Go, that help support Google Search.
• Google Chrome: Mobile users of Google Chrome in lite mode rely on the Chrome Optimization Guide server to deliver hints for optimizing page loads of well-known sites in their geographic area. That server, written in Go, helps deliver faster page loads and lowered data usage to millions of users daily.
• Firebase: Google Cloud customers turn to Firebase as their mobile and web hosting platform of choice. After joining Google, the team completely migrated its backend servers from Node.js to Go, for the easy concurrency and efficient execution.

Want to share your story about how your team or organization uses Go? Share your story here.