/Thought Piece

I’m Now A Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer

- Filippo Valsorda tl;dr: "I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package, which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers... I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet."

featured in #387

Ordering Numbers, How Hard Can It Be?

- Orson Peters tl;dr: "From challenging a variety of people to write a correct implementation of is\_less\_eq, no one gets it right on their first try. And that’s after already explicitly being told that the challenge is to do it correctly for all inputs. I quote the Python standard library: “comparison is pretty much a nightmare.”"

featured in #385

Microfeatures I'd Like To See In More Languages

tl;dr: "Since I spend a lot of time in niche obscure languages, I also encounter a lot of cool QoL features that most people might not have seen before. Here’s a few of them!" Hillel discusses: (1) Number representations. (2) Balanced string literals. (3) Generalized update syntax. (4) The Chapel power hour. And more.

featured in #378

Tech Predictions For 2023 And Beyond

- Werner Vogels tl;dr: The CTO at Amazon elaborates on the following: (1) Cloud technologies will redefine sports as we know them. (2) Simulated worlds will reinvent the way we experiment. (3) A surge of innovation in smart energy. (4) The upcoming supply chain transformation. (5) Custom silicon goes mainstream.

featured in #374

The Cloudy Layers Of Modern-Day Programming

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs..." Vicki shows us how this manifests.

featured in #373

Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming

tl;dr: "The idea is that as you start to find patterns in your application, you can encode them in a little language - this language would then allow you to express these patterns in a more compact manner than would be possible by other means of abstraction. Not only could this buck the trend of ever-growing applications, it would actually allow the code base to shrink during the course of development!"

featured in #370

Twitter, When The Wall Came Down

- Bryan Cantrill tl;dr: "For Twitter, the wall is about to come down: the world is going to change — and it’s not going to change back. I keep wondering about “what is going to replace Twitter”, but I am increasingly of the belief that this is the wrong question, that no single thing is going to replace Twitter. That is, Twitter as an idea — a single social platform catering to all demographics and uses — will become like the evening nightly news or the morning newspaper: a relic from a bygone era."

featured in #366

Why We're Leaving The Cloud

- David Heinemeier Hansson tl;dr: "The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum... the first is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services." The second is when your load is highly irregular and "have wild swings or towering peaks in usage." David points out that it's an "absurd premium" for the possibility of the latter to occur while adding to the increasing power of a few companies. 

featured in #361

The Web’s Next Transition

- Kent Dodds tl;dr: "The web is made up of technologies that got their start over 25 years ago. HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JS were all first standardized in the mid-nineties. Since then, the web evolved into a ubiquitous application platform. As the web has evolved, so too has the architecture for the development of these applications... The most popular architecture employed by web developers today is the Single Page App (SPA), but we are transitioning to a new and improved architecture for building web applications."

featured in #360

Stop Saying 10x Developer

- Adam Gordon Bell tl;dr: "Terminology matters and we can do better than 10x. We can be specific. Skills are not homogeneous, and people can quickly improve their craft as long as we don’t treat talent like some mythical quality."

featured in #346