/Thought Piece

We Need Young Programmers; We Need Old Programmers

- Mark Seemann tl;dr: "We need young people in the software development industry. Because of their vigour and inexperience, they'll push the envelope... We need old people because they're in a position to speak truth to the world." Mark points to the fact that older people have less to lose and "many are in the unique position to reveal truths no-one else dare speak."

featured in #345

How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite Of REST?

tl;dr: "REST must be the most broadly misused technical term in computer programming history. I can't think of anything else that comes close. Today, when someone uses the term REST, they are nearly always discussing a JSON-based API using HTTP."

featured in #336

Development Environments

- Dimitri Sabadie tl;dr: "I want to use this blog article to ask questions and not necessarily answer them, but discuss them: “how we should be developing in the modern era?” Dimitri starts with the following problems: (1) TUIs are not graphically rich enough. (2) CLI-based composition is a "nightmare of running the same command over and over." (3) A terminal is just static text and nothing changes unless you run a command.

featured in #330

I Miss Heroku's DevEx

- Christine Dodrill tl;dr: "If I didn't have something like Heroku in my life I doubt that my career would be the same or even I would be the same person I am today. It's really hard to describe what having access to a platform that lets you turn ideas into production quality code does to your output ability. " The author also worked on the product at Salesforce. "I ended up working there and when I did I understood why Heroku had fallen so much."

featured in #317

C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore

- Aria Beingessner tl;dr: "My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues..."

featured in #300

The Internet Was Designed With A Narrow Waist

- Andy Chu tl;dr: A narrow waist is concept, interface, or protocol that solves an interoperability problem. Picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle. Andy illustrates how IP is an example, and how that impacts internet architecture. 

featured in #299

Software I'm Thankful For

- Jowanza Joseph tl;dr: "This blog post is for top-of-mind technologies that are improving my life at the moment." Jowanza provides insight into how he's leveraging: (1) Docker. (2) Httpie, a CLI tool for HTTP calls, (3) OpenAPI 3, a specification for describing RESTFUL APIs. (4) TypeScript.

featured in #294

The Cost Of A Byte

- Noah Martin tl;dr: “Researchers from MIT, Purdue, and Yale demonstrated that turning off the camera during a Zoom meeting shrinks the environmental footprint by 96%.” This inspired Noah to think about a mobile app’s carbon footprint and he shows us how adding or removing 1MB in app size can have a surprisingly large impact.

featured in #288

Simplicity of IRC

- Susam Pal tl;dr: "For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be one of our first few non-trivial hobby programming projects that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users." Susam illustrates how simple the IRC protocol is. 

featured in #281

Programming In 1987 Versus Today

- Curtis Poe tl;dr: "This quick ‘n dirty hack that I wrote in a couple of minutes replaced two weeks worth of work in 1987 and ran almost two million times faster." Curtis shows us the BASIC code he wrote 35 years ago and it's contemporary counterpart.

featured in #280