80% of professional programmers are unhappy (News)

What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 5th, 2024. The Pudding (who we've talked to [on JS Party](https://jsparty.fm/193)) ran an experiment where they used an LLM to make one of their data-driven, visual stories. Effectively, they tried replacing themselves with Anthropic's Claude. The conclusion: *“Do we feel replaceable? In short, not right now.”* ([readme](https://pudding.cool/2024/07/ai/)) Ok, let's get into some human-generated news.

[80% of professional programmers are unhappy](https://shiftmag.dev/unhappy-developers-stack-overflow-survey-3896/) The latest Stack Overflow [Developer Survey](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/) results (65k developers from 185 countries) had some shocking (but not exactly _surprising_) findings: > 80% of professional programmers are unhappy. One in three respondents actively hates their job, while almost half survive in survival mode. This leaves only 20% of those who claim to be somewhat happy. Although programmers are well-paid and often able to work remotely, many are still dissatisfied. According the the survey, the main drivers of developer frustration are technical debt & the complexity of the tech stack they have to work with. Combine that with the pressure to meat unrealistic deadlines, endless meetings with point-haired bosses & the recent, industry-wide massive layoffs... and yeah, 80% sounds about right, if not a little low.

[Doing web dev using only vanilla techniques](https://plainvanillaweb.com/) One way to fend off the "complexity of the tech stack" factor, which we know leads to developer unhappiness, is to eschew complex tools & frameworks that set out to help you build websites, but sometimes end up costing you (and your users) in unnecessary complexity down the road. But how does one go about using plain vanilla tools / techniques in a smart way in 2024? Enter *Plain Vanilla*: > This is an overview of the major techniques used to make web sites and web applications without making use of build tools or frameworks, with just an editor, a browser, and web standards. This looks like a great explainer. Check it out by following the link in your chapter data and the newsletter.

[The missing semester of your CS education](https://missing.csail.mit.edu/) MIT's "missing semester" course looks pretty amazing: > Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more! > > Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex. The video recordings of the lectures are available [on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyzOVJj3bHQuloKGG59rS43e29ro7I57J). Link in the newsletter.

It's now time for Sponsored News! [Is your Next.js app too slow?](https://sentry.io/resources/extended-tracing-frontend-issues-with-backend-solutions/?utm_source=changelog&utm_medium=paid-community&utm_campaign=tracing-fy25q3-traceworkshop&utm_content=newsletter-headshots-rsvp) Frontend issues often have backend solutions! On Wednesday, September 4th, our friends at Sentry are hosting a workshop to help you identify issues causing slow web pages and poor Core Web Vitals using tracing. You’ll leave the event being able to: - Find backend issues that might be slowing down your frontend apps - Setup tracing with Sentry in a Next.js project - Debug and fix poor performance issues using tracing This is the second edition of this workshop, because the first one was so well received! Don't miss it, sign up for FREE [using the link in your chapter data and the newsletter](https://sentry.io/resources/extended-tracing-frontend-issues-with-backend-solutions/?utm_source=changelog&utm_medium=paid-community&utm_campaign=tracing-fy25q3-traceworkshop&utm_content=newsletter-headshots-rsvp). Thanks again to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News.

[Why CSV is still king](https://konbert.com/blog/why-csv-is-still-king) A dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard: > In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It's simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how the hell did this happen? After a brief history lesson, the author lays out four reasons why, despite its many problems, CSV isn't going anywhere anytime soon: - It's good enough for many situations and dead simple to use. - Most published datasets today are in CSV format. - Many data processing tools still output CSV files. - Its human-readability is unmatched among data formats. In real estate, *they* say the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a property are "location, location, location." In software, *I* say the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a solution are "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity."

[ngtop: Request analytics from the nginx access logs](https://github.com/facundoolano/ngtop) ngtop is a command-line program to query request counts from nginx's access.log files. I share this tool because it made me think: when you combine additional JS payloads bloatin' up web requests, the EU's new(ish) privacy laws & new tools that _should be_ better at detecting bot requests, maybe it's time for server-side-only analytics to make a come back. Something like [Netlify Analytics](https://www.netlify.com/platform/core/analytics/) but open source & somewhat backend agnostic would be super cool...

That's the news for now, but do scroll through the newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, including a fun piece by WIRED on the history of BASIC, how you can become an Internet Archive Team Warrior, and a movement to promote "hobbit software" If you don't get the newsletter, let's fix that bug by popping your email address in at changelog.com/news This week on The Changelog: Adam's favorite author, Dennis E. Taylor, joins the show on Wednesday, and Ben Johnson joins me for an "It Depends" about databases on Friday. Have a great week! Leave us a 5-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.