What up nerds! I'm Jared and this is Change Log News for the Week of Monday, September 25th, 2023. True story, at Strange Loop last week, somebody approached our booth quite excitedly and said, it's ya boy! And I had no idea what he was talking about. Confused, he followed up the JZ sample from 99 Problems. That's you, right? Finally it clicked and we both had a good laugh. More all the story?
If you see me at all things open in October or Cubicon in November and yell out, I will totally know what you're talking about. Okay, let's get into the news. Electric Sequel is a project that offers a local first sink layer for web and mobile apps. If local first is new to you, here's a primer. Quote local first is a new development paradigm where your app code talks directly to an embedded local database and data sinks in the background, yet active to active data replication. End quote.
Built with elixir, electric sequel is drop in compatible with your existing data model, migrations tooling, web framework, and component library. The only requirement is postgres. Check it out if your app needs instant reactivity, real time, multi-user interactions, and or conflict free. I'll find sink. Ned Batchelder was chastised, my word not his, for advising folks to quote learn how you learn on his blog.
That's because the long-believed theory of learning styles has been scientifically debunked for a while now, but it's still common to believe that there are visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. However, Ned wasn't talking about learning styles at all. He says quote, when I said learn how you learn, I meant for learners to take an active role in choosing what their path should be. There are many effective ways to learn how to program, and you have to choose your way.
End quote. In the link to post, Ned goes on to ask a bunch of great questions you should ask yourself to help decide how you learn. Questions like, do you want to start with computer science theory or jump into writing small programs? Do you want to know the inner workings of things or just how to use them? And do you like videos or reading text? This is important because we are spoiled for choice when it comes to software development learning resources, and the paradox of choice is no myth.
On our recent go time episode about go 1.21, frequent guest Carl Johnson shared an unpopular opinion that was so spicy that we turned it into a changelog post and YouTube video. My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML because there are situations where XML is appropriate, but there is no situation where YAML is appropriate. This sparked a ton of discussion online about the virtues and downfalls of XML, YAML, JSON, Q-Ling, and many other protocols.
Turns out Carl's opinion was a little popular on X with 55% of 79 voters are green with them and a little unpopular on Macedon with 52% of 191 voters disagreeing. It's now time for Sponsored News. File scale for VS Code just got a major upgrade. It's called Machine Explorer and it unlocks the ability to explore, edit, and transfer the files on any of the nodes in your tailnet that you can reach through SSH directly in VS Code.
Quote for the millions of developers who use VS Code regularly, this new extension brings all of your remote files into a familiar and powerful editing environment that helps you get stuff done with your code without worrying about using an ancient version of Nano on some remote server or getting the syntax of SCP commands just right. Check out their link to blog post introducing this awesome feature to learn how to install it and watch a video demonstrating how this new extension works.
Thanks once again to tailscale for sponsoring Change Log News. In a post titled Every Programmer should Know, Item Potency, BurkanSosmos says, quote, In the world of programming, there are many concepts that every developer should understand in order to build efficient and reliable systems. One such vital concept is Item Potency, which refers to the property of an operation or function that produces the same result when applied multiple times as it does when applied only once. End quote.
Burkan does a great job breaking down why this concept is important for all of us to understand and why it has significant implications for building distributed systems. He uses four of the most common HTTP methods, Git, Put, Post, and Delete, and explains which ones are item potent and which ones are not. Do you know? HyperDX is like data dog or new relic, only its open source and developer friendly.
Quote HyperDX helps engineers figure out why production is broken faster by centralizing and correlating logs, metrics, traces, exceptions, and session replays in one place. The HyperDX stack ingests, stores, and searches slash graphs your telemetry data. After standing up the Docker Compost stack, you'll want to instrument your app to send data over to HyperDX. It speaks open telemetry, which means it probably works with whatever you're working with.
Our project is open core, so most features are self-hostable and available under an MIT license, but they do offer a cloud-hosted version and a few additional features that are not open source. Well, let's finish up this week with two quick updates to ongoing stories and a follow-up to a question I asked on Change Login Friends. OpenTF joined the Linux Foundation and got renamed to Open Tofu, ending their beef with Hashie Corp. See what I did there.
Unity apologized to devs and put some constraints around their new feed structure, but is it too little, too late? On our What Do We Want from a Web browser episode of Change Login Friends, I said, is there still a Firefox iOS app? Or does that go on now? It's a good question. There was a Firefox mobile browser. Anyways, there's Chrome, there's Brave, there's Arc probably, maybe, I don't know.
Sort of. Meanwhile, Claire Soe from Ozilat was listening a long while vacuuming and stopped right in her tracks. She couldn't believe we didn't know this. Yes, there is a Firefox for iOS. So she approached Adam and I at Strange Loop last week to set the record straight. Sorry about that, Mozilla people. I had a feeling there was a Firefox app. I just couldn't remember. We also received some criticism that we didn't give Firefox a fair shake while discussing the various web browsers.
Maybe true, but if it wasn't clear on the show, I have massive respect for Firefox and the impact it's had on the world. I know it is a huge effort by many people for many years and I thank all of you for your work. In fact, my relationship to Mozilla and Firefox is a lot like Hansel's relationship to Sting in the Zoolander movie. Richard Gears is a real hero in my sting. Sting will be another person as a hero. The music that he's created over the years, I don't really listen to it.
But the fact that he's making it, I respect that. That is the news for now. But our epic Strange Loop episode will drop on Wednesday and we are experimenting with our very first game show for Change Login friends on Friday. Have a great week. Tell your friends about Change Log News if you dig it and I'll talk to you again real soon.