Changelog

Jessie Frazelle: When you go through orientation at Google they walk you through “The Life of a Query” and it was one of my favorite things. So I am re-applying the same for a GitHub Action. A great primer for this week’s episode of The Changelog which is a deep-dive on, you guessed it, GitHub Actions.

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If you’ve been looking for a list of awesome GitHub Actions, you’ve found it — thanks to Sarah Drasner. Actions are triggered by GitHub platform events directly in a repo and run on-demand workflows as autoscaled containers in response. With GitHub Actions you can automate your workflow from idea to production.

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Flavio Copes is a great person to take this advice from. He’s been blogging for “more than 11 years,” more or less consistently. In this post he covers not only what you need to know to be successful, but also what you need to forget. One of ways I learn best is by doing. I literally decide on a topic I think I know something about, and I drill down in a spiral loop through things I didn’t know, or I didn’t even think about. They say you never fully understand a topic until you are able to explain it. Blogging is a low barrier to explaining things.

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This is a nice rundown of the technical clues indicating that DocumentDB might be powered by Postgres. PostgreSQL isn’t the only DBMS that scales writes vertically and reads horizontally via replication, but when you add this all up, especially some of the specific limitations, I think it makes a pretty compelling argument that PostgreSQL is the engine powering AWS DocumentDB.

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Andy Bell: It’s turning into a bit of a trend—particularly in the JavaScript community—to crap on CSS wherever possible. I could lambaste those who frequently do this, but instead, I thought I’d write about CSS positively to counter the falsities that are spread over the tech tyre fire that is Twitter. Andy makes three compelling arguments in favor of CSS, and I’m glad people continue to talk about this. The conversation is ever more critical as our industry grows and matures.

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If you’re digging into the whole remote teams thing, then you’ll enjoy reading this crash course on building and managing remote teams from Andreas Klinger. You need to systemize communication and expectations. When I say processes, I don’t necessarily mean heavy-handed workflows, piles of paper and someone using a giant stamp confirming every action. I mean “systemized communication and expectations made explicit”. This can be as simple as: “We do check-ins every morning…” “Please before you do X always do Y…” These simple explicit agreements allow other people to expect those actions to happen and avoid unnecessary communication loops.

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What’s cool about this is it’s not a proxy, so you don’t have to futz with certificates, proxy settings, and the like. As long as the iOS device and your Mac are on the same local network, you can view the network traffic of your apps.

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HTTP View is a desktop tool for supercharged HTTP(S) debugging. It gives you one-click setup for HTTP and HTTPS interception, and all the tools you need to quickly explore, examine and understand the HTTP your code (or anybody else’s) is sending. Open source, cross-platform, and easy on the eyes. This is definitely worth a look.

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A quick scroll through the must-read books and articles on this list made it clear to me that this is a winner. Great stuff inside. Also this quote from Abe Lincoln is on point: Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. Sounds like he’d be skilled at shaving yaks…

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uses a colored output to distinguish different categories of bytes (NULL bytes, printable ASCII characters, ASCII whitespace characters, other ASCII characters and non-ASCII).

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The thing about taking notes apps is everyone likes ‘em a bit different. Here’s what the author of Notable was after: Notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn’t bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that’s what I was using before). If that resonates with you, click through. 😄

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Max Stoiber shares his regrets and lessons learned from tech choices made when building Spectrum. Yes, this is the same Spectrum recently acquired by GitHub. With the benefit of hindsight, here are the technology choices I regret and the lessons I have learned. … Changing these decisions would not have made Spectrum a better product by itself. Yet, it would have saved us time and allowed us to spend more time experimenting.

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The engine is a fork of the Quake II codebase that focuses on serving as a base for standalone games. Unlike other ports, it does not aim at being compatible with mods or the base Quake II game. In fact, many features were removed to reduce the complexity of the codebase and make the process of creating new games on top of the engine easier and faster.

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This post from Daniel Weibel not only explains how macOS uses an outdated version of Bash, but also how to upgrade to the latest Bash via Homebrew. One thing that many macOS users don’t know is that they are using a completely outdated version of the Bash shell. However, it is highly recommended to use a newer version of Bash on macOS, because it enables you to use useful new features. $ bash --version GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin18) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. The reason Apple uses this old version of Bash has to do with licensing. Bash 4.0 and newer uses the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), which Apple doesn’t support. There are some discussions about this on Reddit. Version 3.2 of GNU Bash is the last version with a license that Apple is willing to accept, and so it sticks with it.

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Who knew an audio post-mortem could be so fun to listen to! On Thursday, November 8, Basecamp 3 went down for almost five hours. It was the worst outage to hit the company in a decade and a stress test of Basecamp’s practices around internal communication, customer support, and calm work. Today’s episode goes inside the company on November 8 to see how the outage unfolded.

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Chloe Condon: Being a woman on the internet can be terrible sometimes. Unfortunately, me writing this article isn’t going to fix things overnight. We have a very long way to go until this awful behavior towards women online stops (and let’s face it- it likely never will). But I’m writing this article to shed light on an issue I think most folks (especially men) don’t see a whole lot of since it’s often behind-the-scenes and often only seen by the women who receive them and their partners/close friends. The creepy DMs, the gross messages from dudes on LinkedIn, the blog comments, and the “well actually”s on our tweets add up. It needs to stop. Chloe details a horrible story of harassment that unfolded this past week. It’s stories like these that get all of us fired up and upset, but Chloe’s reality reveals that she deals with similar things every single day. As she says later in the article, it’s the responsibility of men (myself included) to be allies and “call out this behavior if you see it happening.” It may also call for some self-reflection. Have I mistreated someone (maybe even without knowing it)? It’s always a good time to make changes and grow to be better humans.

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A year ago Drew Devault laid out his future plans and path to sustainably working on open source full-time. Today, those plans have been realized. I don’t want to make grandiose promises right away, but I’m confident that increasing my commitment to open source to this degree is going to have a major impact on my projects. For now, my primary focus is sr.ht: its paid users make up the majority of the funding. Drew goes on to say how he’s making this leap before the needed income is actually there, so if you dig what he’s up to, you can play a part in making his choice a success. I need to clarify that despite choosing to work full-time on these projects, my income is going to be negative for a while. I have enough savings and income now that I feel comfortable making the leap, and I plan on working my ass off before my runway ends to earn the additional subscriptions to sr.ht and donations to fosspay et al that will make this decision sustainable in the long term.

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Chris Palmer lays out The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of security in the software industry. The good news is that “The Good” section is the longest of the three. The bad news is that section length is an arbitrary measurement that I just made up. 😉 The big theme: E_TOO_MUCH_COMPLEXITY Hardware, software, platforms, and ecosystems are often way too complex, and a whole lot of our security, privacy, and abuse problems stem from that.

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While .env files are very simple it is required to keep them consistent. This tool offers a wide range of consistency rules and best practices. And it integrates perfectly to any existing workflow. Check the docs for the full list of violations.

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When was the last time you got REALLY EXCITED about the latest iPhone announcement? It’s been awhile for me too…I mostly get excited about improvements made to the camera. We generally expect newer models to get faster and better, right? So, progress alone makes that an expectation. Everything else is just kinda, meh. From The Economist on Medium: Smartphones revolutionized everything from shopping and dating to politics and computing itself. They are some of the most popular products ever put on sale. But after a decade-long boom, devices once seen as miraculous have become ubiquitous and even slightly boring.

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