I love data-driven analyses like this one Harvard Business Review did on logos. The top-level takeaway: our research demonstrates (albeit with certain qualifications and under certain conditions), descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance. Read the whole thing to understand exactly what they mean by “descriptive logos” and why they’re more effective. If you’re into this stuff, they’ve done similar surveys on simplicity vs complexity and symmetry vs asymmetry.

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A HTTP based JSON storage. It lets you store, read & modify JSON data over HTTP APIs for FREE. Ideal for small projects, prototypes or hackathons where you don’t have to spin up your own data store. Please don’t store anything mission critical here, but like the quote above says this could be a nice option when you just need a place to temporarily dump some data you’re working with. Simply grab a BOX_ID from the homepage and then POST away: curl -X POST 'https://jsonbox.io/$BOX_ID' \ -H 'content-type: application/json' \ -d '{"name": "Schrute", "position": "Assistant (to the) Regional Manager"}'

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JSON formatted files are readable to humans but the lack of comments decreases readability. With JSONC, you can use block (/* */) and single line (//) comments to describe the functionality. Microsoft VS Code also uses this format in their configuration files like settings.json, keybindings.json, launch.json, etc. This is a Go-only implementation, but the concept is portable to any language (hint, hint).

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In this workshop, we’re going to: Deploy Kubernetes services and an Ambassador API gateway. Examine the difference between Kubernetes proxies and service mesh like Istio. Access the Kubernetes API from the outside and from a Pod. Understand what API to choose. See how Service Accounts and RBAC works Discover some security pitfalls when building Docker images and many interesting things. Other things :-)

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You may have initially heard of Ballerina on episode #313 of The Changelog. Well, the “first cloud native programming language” has finally reached its milestone 1.0 release! After more than 3 years of hard work by an incredible team, I am thrilled to announce the general availability of Ballerina 1.0! Congrats to Paul and the team for powering through and shipping something they can be proud of! Check the announcement post for all the details of what “1.0” means for Ballerina.

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Ellen Chisa (CEO) and Paul Biggar (CTO) are out of stealth mode with Dark and they’re moving into private beta. Starting today, Dark is in private beta. During the private beta, we’ll be opening Dark in waves to many more people. If you have a project that is well scoped and you’re ready to get started, we can let you into the beta quickly (even immediately!). Check out the language’s FAQs to learn more about their plans, pricing, etc. Right now, it’s not super clear what the full mission of Dark (the language and the company) is just yet, but you can read this on their about page: Dark’s mission is to democratize coding by making it 100x easier to build software, so the next billion people can code

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Matt Steele was inspired by Mikeal Rogers’ “ode to GitHub Actions” on JS Party #91. Code is forthcoming. For now, just click through to the tweet to watch the embedded video…

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Donald Knuth famously said: The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. You’ve either a) learned this lesson the hard way, b) learned it the easy way (by listening to others’ tales of woe), or you c) should learn it now alongside Victor Zhou as he recounts how he ignored Knuth and wasted a lot of time because of it.

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Tiler is different from other mosaic tools since it can adapt to tiles with multiple shapes and sizes (i.e. not limited to squares). An image can be built out of circles, lines, waves, cross stitches, legos, minecraft blocks, paper clips, letters, … The possibilities are endless!

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In this post, Rich Archbold touches on something we discussed on a recent episode of The Changelog. Specifically, in the episode, we talked about contentment being the enemy of progress and how that might effect our industry psychologically — at-large. But when is what we’re working on ever good enough? Rich has this to say… Software can never be perfect, it can only ever be “good enough”…beyond a certain size and rate of change — it’s always going to contain bugs and experience outages. So how do you know if your software is good enough? … My opinion and approach is to codify your beliefs around what constitutes software that is “good enough” into a small set of engineering principles and build a culture, organization, and set of processes that reinforce them.

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Emoji Button provides search, skin tone variations, and recently used emojis… all with no framework dependency. Play with the demo right here.

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There are some fascinating results in this study put out by HackerRank where they surveyed 10,351 student developers. One example that shows a growing trend in developer ed: University students today seem to be showing less interest in Stack Overflow compared to professional developers. Instead, YouTube is starting to become more favorable as a learning tool for the next generation of developers. We found that 73% of students use YouTube, compared to only 64% of professional developers (where the majority of professional developers were aged 25-34, and the majority of student developers were aged 18-24). A little less surprising, but still good to know for those breaking in to the scene: There’s a big opportunity for student developers to learn JavaScript and JavaScript-focused frameworks. Employers need it more than any other skill. As the direction for web applications have moved from static to dynamic, JavaScript has become increasingly dominant in the industry. In fact, 95% of web applications are built on JavaScript—so it’s hard to ignore the disconnect. This is a really well done report. 👌

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Tidelift CEO, Donald Fischer: Today’s generation of entrepreneurial open source creators is leaving behind the scarcity mindset that bore open core and its brethren. Instead, they’re advancing an optimistic, additive, and still practical model that adds missing commercial value on top of raw open source. (Tidelift is a frequent sponsor of ours here at Changelog)

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This raise comes from Salesforce Ventures — and it’s another clear win for commercial open source and the future of the open web. Funding rounds are something special for Automattic. While the company has been around for nearly 15 years, it hasn’t raised a ton of money. It closed a $160 million Series C round back in 2014 and raised little money before that. Automattic and the WordPress open-source project have a shared history. Many people are familiar with WordPress, the most popular content management system on the planet. The company contributes to the open-source project and also runs some of the most popular services on top of that project, such as WordPress.com and the Jetpack plugin, WordPress.com VIP (which TechCrunch uses) and WooCommerce. Here’s an interesting quote from Matt Mullenweg (Founder and CEO of Automattic)… What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web. We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress. And by doing so, we’ll make sure that the web can go back to being more open, more integrated and more user-centric than it would be if proprietary platforms become dominant…

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