Changelog

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Hello, world!

I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 15th 2022.

We’ve had a few listeners write in recently thanking us for the podcasts. (Hi, William!). Some say they don’t have time to listen to all of the shows.

Hey, we totally get it! It’s a full-time job for us to produce 5 or 6 episodes each week, we know only the most loyal listeners (and perhaps those with the longest commute) listen to everything that we ship.

But there are more snackable, less time-intensive ways to keep up with all the awesome conversations going on in the Changelog Podcast Universe. Once of the best of those is our YouTube channel. We post 1 or 2 clips, like super short 1-minute to 3-minute highlights on YouTube every day. So, if you’re like William and you love our shows but don’t have time to catch ’em all, maybe join the 4k+ brilliant sofware pros who have already subscribed at youtube.com/changelog.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

Break

Lucas F. Costa blogged about why your daily stand-ups don’t work and host to fix them.

Daily stand-ups are a classic example of learned helplessness. We all know they’re useless, but we tell ourselves \“that’s just how things are\” and do nothing about it.

Lucas provides a set of five symptoms that indicate you’re doing stand-ups wrong and says if your team hits at least three of the five, your stand-ups are useless. Do you want to know what they are?

Ok ok I’ll tell you. They are: stand-ups take more than 15-minutes, people talk about their work instead of talking about goals, people stop showing up regularly, people talk to their manager (or “scrum master”) instead of talking to their peers, or if the manager or “scrum master” can’t show up, the stand-up doesn’t happen.

Does your team exhibit three or more of those? Then you need to read Lucas’s post. Instead of just telling you to stop doing stand-ups (which is what I’d probably tell you), Lucas provides solid advice on how to make them useful again.

Break

Mahdi Yusuf is at it again with his Architecture Notes. He previously covered what you should know about databases, this time he’s doing a deep technical dive into all things Redis. Covering various Redis topologies, data persistence and process forking.

Accompanying Mahdi’s excellent prose are spectacularly crafted diagrams that are much better felt than telt.

This is a masterclass in technical content creation and an excellent primer on everyone’s favorite data structure server.

Break

The TLDR of this announcement post penned by Ryan Dahl and Alon Bonder has four bullet points. I’ll read you the two big ones and leave the rest for the uber-curious. The first bullet point, “We’ve been working on some updates that will allow Deno to easily import npm packages and make the vast majority of npm packages work in Deno within the next three months.” And the second, “Our goal is to make Deno the fastest JavaScript runtime. For starters, the next release of Deno will include a new HTTP server. It is the fastest JavaScript web server ever built.”

Is this a reaction to the recently released Bun runtime? Probably! But that’s awesome and shows how healthy competition catalyzes innovation an our industry.

Michael Scott

With win-win-win, we all win.

Break

DevDash is a highly configurable terminal dashboard for developers and creators. It’s written in Go, runs in your Terminal, and pulls in data from Google Analytics, GitHub, Feedly, and pretty much any system that can run a shell command, whether locally or over SSH.

Check it out at thedevdash.com.

Break

Our good friend (the tall, snarky Canadian) has spent the last 2 years on his blog writing about Python’s syntatic sugar. For his last post on the topic, Brett Cannon devised a subset of the language he’s calling Minimum Viable Python, or MVPy.

Brett lists 15 bits of syntax that if you can implement them, then you can do a syntactic translation to support the rest of Python’s syntax. What Brett didn’t realize, is that MVPs are out. SLCs are the new hotness.

Maybe for his next post he can convert Minimum Viable Python into something a little more Simple, Lovable, CPython? I dunno, that bit fell apart real fast.

Break

That is the news for now. We’ve hit the summer doldrums and vacation time, so this week on The Changelog we’re rebroadcasting Adam’s Founders Talk interview with Jack Dorsey from earlier this year. If you didn’t catch it the first time, stay tuned. If you’ve already heard it, well, then it’s a good time to catch up on HBO’s Silicon Valley. (Adam told me to say that. Don’t do it. We are the resistance. Stay strong!)

Have a great week! We’ll talk to you then.

Changelog

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