Changelog

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What up, nerds

I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 16th 2023.

Changelog News is a labor of love. We don’t make a dime on it. If you get value from it, you can return some value with a Changelog++ membership. Sign up today at changelog.com/++

Ok, let’s get into the news.

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First up, this is too cool. WestArtFactory creates premium cheat sheets made out of real Printed Circuit Boards. You heard that right. They design and produce real PCBs that go through various processes until in the end a real circuit board with tracks made of real gold and a unique look and feel is created. Gosh, that sounds like an ad. This is not an ad! We don’t roll like that. I just think these are rad and wanted to share them with you.

There are cheat sheets for Git, Linux, Python, Vim, and more. I’ll embed the Vim one in the chapter image so you can see for yourself.

Oh, and if you’re listening to this in a podcast app that doesn’t support chapter images… cough_Spotify_cough… maybe it’s time upgrade to one that does.

Beyonce

Let me up grade ya…

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The most-clicked story in yesterday’s edition of our Changelog Weekly newsletter (subscribe today at changelog.com/weekly) was the story of a single developer that dropped AWS costs by 90%, then disappeared. Six months later, the costs sky-rocketed right back to where they were before the dev did their thing. Maxime Topolov was brought in to figure out what happened.

It’s a modern day mystery, with a juicy reveal that includes an accounts.yaml file containing 1 million Google accounts.

I won’t spoiler it for you, but I will tease that Adam emailed Maxime last week to see if we can get him on the show for a deep-dive into all the details. Fingers crossed, we’ll have more for you soon.

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A few months back I covered Zed Shaw’s post about Stripe being like Paypal in 2010. Maybe you remember it?

Clip from Changelog News 2022-10-17

Zed doesn’t pull any punches, and this post goes deep on the shortcomings of both Paypal and Stripe.

If that advice speaks to you, check out HyperSwitch. Written in Rust, HyperSwitch is a “payment switch that lets you connect with multiple payment processors with a single API integration. Once integrated, you can add new payment processors and route traffic effortlessly.”

If you’re already using Stripe, HyperSwitch is said to be fun, fast & easy. Those are three words not usually associated with payment processing. You can try it out in their sandbox environment or on your local system with Docker Compose or by setting up a Rust dev environment.

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While we’re talking Rust, this could be huge news. The Servo project is back in 2023.

Eminem

Guess who’s back, Guess who’s back, Guess who’s back, etc

If you’re out of the loop, Servo is an experimental “write a browser engine in Rust” project that Mozilla started in 2012. We talked about it with Jack Moffitt on The Changelog back in 2016. In 2020, it was moved to the Linux Foundation. That was literally the last blog post on the Servo blog until today, where they shared that thanks to new external funding, a team of developers will be actively working on it again.

I haven’t been able to confirm who is behind this new funding, but early speculation links it to Igalia, a Free Software consultancy headquartered in Spain that’s involved with projects like GNOME, Qt, WebKit, Chromium and more.

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Last one for today: Wildebeest. It’s an ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server that runs on Cloudflare’s various servers, built by Cloudflare of course. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, if you’re at all curious about the new-fangled way these CDNs turned edge compute platforms wire together a production application, Wildebeest should be a great example of at least how Cloudflare’s doing it.

Second, it is yet another hat thrown into the ring in favor of federated social networking. Could Mastodon and ActivityPub have staying power this time around? A few other hats: Matt Mullenweg has said Tumblr will add support, Medium last week announced they will operate a Mastodon instance for their authors, the Vite team is building a Vue-based Mastodon web client called Elk, and the podcasting 2.0 guys are shifting their perhaps-doomed-from-the-start-but-still-interesting cross-app comments initiative to leverage Mastodon.

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That is the news for now. I hope you have a great week.

We’ll be back in your podcast feed on Friday with a return guest for ya. Craig Kersteins, the long-time Postgres educator slash advocate joins us to catch up with our favorite open source database. Maybe just Postgres is good enough? Find out with us on Friday.

Changelog

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