Lately at work, I’ve been migrating my servers from AWS instances to Docker containers. Although the internal tools try to provide the turn-key migration experience, I found that many hidden assumptions, especially regarding the dev machine’s environment, created gaps in the process. I often had to spend hours fixing the bad states from half-complete commands. Which is fine. I accept those hours as the price I pay for being an early adopter. But I do hope my notes and feedback will create a more stable foundation for the future adopters.
Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash
Software Engineering ⚙️
Rust-based Javascript tools: Boa and RSLint
Two exciting, albeit experimental, tools popped last week. Boa is a parser, and RSLint is a linter (obviously). I am looking forward to performance gains from these native tools. At the same time, I worry that I won’t introspect the source code of these tools as easily.
Hidden Features of Chrome DevTools – Martin Heinz
I believe all engineers must be able to debug efficiently. Once I got comfortable with the Chrome DevTools debugger, it made debugging much faster than using console.log. But the DevTools have a lot more features. I’ve used the Performance tab and Conditional Breakpoints heavily lately.
People ❤️
An update on efforts to reduce spam with Hacktoberfest: introducing maintainer opt-in and more. – Digital Ocean
The Hactoberfest snafu perfectly exemplifies how a well-intentioned system can incentivize bad behaviors. Before this update, the old system rewarded pull requests to open source projects with free t-shirts while relying on the project maintainers to discern spammy pull requests. In the end, the spammers overwhelmed the maintainers and created media backlash. Never underestimate how motivated bad actors will be.Domenic Denicola @domenicUgh, oh no, October is starting. Prepare for a month of spam pull requests… whatwg/html has already been hit hard, at 5 in the last 3 hours. @hacktoberfest, please please stop this annual tradition of wasting maintainers’ time. You are a net negative for the world.September 30th 2020161 Retweets721 Likes
The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect – Bruce F. Webster
When a team first gets founded, it’s easier to recruit top-level talents into the team. Vision and autonomy are great motivators. But it is also easy to lose them because they have so many options. Like many things, it’s easier to keep the already-high talent density high than to rebuild the team.
Business 💸
House Democrats push Congress to break up Big Tech monopolies – Engadget
After the congress hearing with Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google CEOs, the US House Democrats suggest that the four companies be broken up. All companies argue that breakups will cause consumer harm. That may be true in the immediate future. But these dominant monopolies are hurting future innovations and consumer gain.
The Full-Stack Startup – Chris Dixon
As Chris Dixon defines, full-stack startups own all necessary pieces around their users, thus enabling better user experience. It’s not just Amazon now. Many companies do this now: Peloton, Lemonade, Netflix, etc. These investments, on top of the enabling software, will also create a lasting moat.
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