Waymo started its public self-driving service in Pheonix, Arizona on October 8th. I was curious about how the service worked and found this video. The video captures four trips from start to finish, showing the streets, the in-car screen, and the app screen simultaneously.

Around the one-hour mark, the car enters the busy Costco parking lot. Humans find it hard to drive there, but it navigated the lot without a hiccup. Very Impressive!

The video reminded me of the famous line by William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Presenting v7.0.0 of the npm CLI – npm

Workspaces, more predictable installs, and better peer dependency management! I was slightly worried about delays or changes because Github acquired npm, Inc before v7 work was done. But I am glad to find my concerns were unfounded.

TypeScript to WebAssembly: The What, The How And The Why – Fernando Doglio

Maybe not every day, but there will be a time when we need to do a computation-heavy task in a browser. But if we don’t know Go or Rust already? AssemblyScript is a great alternative that utilizes a subset of Typescript syntax to write WASM.

Writing JavaScript tools in other languages – a new trend? – Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

This post discusses the pros and cons of using a non-JS language for JS tooling. A tool creator will have to tradeoff between performance gains and the JS community.

People ❤️

Email to former board member – Ryan Caldbeck

A startup CEO shared an email to a former board member publicly as he stepped down. The email gives you a look at how sausages are made (or how dysfunctional boards can be). No matter what we do for a living, we are all humans with our frivolities.

Business 💸

A Quarter Century of Hype – 25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle – Mark Mine

A great way to get out of hype is to look at the long term trend. The visualization below connects 25 years’ worth of the Gartner Hype Cycles.