Wednesday 17th March, 2021 #
- Shop Talk Podcast Ep #454 - All About Vite with Evan You - A conversation around the latest developments in frontend tooling trends, there has been a shift in the past year or so to use ES modules in development and only bundle for production, it’s generally a very informative episode as Evan is super knowledgeable in this space because of both the Vite and Vue projects - One thing that really stood out for me was their discussion of the recent community and development issues in NodeJS supporting ES Modules (22:48), it’s not a problem facing most developers but I get the sense it could be a bigger deal than some are anticipating, the entire episode is a good listen
- 🚀 I had an interesting discussion on IH around backend languages, I think the difficulties with the NodeJS implementation of ESM might start to become a thorn, and to think that package management was one of NodeJS’s greatest features when I started on the platform back in 2014, it’s tough to have to support both client and server module systems, I hope we can find a way through
- Changelog Podcast - Leading a non-profit unicorn - Interview with Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp, wide ranging discussion starting with their philosophy of access to all, no matter sociology-economic status, or access to the financial system, with free as a core value, then the specifics of the platform that offers web development and now data science courses, and also covering their relationship with competing paid for online training, the move to a platform that is like a game but for adult learning, a recent push to create multi-language courses, with interesting git workflows enabling international collaboration, their organisation through facilitation rather than control, being wary of unrealistic deadlines and rushing which creates unnecessary compromises, working in parallel without blocking each other, and fund raising to build a robust, grassroots and impactful business model for the long term - It’s a refreshing take on building online resources, with a focus on access rather than profit, there’s a healthy amount of early web optimism in their approach which I like a lot
- Unikraft - Build tools for creating specialised unikernels, could be used to run a very streamlined NodeJS runtime using QuickJS, for fast startup times and added security, which might be useful on some simple network based IoT projects
- Buildroot is a simple, efficient and easy-to-use tool to generate embedded Linux systems through cross-compilation - Appears to be popular for creating hardware products that run embedded Linux
- Re-post (2021-01-29): GameStop and the Real Market Manipulators - Has a pretty good explanation of the happenings in the markets the past few days, in short, lots of new participants have been trading via web tools such as Robinhood, which give access to trade to regular people, and it has exposed double standards, and raised serious questions about what constitutes market manipulation, and fundamentally every single trade is a form of manipulation - I see lots of parallels in many industries, this type of thing is happening all across the economy
- eToro to go public via merger with blank check company at $10.4bn valuation - They are into trading crypto, commodities, stocks etc, relevant because of the recent GameStop situation, but I’m mostly linking to this article because I think their name looks quite cool
- Intel’s 11th Gen desktop chips are here with faster speeds but fewer cores - I don’t claim to be super knowledgeable about chips, but the chip space is pretty hot at the minute with Apple shaking things up with the M1, so new Intel products are of interest, it’s the old chip crossed with the new chip, it’s a downgrade, but actually it’s an upgrade, it’s a totally new chip design, it’s for Desktop; no doubt it will be popular with the gaming bods that understand this better, but for the rest of us this transition looks kind of complicated
- Re-post (2020-03-21): Wikimedia has decided to move ahead adopting Vue.js as their frontend framework - These are the folks behind internet giant Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big deal as far as web development goes, firstly because as great as Wikipedia is, they use quite an antiquated tech stack, so moving their website towards something more modern is going to be interesting to watch, but also because they chose Vue over React with some pretty good reasoning in my opinion
- Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up - It is starting an commercial Enterprise version of Wikipedia, I have mixed feelings, I worry that such an amazing resource could be splintered in two, couldn’t Big Tech just contribute meaningfully to the original project?, how will they make sure the original Wikipedia doesn’t wither, but there are arguments on both sides, maybe the separation is a good way to shield the original project, anyway it will be interesting to watch how it goes, let’s hope they are transparent about the operation and willing to keep an open mind, the reality is that commercial organisations are a big part of society, good luck Wikipedia!