Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $2 a month off for the lifetime of your membership and contribute to our show directly Promo Code: jarjar
• Trusteebook: TrusteeBook - a simple, easy-to-use workbook that helps you take control of your digital legacy. Get started today, and take $10 off. Promo Code: CODER

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Microsoft to share details on bringing Xbox games to PlayStation in mid-February — Microsoft has news to share about the future of Xbox in an event next week.
• Michael Dominick on X — The vital #VisionPro question: “what is this for?” I’m just not seeing it. Am I missing something. #AppleVisionPro
• Meta Quest 3 — New Mixed Reality VR Headset
• Immersed on Meta Quest — VR Offices! FREE app for *multiple* Virtual Screens in VR for Mac/PC/Linux (with no extra hardware) in stunning virtual worlds. Immersed is great for solo work with multiple screens in a virtual cafe, or for collaborating with your team around even more screens and whiteboards!
• Meta Quest 3 - Swappa
• Visor — The world's smallest 4K headset.
• Rails 7.1 expands its support for ActiveRecord asynchronous queries — ActiveRecord async queries are a way to execute Active Record queries in parallel, which can improve the performance of your Rails application. This is especially useful for slow or complex queries or for applications that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests.
• In-depth Guide to ActiveRecord load_async in Rails 7 — This seemingly simple change of just adding a single new method that takes no arguments has profound implications for database layer interactions. In this tutorial, we’ll deep dive into the intricacies of this new load async API. We’ll discuss lazy-loaded queries, Ruby threading model, blocking IO, database pool vs. max connections limit, and performance impact of concurrent database clients.

Plus our trouble with Gnomes, your feedback, and martinis on the moon.

Sponsored By:

• A Cloud Guru: A Cloud Guru now includes Cloud Playground. Azure, AWS, or GCP Sandboxes at your fingertips.
• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder

Links:

• Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Ugh of course it's #Gnome extensions! I disabled Backslide, rebooted and all of a sudden it all works again."
• Building A Better GNOME Extensions Experience — With the advent of the new release of GNOME 3.38 – we want to start focusing next cycle on improving the GNOME Extensions experience.
• Introducing Microsoft Edge preview builds for Linux — Today’s release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions. Going forward, we plan to release weekly builds following our typical Dev Channel cadence alongside our other supported platforms.
• Bringing the browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code — Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of the new Microsoft Edge Tools for VS Code extension,
• Introducing the Storage Access API
• ‎iSH Shell on the App Store — Linux in your pocket

Plus the state of browser extension development, the value of non-technical advice, and your feedback.

Links:

• Feedback: good mic for voice recording? — I'm looking for a good mic for voice recording since I will be a guest on a podcast soon. Since you sound good in your shows, can you share what mics you are using?
• Amazon.com: Audio-Technica ATR2500-USB Cardioid Condenser USB Microphone: Musical Instruments — Side-address condenser microphone with USB output for easy connection to your computer.
• Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers · Armin Sebastian — We are witnessing the failure of browser vendors to recognize the value of our labor and the important role it plays in a healthy browser ecosystem.
• Half of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 16 installs — All in all, about 50% of all Chrome extensions have fewer than 16 installs, meaning that half of the Chrome extension ecosystem is actually more of a ghost town, according to a recent scan of the entire Chrome Web Store conducted by Extension Monitor.
• All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people — As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best advice, the things that stuck with me, came from people who had no background at all in software.
• Overview of Docker Compose | Docker Documentation — Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration.
• Podman — What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: `alias docker=podman`.
• Buildah — A tool that facilitates building OCI container images.
• skopeo — skopeo is a command line utility that performs various operations on container images and image repositories.
• From 30 to 230 docker containers per host — I could not find much information on the interwebs how many containers you can run per host. So here are mine and the issues we ran into along the way.

Plus some thoughts on the lessons learned from the 737 MAX, an Elastic Beanstalk PSA, and more!

Links:

• Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web | Ars Technica — Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features already found on the other clients. And as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome. Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out.
• The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention — What is different here is: the MCAS commands the trim in this condition without notifying the pilots AND to override the input, the pilots must deactivate the system via a switch on a console, NOT by retrimming the aircraft via the yoke, which is a more common way to manage the airplane’s trim.
• How a 50-year-old design came back to haunt Boeing with its troubled 737 Max jet - Los Angeles Times — The crisis comes after 50 years of remarkable success in making the 737 a profitable workhorse. Today, the aerospace giant has a massive backlog of more than 4,700 orders for the jetliner and its sales account for nearly a third of Boeing’s profit. But the decision to continue modernizing the jet, rather than starting at some point with a clean design, resulted in engineering challenges that created unforeseen risks.
• Trevor Sumner on Twitter: — Some people are calling the 737MAX tragedies a #software failure. Here's my response: It's not a software problem.
• Timeline - Time to Play Fair — Apple’s behavior isn’t new. In fact, there are countless times over the years that demonstrate that they don’t play fair.
• Addressing Spotify’s Claims - Apple — At its core, the App Store is a safe, secure platform where users can have faith in the apps they discover and the transactions they make. And developers, from first-time engineers to larger companies, can rest assured that everyone is playing by the same set of rules.
• Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Platform Support Policy — Elastic Beanstalk is retiring these platform versions containing Nginx 1.12 or earlier, which are marked end of life by its supplier. We recommend that you migrate your environments to the latest supported platform version as soon as possible. Here is a complete list of your environments in the us-west-2 Region running on platform versions with a retirement date of March 01, 2020.
• TechSNAP Episode 399: Ethics in AI — Machine learning promises to change many industries, but with these changes come dangerous new risks. Join Jim and Wes as they explore some of the surprising ways bias can creep in and the serious consequences of ignoring these problems.
• User Error Episode 61: Faith in Microsoft — Maybe it's finally time to cut Microsoft some slack, the pace of technological change, and what a couple of common terms actually mean.

Plus Mike reviews the System76 Darter Pro, our tool of the week, and some fantastic audience feedback.

Links:

• TechSNAP Episode 388: The One About eBPF — eBPF is a technology that you’re going to be hearing more and more about. It powers low-overhead custom analysis tools, handles network security in a containerized world, and powers tools you use every day.
• Feedback from Tom — I don't think people need to worry about Google's/Chrome's dominance the way we did about IE6. It's not just that Chrome is cross-platform and open-source, and (with Chrome Web Apps well behind us) sticks to the standards in a way that IE did not. Practically speaking, we must keep in mind that the browser is locked down on iOS in a way that didn't exist (and wouldn't have been tolerated) back then. This means that no matter how popular Chrome becomes, an importnat portion of mobile users must use Apple's browser (engine). But also, now matter how much effort, money Google puts into their web initiatives and in spite of their browser share dominance, they can lose big as they did with web components and webasm. That's the beauty of a standards based platform.
• How to publish iOS apps to the App Store with GitLab and fastlane — See how GitLab, together with fastlane, can build, sign, and publish apps for iOS to the App Store.
• Inside Clojure: Journal 2019.10 — Some tests I wrote were posted on Reddit this week, which was unexpected. The one thing in there that I think is worth thinking about is how to write tests that validate returns while also being open to accretion.
• QuickCheck: Automatic testing of Haskell programs — QuickCheck is a library for random testing of program properties. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions should satisfy, and QuickCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.
• Darter Pro Review - dominickm.com — My continuing adventures in Linux hardware and working on Linux as a software developer has lead me to check out the System 76 Darter Pro.
• Google+ API Shutdown — Legacy Google+ APIs have been shut down as of March 7, 2019.
• omniauth-google-oauth2: Oauth2 strategy for Google — A ruby gem for Oauth2 with Google.
• Mention removal of Google+ API usage in CHANGELOG by stanhu · Pull Request #350 · zquestz/omniauth-google-oauth2
• code-server: Run VS Code on a remote server. — Code on your Chromebook, tablet, and laptop with a consistent dev environment, take advantage of large cloud servers to speed up tests, compilations, downloads, and preserve battery life when you're on the go.

Plus Wes’ reluctant ruby adventures and our pick to ease your javascript packaging woes.

Links:

• rbenv: Groom your app’s Ruby environment — Use rbenv to pick a Ruby version for your application and guarantee that your development environment matches production. Put rbenv to work with Bundler for painless Ruby upgrades and bulletproof deployments.
• Serverless Feedback from TomEnom — One thing you left out of your definition of serverless (IMO) that I find important is that it scales to zero. So if your lambda/function is not being used it incurs zero cost. I guess you could say that that is where serverless becomes literal.
• Install openSUSE on Digital Ocean — Unfortunately, Digital does not at present have an option for an openSUSE image. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use openSUSE on Digital Ocean, but it is going to be a little more work than most common Linux distributions.
• What is Pika? — Pika's mission is to make modern JavaScript more accessible by making it easier to find, publish, install, and use modern packages on npm.
• Introducing: pika/pack — If you’ve recently published a package to npm, you know how much work goes into a modern build process. Transpile JavaScript, compile TypeScript, convert ES Module syntax (ESM) to Common.js, configure your package.json manifest… and that’s just the basics.
• Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in Rust - Mozilla Hacks
• Rust use case study in npm [pdf] — The npm Registry uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks.

Plus the latest on Mike's road to Rust, some great feedback, and more!

Links:

• Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
• Reddit Feedback for Episode 341
• Vapor (Server-side Swift)
• Apple: Trust us, we've patented parts of Swift, and thus chunks of other programming languages, for your own good — In the past day or so, developers working with the language have highlighted on Swift discussion forum Cupertino's intellectual property land-grab, expressing concern that the patents – which are assigned to Apple rather than the Swift project – may expose those writing Swift applications to future legal jeopardy.
• Swift Forums: Apple is indeed patenting Swift features
• Programming system and language for application development
• DHH on Twitter (1) — Treating the web as a “compile target” washes away much of what‘s so special about it. Reducing the web to just another closed platform, like Windows or iOS, is to be blind to its truly unique shape and promise. Let’s cherish what made the web special, not pave it over.
• DHH on Twitter (2) — Web Assembly is exciting in a lot of ways. This isn’t one of them. Hopefully we’ll keep HTML/CSS/JS readable, tinkerable, teachable for all the work that doesn’t need Web Assembly.
• WebAssembly FAQ
• WebAssembly Use Cases
• WebAssembly support in Unity