Thoughts on Weaponizing Open Source When you think of open source software, you might think of it as a gift from someone to the world. They’ve written something of value, and instead of trying to make money off of it, they’ve posted it online for anyone to use (and potentially make money off of) for free. While many projects start that way (Linux, ESLint, etc.), there’s another way open source comes into being: as a weapon against a company’s competition. Android. Perhaps the best example of...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Thoughts on Rates of Change One of the first things I realized about working in codebases is that different parts of the codebase change at different rates. There are some files that are touched very frequently while others can go months, or even years, without being touched. This fascinated me, partly because it reminded me of my closet (why do I even still have those jean shorts?), and partly because people seemed to put such little thought into optimizing their projects to reflect this...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun If you started working in the tech industry after 2005, what’s going on now may seem like a shock. Large tech companies continue to lay people off despite record profits. Smaller tech companies are also laying people off, and in some cases, having “quiet layoffs,” where they find other ways to reduce headcount, including offering employees three months of salary to voluntarily leave the job. As a result, there are more software engineers looking for jobs in...
4 months ago • 5 min read
Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun For well over a decade, if you wanted to run JavaScript on the server, your only choice was Node.js. It has been battle-hardened by some of the most demanding companies in the world, many of whom paid employees to help maintain or contribute to the project. Then in 2018, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl announced Deno, a new server-side JavaScript runtime that was intended to fix a lot of the problems of Node.js. Fast forward to 2023, and Bun was released as...
5 months ago • 5 min read
Thoughts on Google In 2023, Google Search generated $175 billion in revenue. The next closest unit was Google Cloud with $33 billion (YouTube generated $31.5 billion, in case you were wondering). That’s a pretty big step down from your top money-maker to second place. And that’s why we’ve seen a big change in how Google is operating. For over two decades, we’ve been trained to think of search as the way to find important information. Need to know where the closest supermarket is? Google it....
6 months ago • 3 min read
Thoughts on Open Source Takeovers This past month saw one of the most well-planned open source software supply chain attacks in history. A program called xz Utils, which provides lossless data compression for most Linux distributions, was found to have a backdoor that affected sshd. As Ars Technica reported, “Anyone in possession of a predetermined encryption key could stash any code of their choice in an SSH login certificate, upload it, and execute it on the backdoored device.” There are no...
7 months ago • 5 min read
Thoughts on JSR This past month saw the public release of the JavaScript Registry (JSR), a direct competitor to npm. The folks behind JSR are the same folks behind Deno, a direct competitor to Node.js. While it may not be surprising that a Node.js competitor would also create an npm competitor, Deno actually started with a theory that the JavaScript community didn’t need npm or any other package manager. In fact, in Ryan Dahl’s original talk announcing Deno, he explicitly mentioned npm as a...
8 months ago • 5 min read
Thoughts on Burnout As tech layoffs continue to fill up news sites, I’m reminded of how hard I used to work as a full-time employee at companies who could dispose of me without warning. Not only was I giving my all to my work, but then I was working on open source and books in my spare time. For years, I had very little downtime as I bounced from one task to the next, all the while pushing through burnout and not taking any time to recharge. It’s no surprise that I ended up so sick that I’ve...
9 months ago • 6 min read
Thoughts on Decision Documents When you start a new project or significant feature, it's likely that you've written a technical specification. Tech specs often lay out the overall design of a system or feature such that it can be implemented by following the spec. Tech specs answer the question, "how?" Knowing how to build something is useful, but there's an equally important question: “why?” That’s where decision documents come in. A decision document outlines the thought process around a...
10 months ago • 4 min read