Hyperswitch, the future of programming, Thoughtworks' latest tech radar & yo...

Changelog

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What up, nerds?! I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, May 1st. 2023

Adam and I will be in Vancouver next week at Open Source Summit! We’ll be hanging out with our friends at GitHub in (or near) their booth, recording conversations (of course), and connecting with the community. If you’re attending, come say hi!

Okay, let’s get into the news.

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According to the team behind it, Hyperswitch is “an open source financial switch, written in Rust, to make payments fast, reliable and affordable. It lets you connect with multiple payment processors and route traffic effortlessly, all with a single API integration.”

Remember when Segment took the adapter pattern and applied it to 3rd-party scripts? From what I can tell, that’s what Hyperswitch wants to do with payment processors.

It supports processors like Stripe, Braintree, Paypal… all the major credit cards including Apple Pay and Google Pay… and buy now pay later providers like Klarna and Affirm.

I’ve covered Hyperswitch here on Changelog News in the past, but I thought it was worth mentioning again now that the project seems to be maturing both in breadth and depth.

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Austin Henley was jealous that he couldn’t attend ACM’s esteemed CHI 2023 conference last week, saying:

Instead, I’m going through the proceedings and reading all of the papers related to programming, of which many involve AI.

Austin then listed and summarzied eight of the talks that stood out to him. This conference is for researchers, so the work they’re doing today may very well help produce the future of programming. Here’s one example.

The talk is called “Why Johnny Can’t Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts”

Austin’s summary is: “Prompt engineering is quite the craze right now, but can non-AI-experts write effective prompts? The researchers investigated the challenges that people face while writing prompts and designed a tool to help these non-experts do so.”

My takeaway is: tools that improve the UX of interacting with various AIs will provide outsized value over the next few years.

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The 28th volume (!) of Thoughtworks’ excellent Technology Radar has been published and it’s always fun to see what’s new and what’s moving in/out of vogue.

If you’ve never seens their radar before, There are four major sections (Techniques, Tools, Platforms, Languages & Frameworks) categorized into four major quadrants (Adopt, Trial, Assess, Hold).

It’s definitely worth sitting down and considering the entire report. Here’s a quick list of everything in the Adopt quadrant.

Techniques include: Applying product management to internal platforms, CI/CD infrastructure as a service, Dependency pruning, Run cost as architecture fitness function

There’s only one Tools on the list: DVC - which is an open source, git-based data science tool

Adoptable platforms are: Contentful, GitHub Actions & K3s

And two Languages/Frameworks made the list this time: Gradle Kotlin DSL and PyTorch

The full report can be downloaded as a PDF. And the link to that PDF is in today’s companion newsletter.

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Big thanks to the team at Postman for sponsoring this week’s Changelog News. Oh, and if you don’t want to hear sponsored stories on our pods…

Kin Lane writes: “As chief evangelist here at Postman, I recognize how important these discussions are. There’s a significant meaning and purpose wrapped up in the API-first concept. With the right approach, API-first will save your team pain and suffering, and save your organization time and money. This can ultimately spell the difference between remaining competitive or falling behind in today’s digital landscape.”

It’s a journey. API-first design takes more time up front to plan and gain alignment among stakeholders. But once the design is agreed upon, it can save time auto-generating deliverables throughout the rest of the API lifecycle. Read the rest of Kin’s post to wrap your head around different paths you can take to become API-first.

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Here’s some cold hard truth: If someone’s having to read your docs, it’s not “simple”

The team at General Products Ltd put together an awesome microsite to remind us devs to scan our technical writing for words such as “easy”, “painless”, “straightforward”, “trivial”, “simple” and “just”. They’re not helpful!

They say: “If someone’s been driven to Google something you’ve written, they’re stuck. Being stuck is, to one degree or another, upsetting and annoying. So try not to make them feel worse by telling them how straightforward they should be finding it. It gets in the way of them learning what you want them to learn.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I do find myself using “just” and “simple” often in my writings and explanations to people. If you have the same inclination, just remember (wink wink) to visit justsimply.dev and read this excellent one more time.

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Let’s finish up with a lightning round of cool tools:

• quicssh is a QUIC proxy that allows to use QUIC to connect to an SSH server without needing to patch the client or the server
• Bullet Train is an MIT-licensed Rails-based SaaS framework
• Frogmouth is a Markdown viewer / browser for your terminal, built with Textual
• killport is a command-line utility for killing processes listening on specific ports

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That’s the news for now. The companion Chanelog News(letter) has a lot more interesting links if you’re still wanting more, give it a read.

On this week’s interview episode of The Changelog I’m joined by Elixir creator José Valim to discuss all the cool new stuff his team announced during Livebook’s big launch week.

I leave you with this gem of a quote from Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering:

New is easy. Right is hard.

Have a great week, share Changelog News with your friends if you dig it, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Changelog

Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚