OpenTF sticks a fork in Terraform

Changelog

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What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 28th 2023.

So here’s an idea I want to run past you. What if we created a special edition of Changelog News exclusively for Changelog++ members? In addition to the five top stories we cover in the public feed, it would exlclude the sponsored story, of course, and include 3 additional stories from the newsletter in audio form.

Would that be cool? Cool enough for you to sign up for Changelog++ if you haven’t yet? Let us know in the comments, I’m very curious.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

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When we covered the OpenTF Manifesto last week, I said: “the group’s goal is to ensure Terraform stays truly open source forever and they’re asking HashiCorp to switch the license back.”

According to OpenTF, there has been no indication by HashiCorp that they plan to revert the license, so they moved forward with the fork and they’ve filled out all the paperwork necessary to join the Linux Foundation. “We completed all documents required for OpenTF to become part of the Linux Foundation with the end goal of having OpenTF as part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. By making a foundation responsible for the project, we will ensure the tool stays truly open-source and vendor-neutral.”

To me, this is the open source community doing what it does best: stepping up and taking action to fill a void for the community that relies upon a project. If you’re wondering about the sustainability story of this fork… here’s a note from the FAQ: “ So far, four companies pledged the equivalent of 14 full-time engineers (FTEs) to the OpenTF initiative. We expect this number to at least double in the following few weeks. To give you some perspective, Terraform was effectively maintained by about 5 FTEs from HashiCorp in the last 2 years. If you don’t believe us, look at their repository.”

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Add Meta’s Code Llama to the ever expanding list of code generating LLMs. Based on Llama 2, Code Llama comes in three sizes (7B, 13B, 34B) and in three varieties (general, NLP instructions, Python). Meta claims it out-performs other publicly available LLMs and it will share the same open(ish) license as Llama itself, which is free for research and commercial use (unless you compete with Meta).

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Alright it’s time for some sponsored news!

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Thank you to Sentry for sponsoring this week’s Changelog News.

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Matt Mullenweg is a long-term thinker. Here he is announcing WordPress.com’s new 100-year plan: “For almost 20 years, WordPress.com has been committed to providing a user-friendly and stable platform where anyone with a story to tell can do so freely and securely. Many of our customers have been with us from the beginning, and we’re proud to have been a partner in their digital journeys. Now, we’re thrilled to announce something truly new and exceptional: a plan designed exclusively for those seeking the ultimate in security and longevity for their digital presence.”

The plan locks in your domain name, ensures backups run, provides facilities for gifting & transfer of ownership, and offers premium support for for the duration of the 100 years.

Sounds like Matt is confident that WordPress.com’s gonna be around for awhile.

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Paul Gichuki from Thinkst recently bumped into something in their product design that made them rethink their use of examples. In a DNS configuration setting, they used someprefix as a default subdomain, which was meant to instruct their users to pick a prefix for the subdomain. Can you guess what happened next? Two in five people “chose” someprefix for their subdomain. Here’s what they learned through the process:

“To be sure, this is not an individual customer problem. Looking at other configuration options present in our UI, the pattern is clear. When given an example, a significant number of users default to using that same example in their customisation. The behaviour is consistent across customers and configurations. This surprised us!”

For this particular case, their plan is to show multiple prefix examples to the user so it’s clear that you need to select one. The big takeaway, though: “The outsized impact what seemed like a very minor placeholder choice made years ago helped us reevaluate how we select the examples we show customers. It’s a strong reminder about sweating every small detail in the UI; we were surprised at the oversized effect of our examples.”

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Marco Otte-Witte and his team at Mainmatter have been investing heavily in Rust for web development and in this post he shares why they’re so confident making that investment and why he believes “Rust has a great future ahead of it in the web and cloud space.”

What could motivate a team that already uses Ruby, Java, Elixir, TypeScript, Go, or whatever else, to adopt Rust? There are two key aspects that make Rust a great choice for building for the web:

• its efficiency and performance
• the reliability and maintainability gains brought by its type system

He explains each of those bullet points in detail and goes on to describe how & where Rust fits best in the web world. Give his article a read and let us know if this might make for a good episode of The Changelog.

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That’s the news for now! This week on The ChangelogAdam sits down with Warp founder Zach Lloyd to talk all about the terminal of the future.

Have a great week, tell your friends about Changelog News if you dig it, and please do let us know if an extended edition would entice you to join Changelog++.

I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

Changelog

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