We can dance if we want to...

Changelog

Play the audio to listen along while you enjoy the transcript. 🎧

What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, February 12th, 2024. Let’s get straight in to the news.

Break

I wanted to announce our fresh Changelog Beats on last week’s episode, but Apple Music didn’t approve it until I’d already hit publish. I guess that’s just life in the walled garden. Oh well, introducing…. Dance Party! Enjoy the drop

This album bundles 21 BMC bangers such as Tetris Schmetris…. Miami Bites 1984…. Pole Reposition… and Paul Oakenfold Fights Moby in the Alley Behind a Pan-Asian Restaurant….

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music… all the musics! Of course there’s a direct link to all the goodness in this week’s newsletter and in the chapter data. Go ahead and get ya groove on.

Break

Will McGugan from Textualize has a new terminal app called “toolong” (tl for short), which lets you view, tail, merge & search log files (plus JSONL) in a “snappy, straightforward to use” way. Here’s why he made it:

I spent a lot of time in my past life as a web developer working with logs, typically on web servers via ssh. I would use a variety of tools, but my goto method of analyzing logs was directly on the server with *nix tools like tail, less, and grep etc. As useful as these tools are, they are not without friction.

I built toolong to be the tool I would have wanted back then.

I’m somewhat ashamed to say I still use those tools and have been for toolong. Maybe I should give toolong a try instead.

Break

Diane Brady writes for Fortune:

Mozilla Corp. … announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.

The short-term plan, according to Chambers (who has an open invitation to The Changelog) is:

to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO.

New products. AI tools. What next, Mozilla Vision Pro?! Here’s where I’d focus if I were Mozilla CEO: making Firefox so good it does to Chrome what it did to Internet Explorer not so long ago…

Break

It’s now time for Sponsored News!

Are you using Kafka in production and looking for something significantly simpler yet more cost effective that can easily extend to the edge?

NATS is becoming the go-to alternative that satisfies Kafka’s use cases, but does much more than streaming.

Stateless messaging? Request-reply? Key-value storage? Object storage? NATS does that!

Synadia is helping teams get beyond the assumption that “Kafka is the default” by showing how NATS can take their applications to the next level. Learn more and try it out for free by going to https://synadia.com/changelog

Break

Microsoft’s Jordi Adoumie writes:

We’re excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session. It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console.

It’s also open source, which is how I know it clocks in at ~75 lines of PowerShell and is in no way a fork or a port of Linux’s sudo, just a reimplementation of the concept for Windows. Before you know it, they’ll be ditching those trashy backslashes and adopting the simple slash (no need to say the forward bit) too!

Break

Tatu Ylonenqqq, author of the original SSH, tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22.

I wrote the initial version of SSH (Secure Shell) in Spring 1995. It was a time when telnet and FTP were widely used.

Anyway, I designed SSH to replace both telnet (port 23) and ftp (port 21). Port 22 was free. It was conveniently between the ports for telnet and ftp. I figured having that port number might be one of those small things that would give some aura of credibility. But how could I get that port number?

The internet was much smaller back then, so the process was straight forward (but still intimidating). It boils down to a well-worded email to the IANA (which is included verbatim in the post) and voila!

Break

Jack Lindamood wrote up what he calls “Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup.” In the ~20 minute read, Jack gives an Endorse or Regret rating to ~50 different services, tools & processes. Here’s a sampler platter:

• 🟩 Endorse: GitOps
• 🟥 Regret: Multiple applications sharing a database
• 🟩 Endorse: Notion
• 🟩 Endorse: Slack
• 🟥 Regret: Datadog
• 🟥 Regret: Not using open telemetry early

And a special treat for our Changelog++ members today, you also get the full meal. Yes, I read all 50 ratings for everyone who directly supports our work with their hard-earned cash. Whew, that was exhausting. Treat yourself at changelog.com/++

Break

That is the news for now. We do hope you enjoy our new Dance Party album, queue it up for your next coding session and let us know what you think! we have some great shows coming up this week:

• On The Changelog: Stefano Maffulli, Executive Directory of the Open Source Initiative
• On Changelog & Friends: Jamie Tanna, Senior Software Engineer at Elastic

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

Changelog

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