The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developing with Docker (the right way) (News)
Mon, 28 Oct 2024
Daniel Quinn weighs in on how to develop with Docker The Right Way, Mitchell Hashimoto says Ghostty will be publicly released this coming December, Kevin Li writes about the value of learning how to learn, The Browser Company moves on from Arc & the React Native team ships its new architecture.
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 28th, 2024, but recorded on Sunday because Adam and I will be manning the booth at all things open when this episode drops. Okay, let's get straight in to this week's news. Developing with Docker the right way. Daniel Quinn has used Docker differently at every job he started in the past 10 plus years.
It's time for some consensus, he thinks, on how to do it right. The argument here is that the use of Docker and various tooling shouldn't be unique to any particular project, that this sort of thing should be so standard it's both common and boring to even think about.
My experience tells me that we are not there yet, though, so this is just me making the case for what I think constitutes a good setup." Daniel's major argument is that if you're using Docker, you aren't writing software anymore. Instead, you are building immutable images. Quote, End quote.
Check out his article, link in the newsletter, for why he thinks the 12-factor app is uniquely suited to Docker-based systems. Ghost TTY 1.0 is coming. Mitchell Hashimoto says his new terminal emulator will be publicly released this coming December. Quote, End quote. Why Ghost TTY?
Mitchell felt that the existing terminal emulators pushed an unnecessary choice between speed, features, and platform native GUIs. With Ghost TTY, Mitchell says pick any three. And since Mitchell previously built a publicly traded company around his open source work, This note on finances is worth highlighting.
Quote, Ghost TTY is a passion project for me and I have no plans to pursue any sort of commercialization of the project. Ghost TTY will be released as an open source project under the MIT license. Learning to learn. Maybe we spend too much time learning. and not enough time learning how to learn better. Here's Kevin Lee. Quote, End quote.
If you want to take your learning process more seriously, maybe try this suggested optimal learning flow. One, very quickly identify what the foundational knowledge is. Two, build a personal curriculum to become an expert and avoid the trap of the expert beginner. Three, sprint hard the first 15 to 20 hours to impress initial memory, then decelerate to a more regular pace.
It's now time for Sponsored News. AI GPU clusters from your laptop with Livebook. There's an excellent post on Fly.io's blog that recaps Chris McCord and Chris Granger's ElixirConf keynote. It starts with this, quote, Livebook, Flame, and the NX stack. Three Elixir components that are easy to describe, more powerful than they look, and intricately threaded into the Elixir ecosystem.
A few weeks ago, Chris McCord and Chris Granger showed them off at ElixirConf 2024. We thought the talk was worth a recap. End quote. Did you know that any live book, including the one running on your laptop, can start a runtime running on a fly machine in Fly.io's public cloud? That's pretty cool.
That Elixir machine lives in your default Fly.io organization, giving it networked access to all the other apps that might live there. But that's just the start. Check out the post to see how the Chris's used Flame to generate a cluster of 64 GPU fly machines, each running L40s GPUs to do hyperparameter tuning on a laptop. Link to that post is in your newsletter.
And thank you to Fly.io for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Arc is a dead browser walking. I verbalized my concern with the otherwise exciting Arc browser being venture-backed on a couple occasions. Concerns realized. Quote, Arc has gained a loyal user base but ultimately hasn't achieved mainstream adoption, which the browser company wants.
CEO Josh Miller spoke on a YouTube video about the company's realization that Arc... End quote. They are now working on a new browser that they hope will go mainstream. That's a hard pass from this guy. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? React Native's new architecture is here. Congrats to the React Native team for shipping a major rewrite that sets the project up for the future.
Quote, the new architecture is a complete rewrite of the major systems that underpin React Native, including how components are rendered, how JavaScript abstractions communicate with native abstractions, and how work is scheduled across different threads. Although most users should not have to think about how these systems work, these changes bring improvements and new capabilities.
The old architecture was holding the team back, making it difficult, if not impossible, to properly support React's concurrent features. To solve these problems, the new architecture includes four main parts. The new native module system, the new renderer, the event loop, and removing the bridge. The new architecture is now ready for prime time.
In fact, it's been in production use for months at shops like Expensify, Kraken, and Blue Sky. That is the news for now, but do scan the companion changelog newsletter for even more stories worth your attention. Like, slash temp is usually a bad idea, embeddings are underrated, and Steven O'Grady's freshest take on the open source AI definition.
Spoiler alert, he does not believe the term open source can or should be extended. into the AI world. You can find the newsletter link in your show notes or at changelog.com slash news. We have some great episodes coming up this week.
DHH talks Rails 8 with us on Wednesday, and on Friday, we'll bring you the best of our all things open conversations that we're probably having right now while you listen to this. Have a great week. Tell your friends about ChangeLog News if you think they'll dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.