The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Make computing personal again (News)
Mon, 20 Jan 2025
Benj Edwards wants to put the "personal" back in "personal computer", the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 20th, 2025. Have you ever heard of Coyote Time? No, not your annual Coyote Ugly rewatch party. Coyote Time is an affordance in video game design where the game intentionally waits a brief period after you run off the side of a platform before it plummets you to your imminent demise.
It's named after the wily coyote cartoons and it's apparently been making me feel better at video games than I actually am for the entirety of my life. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. Okay, let's get into this week's news. It's time to make computing personal again.
Benj Edwards deftly describes how surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past. What percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC? Which part of this TV set kept track of everything you watched and then secretly sold the data to advertisers?
Which part of Windows 95 fed you ads without your consent and kept track of everything you did remotely so Microsoft could keep stats on it? Which part of Amazon.com in 2000 tried to get you to buy millions of no-name counterfeit and dangerous goods propped up by stealth advertising and fake reviews?
Which part of Google in the 1990s and early 2000s blanketed its results with deceptive ads or made you add Reddit to every search to get good results that weren't overwhelmed by SEO-seeking filler content? When you say it like that, Benj... He continues, quote, End quote.
Benj has a few ideas on what we can do individually to push this idea forward, but he believes it will take collective action to make meaningful changes. Whether through purposeful reform or the eventual collapse of digital strip mining, I believe the personal computer will eventually rise again along with our chance to reclaim control of our digital lives. Thoughts on a month with Devin.
Hamil Hussain, Isaac Flath, and Jonna Whitaker from Answer.ai put Devin... the product whose creators promised it to be a fully autonomous software engineer through its paces. They were optimistic. Quote, something about Devin felt different. If it could deliver even half of what it promised, it could transform how we work.
But while Twitter was full of enthusiasm, we couldn't find many detailed accounts of people actually using it. End quote. Their conclusions confirm my priors, so I'm happy to share them with you. Jono says, Here's Isaac's take.
I had initial excitement at how close it was because I felt I could tweak a few things, and then slowly got frustrated as I had to change more and more to end up to the point where I would have been better off starting from scratch and going step by step. And Hummel's findings...
Devon struggled to use internal tooling that is critical at Answer AI, which, in addition to other issues, made it difficult to use. This is despite providing Devon with copious amounts of documentation and examples. I haven't found this to be an issue with tools like Cursor, where there is more opportunity to nudge things in the right direction more incrementally.
I think Hamel's last comment nails it. The current state of the art in generative AI coding tools, despite impressive demos, only brings meaningful value when paired with a competent human programmer to nudge things in the right direction at every step. Why Senior Engineers Should Stay ICs For many successful software engineers, management seems like the only path toward career advancement.
Asaf Samir, however, has learned something quite different after years in the industry. In my years of mentoring developers, I've seen too many brilliant engineers jump into management because they thought it was the only way forward. But here's the thing. The IC path isn't just a valid choice. For many, it's the path that leads to the highest potential and greatest satisfaction.
In this post, Asaph makes his case for the individual contributor path. If you're sold on the idea, he also lays out four strategies to build your IC career around. One, develop your technical brand. Two, seek out technical leadership opportunities. Three, stay current and curious. And four, build strong relationships. It's now time for Sponsored News.
On January 30th, you can watch Augment Code in action during their live demo. But what is Augment Code anyways? It's the developer AI for complex code bases, providing you with real-time, deep understanding of the code so you can be super productive right away. Quote, your code base, documentation, and dependencies.
It's the most context-aware developer AI, so you won't just code faster, you'll build smarter. Join Solutions Architect on Schumann Pandy while he demos how it can help you get up to speed on new projects, write effective unit tests, refactor legacy code. Don't just code faster, build smarter with Augment Code.
Register today and they'll send you a link to join the talk and an email reminder before the session. And thanks to Augment Code for sponsoring ChangeLog News. The 7-Action Documentation Model Fabrizio Ferribenetti thinks most of the existing documentation frameworks focus too much on the tech writers and not enough on the actions of users. What are we, barbarians?
This apparent lack of flexibility disincentivizes writing the content that's needed. Fabrizio proposes a new documentation model that is centered on seven actions that the docs are meant to satisfy. The actions are roughly in order, but not strictly. One, appraise. Two, understand. Three, explore. Four, practice. Five, remember. Six, develop. Seven, troubleshoot.
He develops and explains each action and the approach you'd take in providing docs to accompany the user on their way, finishing with this. As it happens with theoretical models, this one isn't backed by extensive research or factorial analysis. The model is distributed as is, and under no circumstances can you hold me accountable for having ruined your lunch.
However, I hope it provides a useful perspective for technical writers seeking to create more purposeful documentation. A standards-first web framework. New creator, that's N-U-E, creator, Taro Pieranen. Pieranen. Taro Pieranen. Taro P-I-I-R-A-I-N-E-N. Pieranen. Today, new takes a new, more natural direction. It becomes a standards first web framework.
The focus has always been to strip away artificial layers and help developers take modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to their absolute peak. This shift is important because now we can more directly work on solving the two key issues in front end development.
Those two key issues, as Taro sees them, are the front-end engineering problem, which can perhaps be boiled down to React and Friends spoil the fun, and the design engineering problem, which can perhaps be boiled down to JavaScript monoliths spoil the fun.
Taro is disappointed with the front-end ecosystem, so he's building something that he hopes will show the old, new way to build better websites. That is the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more news worth your attention, such as you have built an Erlang, using coding skills to make passive income, and Docker on macOS is still slow?
In case you missed it, last week we published two awesome shows, an interview with Alicia White from Embedded.fm, and a news roundup with Adam and yours truly, talking NVIDIA digits, Waymo infinite loops, and modern terminal experiences.
Scroll up in your feed to find those and stay tuned for this week because Wednesday we are speaking with Ashley Jeffs all about his open source ride and selling Benthos to Red Panda. And on Friday, we're joined by Chris Brando and Matthew Sinabria from GoType's spinoff, FallThrough.fm. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work. And I'll talk to you again real soon.