The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The democratization of spreadsheets (News)
Mon, 11 Nov 2024
Changelog Merch is now on sale, IronCalc sets out to democratize spreadsheets, Grant Slatton writes about algorithms we develop software by, Mark Rainey gives respect to the ultimate in debugging, Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes & Johannes Kaufmann’s html-to-markdown converts entire websites into Markdown.
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, November 11th, 2024. Merch alert! We are doing a first-ever year-end sale with discounts up to 40% off. There's never been a better time to grab yourself, or a friend, or a collaborator, or an open source maintainer, some fresh changelog threads. Get in on it at merch.changelog.com. All threaded up? Sweet.
Let's get into this week's news. the democratization of spreadsheets. IronCalc is an MIT-licensed, work-in-progress spreadsheet engine written in Rust, but usable from a variety of programming languages like Python, JavaScript, via Wasm, Node.js, and possibly R, Julia, or Go. Here is why they're building it. For over 40 years, spreadsheets have been integral to countless applications.
Despite numerous proprietary and open-source options, finding a universally accessible, reliable, and high-quality engine remains a challenge. Many existing solutions are expensive, require accounts, or suffer from performance and stability issues. Our mission, to fill the gaps left by the industry and empower every user with a robust, open-source spreadsheet engine that caters to diverse needs.
End quote. Their ambition extends beyond code, too. They want to drive the spreadsheet industry forward through R&D, community building, and an awesome knowledge base. Cool stuff. algorithms we develop software by. Grant Slatton outlines a cool feature development method he learned from another engineer. Quote, start working on the feature at the beginning of the day.
If you don't finish by the end of the day, delete it and start over the next day. You're allowed to keep unit tests that you wrote. If after a few days you can't actually implement the feature, think of what groundwork, infrastructure, or refactoring would need to be done to enable it. Use this method to implement that, then come back to the feature. End quote.
2.
Quantity has a quality all of its own. And 3. The gun to your head method. That last one reminds me way too much of a particular scene from Swordfish. If you know, you know. The ultimate in debugging. Here's Mark Rainey.
Quote, engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billion miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over 40 years. I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prompt packs for terminals.
However, I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1. Recently, they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter that is lower power.
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