The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Working from home is powering productivity (News)
Mon, 14 Oct 2024
Nicholas Bloom finds WFH is powering a productivity boom, Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves, Levels.fyi has added a salary heat map, Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is & Artem Zakirullin details how cognitive load is what really matters in software development.
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, October 14th, 2024. SpaceX won the weekend by having Starship's super-heavy booster return to its launch pad where the launch tower caught it using arms, which they nicknamed the chopsticks. Meanwhile, I can't even chopstick a serving of fried rice without the aid of my offhand. Oh well, let's get into this week's news.
Working from home is powering productivity. Here's Nicholas Bloom writing for the IMF. Quote, WFH increased about tenfold following the outbreak of the pandemic and has settled in at about five times its pre-pandemic level. This could counter slowing productivity and deliver a surge in economic growth over the next few decades.
If AI yields additional output, the era of slow growth could be over, end quote. Nicholas's research into this topic focuses on how work from home, one, increases inputs like labor and capital, and two, grows productivity. However, like all things, it does have its downsides, including the damage to city centers and large reduction in valuations of commercial office space.
Still, Nicholas concludes, "...being an economist usually means balancing winners and losers. Analyzing changes in technology, trade, prices, and regulations usually has mixed effects with large groups of winners and losers. When it comes to working from home, the winners massively outweigh the losers." firms, employees, and society in general have all reaped huge benefits.
In my lifetime as an economist, I have never seen a change that is so broadly beneficial. The expropriation of advanced custom fields. Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves. His latest move? taking over the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, which is used by millions.
Here's WP Engine posting on X, quote, We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org. A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21-year history of WordPress. End quote.
To see it for yourself, visit the ACF plugin page, which lives at wordpress.org slash plugins slash advanced dash custom dash fields. And what you'll see, at least as I publish this on October 14th, 2024, is Automattic's own secure custom fields plugin.
This is technically inside the realm of wordpress.org's guidelines, which says they can remove any plugin for any reason, but it is not inside the realm of of what's cool or reasonable in the open source world. Ruby on Rails creator David Hennemeyer-Henson says it well, quote, weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot allow to form precedence.
They must remain neutral territory, little Switzerland's in a world of constant commercial skirmishes. a United States software engineer pay heat map. Levels.fyi, which is a site started to help job seekers compare pay across different companies, has added a salary heat map. With it, you can, one, explore the interactive heat map of total compensation pay ranges across the United States,
Organized by DMA Regions and accompanied by a color-coded legend. Two, click into a region and uncover insights on salary percentiles, breakdown of total compensation components, and top paying companies. And three, send them feedback. They want to know what else would you like to see.
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They have a generous free tier, so please try it out yourself. Once again, that's systeminit.com. The disappearance of an internet domain, also known as nomo.io. This piece by Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the internet really is.
Quote, On October 3rd, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have.
The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry's preferred top-level domains, .io. End quote. Once the treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Will the .io domain go with it? Probably not. There's too much value tied up in it for that to happen, in my opinion. But it certainly could.
And that's kind of scary, isn't it? Cognitive load is what matters. Warning, I'm highly tempted to quote this entire article. I will do my best not to, but you've been warned. Quote, there are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.
Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not some fancy abstract concept but rather a fundamental human constraint. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code. End quote. All right, that's it. I'm stopping right there.
Just go read it. The overarching point is that we should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. But how? That is the news for now. But also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention. Like Chris Wanstroth on life after GitHub. Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter? Spoiler alert, yes. A sweet Firefox theme for the TUI enthusiast.
And our award-worthy list of unordered links. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work. And I'll talk to you again real soon.