Weeknotes 2023.50

It might seem that I didn’t edit out any link this week, but believe me, the list of candidates was more than double the amount. End-of-year rally I suppose?

Changelog

• Halted the publishing of an article after my editor (hi, Andreas 👋) proposed some changes. He is usually right and you will thank him for that.
• You might have noticed some flux in the visual style, with different outcomes to different pages. This is not A/B testing, it’s me cleaning up things and poking at stuff in Eleventy that you probably should not poke.

Linklog

People & Organisation

• I haven’t sifted through all of the JetBrains survey. It’s also the one survey I take with a grain of salt when it comes to responses about technical choices, since it’s biased towards their customers. But that 73% stating they had experienced burn-out shocked me deeply, since it might represent the general audience more. I wonder what organisations are planning to counter what seems to be an ever worsening trend.

AI

• Google allegedly cheated in their AI demos. Naughty!
• JetBrains is joining the party. 🤖
• Apple doesn’t want to be out of AI news either. Though this is for developers of AI tools. If Apple can pull off creating viable and competitive development strategies for local model execution, I wonder what happens to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic? However that’s a big if.

Product

• This is why we can’t have nice things. Apple likely pulled collaborative playlists from the next update due to abuse and spam problems. One might guess that the more obvious ways to abuse it had been stopped before the beta test. This means the abusive usage happened during beta testing. My gut feeling is that if you look at the increase in product development expenses over the last few years, you will notice that a huge chunk of it is related to counter malicious actors. Sigh 😞
• A nice overview of international accessibility guidelines and regulations, not just for Swift developers!

Programming

• JSONB has landed in SQLite! Whoohoo! I’m tempted to include a celebratory GIF 🎉
• I don’t know how I missed this (unfortunately I do 😔). Markdoc by Stripe is pure genius and even Gruber approves. It’s probably the best attempt at extending Markdown for longer form writing, like documentation. It’s expressive without becoming gibberish or too verbose. ❤️
• Django 5.0 has been released. It seems like yesterday we updated our production app in a corporate environment to v1.0 and literally none of the scary stories IT told us would happen actually happened. Though I’m not deeply involved in any Django projects anymore, it’s still near and dear to my heart. One of the best pieces of software I have worked with. ❤️ 🦄

Security

• When was the last week we did not have any serious security issue floating around? I fear we’re passing the threshold of people not caring anymore, because it’s happening so often. Now it’s just about every Windows and Linux device (more concrete UEFI-based devices) and why the heck do firmwares need to have an image parsing library in the first place? Oh sure, to show a logo 🙄

Business

• Startup investment stays strong, scale-up and other later stage investment not so much. The subsequent financing rounds at artificially inflated valuations are gone that’s all. Call it fiscal responsibility. Suggestions to push for earlier IPOs sound like a pump-and-dump scheme.
• Spotify axed their CFO amid huge layoffs. It’s likely related, but no one is being candor. In any case, it’s refreshing to see consequences in the C-suite when such layoffs happen.
• Oh Intel…

Blockchain

• It’s been estimated that each Bitcoin transaction(!) uses almost 16000 litres of water. What monster have we created here?

Final link

Everybody breath a sigh of relief: the missing space tomato has been found! 🍅

This one is for my PDM peeps. Miss you and our PDM weekly shenanigans!