What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday January 15th, 2024 Well, the cat is officially out of the bag. Our Ship It podcast is back in production with new episodes real soon now Hosted by Justin Garrison and Autumn Nash the new tagline is a podcast about everything that happens after get push Changelog plus plus and master feet subscribers don't need to take any action whatsoever new ship episodes will publish right into your podcast app Everybody else subscribe at ship it out show or by searching for ship it in your podcast app of choice You'll find it and if you have a topic or person you would like to hear on ship it email ship it at changelog.com and let us know Exciting times more to come. Okay, let's get into the news today's titular story comes by way of Nicholas Wirth The creator of Pascal who passed away on New Year's Day about six weeks before his 90th birthday Perhaps Wirth rings a bell. Maybe you heard Wirth's law on our most recent found a fine game Well it all comes down to this since Taylor is one point away from winning he piled on we have a male Taylor and Adam They're all on number three and so maybe they're all correct Maybe they're all wrong and we play on Wirth's law and adage on computer performance Which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster sounds true and sounds like Wirth's law indeed So you guys all got it correct?
He wrote that in the linked article which is written in 1995 in which Wirth also lays out causes of what he calls fat software The two main causes too many features not enough time sound familiar the price of simplicity is also defined and he shares nine lessons learned From the successful Oberon system. He and a colleague designed between 1986 and 1989 which was still in use at the time of the writing It's amazing how absolutely relevant this paper is almost 30 years later Wirth's message in a nutshell quote software's girth has surpassed its functionality Largely because hardware advances make this possible the way to streamline software lies in disciplined methodologies and a return to the essentials Pocketbase puts your entire back end in one file the back end written and go with JS and Dart SDKs Consists of an embedded SQLite database with real-time subscriptions built in file and users management and admin dashboard UI and a simple restful API You can download it and use it as a standalone app or as a library that your code uses and extends to create your own custom portable back end cool Stuff vanna.ai is a Python rag framework for accurate text to SQL generation It lets you chat with any relational database by accurately generating SQL queries trained via RAG which stands for retrieval augmented Generation to use with any LLM that you want you load up your data definitions your documentation and any raw SQL queries You have laying around into Vanna and then you're off to the races Vanna boasts high accuracy on complex datasets excellent security and privacy Because your database contents are never sent to the LLM or a vector DB It boasts the ability to self-learn by choosing to auto-train on successful queries and a choose your own front end approach with front ends provided for Jupyter notebook streamlit flask and slack it's time for sponsor news Join Sarah gothles this Wednesday January 17 and learn how to get started using sentry for your next JS apps in the session She will cover connecting your source code to view unminified stat traces adding event context with custom tags setting up effective issue assignment and alerting Connecting front end and back end errors and viewing video like playbacks with session replay the best part get your questions answered live during the free session Sign up today using your link in the show notes and thanks once again to sentry for sponsoring changelog news Henrik garlson writes about life as a multi-armed bandit and how we need to oscillate between exploring and exploiting it when you're in Exploiting mode focus is key Henrik writes as a rule of thumb. You can only do one or two things well some people are exceptional They can do three. I'm not exceptional I learned this as many do when I had my first child I had been a bit nervous about becoming a father having failed to achieve what I'd expect that I would I thought strapping a child in my chest meant setting myself up for permanent failure It did not when mod ain't about half my time.
I had to force myself to make priorities I would care for her I would write and I would say no to everything else Narrowing my life like this at least doubled how much I could achieve when I had more time I had spread myself too thin to get stuff done end quote There's a lot in this long post that rings true to me and lots more to ponder definitely worth a read Calvin wonky writes quote as someone who grew up with a dial-up internet connection I get anxious at the thought of any always online product or service my smart home is no different I rely on it to automatically cool the room when I get home light up my closet when I open the door and match the color Temperature of my lights to the sun's position Why should any of that require an internet connection that train of thought is exactly what led me to build a fully offline smart home? That doesn't hinge on any third-party servers whatsoever And here's how you can do it too end quote Calvin then proceeds to take you step-by-step through building a fully offline smart home And wraps up with his analysis of whether it's worth all that effort Would you want us to pod about this maybe get Calvin on the show let us know and we'll work on that That is the news for now But if you want more scan the companion newsletter for our clip of the week recent good pods from us and a roundup of excellent posts about the future Of the web stay tuned right here We have Alan Jew talking free BSD coming up next and techno Tim talking home lab right after that Have a great week tell your friends about changelog news if you dig it and I'll talk to you again real soon