The next edition of CODE100 is in Manchester in the UK and I am super excited to come back to the isle! It will be my first time in Manchester and as a huge Joy Division/New Order fan, I really look forward to it.

CODE100 is not your typical coding competition; it’s a coding game show where talented developers go head-to-head live on stage. It’s high energy and people in the audience and on stage alike can participate.

• Attendees find a fun night watching coders compete in real-time, participate in audience challenges, win prizes, and network with the local tech community.
• Contestants can showcase their coding skills, compete against other talented coders, and potentially win a seat at the finals at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024.
• Teams and organisations can nominate a challenger, engage with like-minded individuals, and showcase their group’s talent to a wide audience.

CODE100 is language agnostic, all you need as a challenger is analytic thinking skills, a Github login, a phone and nerves.

• Secure your ticket as an attendee here
• Apply as a CODE100 Challenger here

Me, I am the person coming up with all the challenges, pick the challengers and making sure all works smoothly. So, see you on the 22nd?

A themed CODE100 Challenge

As a themed challenge, here is our take on the classic Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division cover . In this challenge we ask you to return the amount of black or transparent pixels in the image and return it as an integer. You get the pixel data as a JSON object.

I will be in London for Devoxx earlier in May, back in Islington where I lived for 16 years, so hopefully I will see some of you there.

I just released a new CODE100 challenge- can you tell how many of these hearts are brown from a list of brown colours and the HTML source?

README and code
Gist

Codepen

See the Pen

#BuntStattBraun CODE100 challenge by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8)
on CodePen.

Next week’s solution will also have a “making of”.

Welcome to another edition of the WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest. This time we have am interview with Sead Ahmetovic, CEO of of WeAreDevelopers amd Scott Chacon, co-Founder of GitHub. They talk about careers, early coding days, developer communities, evangelizing git, and how AI is shaping the future of coding.

Gitting things done…

So, let’s get started with some some Git topics. Julia Evans is full of great information about it, for example talking about popular Git config options, or a deep-dive explanation on how HEAD works in Git. Always worth coming back to her blog.

Version control to me is the main step to move from an enthusiast to a professional developer. You need to get your head around it at first, but it is so much better than keeping lots of zip archives and rename folders to `_final_really_this_time_it_is_version1.0a` and the like. The big thing about Git is that it allows safe collaboration without the danger of overwriting each other’s work. And that makes us more effective.

Which is an interesting topic, as the median active developer merges 2 PRs per week and on average 48% of active developers are responsible for 80% of PRs merged since 2023. So whilst collaboration is much easier, we still wait for each other to deliver the work for us. Anyone wanting to start as a developer should try to break this cycle and start collaborating immediately. Do your own branch or fork and nobody can be annoyed at your contributions.

Working together is a big thing in general and it’s amazing how the communication part is often what breaks down. This is why many big products have a well-defined code of conduct. The W3C just adopted a new Code of Conduct which is pretty thorough and sensible to enforce. Also a good example for others.

Looking back at development learnings…

Development is nothing new, and we should be more organised by now and not afraid of change like other markets are. We have lots of experience of other people to build upon. And most is available on the internet. 50 years ago the book `The Mythical Man Month` defined the The “10x engineer and it still a mythical being to me. It’s not about one person doing everything or finding the shortcut to release things much quicker. It is about people from various backgrounds, with different perspectives and experience building things together. Lars Wirzenius wrote a wonderful article on his experiences of 40 years of programming. If performance is your thing, there is a great performance-aware programming series with lots of information about the inner workings of different processors.

But can’t AI do what we do already?

Last week, we reported about Cognition’s Devin, the first “AI software engineer” apparently making developers a virtual thing. Many people wrote about and over on the pragmatic engineer they discuss if the “AI developer” is a threat to jobs – or a marketing stunt. The previous Director of AI @ Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, wonders if software engineering can even be automated and XX explains how AI Will affect your career.

So, yes, AI can do a lot of things well, but it’s not really a replacement. And we still have to worry about it multiplying and replicating our biases. Mozilla did some research showing that AI is unfairly targeting and discriminating against Black people and whilst AI chats try their best not to give bad advice, you can get harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots by using ASCII art of all things.
¯\_(ツ_/¯ indeed.

What about jobs?

The job market has become a bit better but job cuts are still at highest since dot-com crash which has people worried. I remember the crash and how the dotcom I worked for closed all its offices. My response was to work for an agency focussed on government services in the UK, which was a good time to lay low for a year.

However, whilst some development work will be automated, there are still high-paying jobs in the age of AI.

On a more baffling note, in some companies remote workers can’t get promotions. This sounds borderline discrimation to me, and I wonder what European work law says about this.

Back to the Bard?

Some things are great to be automated, like browser testing, and Playwright is an excellent tool for that. Browsercat released the Ultimate Guide to Visual Testing with Playwright and I did not know that Playwright has a code generator. You can use a web product, record all the interactions and let Playwright replay them.

Money matters

Serverless Horrors Stories”:https://serverlesshorrors.com/ is a collection of things going wrong when you go serverless. Especially bills coming in for traffic you didn’t expect. Another interesting thing is a report showing that most subscription-based apps do not make money and ads don’t seem to work either. So what can we do?

Tools in brief

• tlm – an offline AI Copilot, suggesting and explaining command line code, powered by CodeLLaMa.
• Capo.js helps you fix performance issues by optimising the `` order
• A Guide to Node.js Worker Threads to get you started
• Syntax Highlighting can be hard to do. One solution is Shiki.

Procrastination Corner

• Bartosz Ciechanowski is great at explaining complex topics with beautiful animated illustrations. He told us some time ago how bikes work, but this time things really take off with How planes fly.
• GifCities The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine allows you to find all those wonderful GIFs that made people’s Geocities pages so much more unique. Time to let babies dance, hamsters spin and show that “under construction” sign.

That’s it! See you all next week!

VS Code now has port forwarding. If you want to share what you are working on with the world, open folder in terminal, run your server and forward the port. Set it to public and Bob’s your uncle!

This is great for some testing and showing people what you do, but of course should not be used as a hosting alternative. After all, you do make your computer web accessible that way, and you got to be 100% sure your app is safe.

Last Friday, I released the 107th edition of WeAreDevelopers DevDigest. It celebrated the 35th birthday of the World Wide Web, we had a video of me interviewing the founders of Daytona about going open source, we covered the news around Devin, the first AI software engineer and went to space in a Yugo. All strapped in? Let’s go.

Daytona goes open source

Daytona is now open source and has been trending on GitHub for a few days. But what is it? We talked to CEO Ivan Burazin and CTO Vedran Jukic. Check it out.

Happy 35th birthay, World Wide Web!

Ah, 35 years of World Wide Web. I remember when it was quite a task to get connected. Do you?

But when that cacophony ended, we got access to a library of wonders, mostly text with some slow loading images, but it was something special. And by now, the web is something we take for granted, and do not quite give it the respect it deserves. As the W3C puts it in the birthday blog post : from humble beginnings, the web is now central to the lives of billions.

Of course, Sir Tim Berners-Lee also had quite a few things to say “in his open letter marking the web’s 35th birthday”https://webfoundation.org/2024/03/marking-the-webs-35th-birthday-an-open-letter/ .

There are two clear, connected issues to address. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. This has segmented the web, with a fight to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through the passive observation of content. This exploitative business model is particularly grave in this year of elections that could unravel political turmoil. Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed.

It’s true, the open web is very much under attack and it is up to us to fight for it.

Brian Kardell also points out that not all is clear and safe for the future of the web and has some interesting points as to how we can fund the web ecosystem .

So the web is 35 and that means it might feel some backend pains and isn’t as springy as it used to be. But I for one will never give up on it as it was instrumental to my career. I started working as a radio newscaster and journalist and once I had access to this new media, I was all in. I hope you are, too.

We need to talk about Devin…

Cognition made a huge splash by releasing Devin , the first “AI software engineer”.

The announcement sounds straight out of science fiction movies and everyone and their dog had an immediate opinion about the product. Andrew Gao went deep in a Twitter thread and kicked its tyres thoroughly.

My personal opinion: neat, and let’s see how it fares in day to day deliveries. The concept of being a software engineer is a complex one and most of what Devin does is a thing that bored me about current engineering practices: using already existing code and putting it together to release it with other products and services made up from code I “don’t need to understand”. We automated and optimised our processes and re-use more than we create, so it isn’t quite surprising that this task could be done by a product, as it is predictable and follows strict processes. Now, debugging issues, finding performance problems, tweaking UX until it works for every user out there, these are very much different things. But do we even cherish them any longer?

Is frontend even valued any longer?

Josh Collinsworth is lamenting the quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend and it makes you wonder if automating front-end engineering isn’t already a thing . Then again, Nicole Tietz argues that the most important goal in software is understandability and not getting to the result as quickly as possible.

Google made Interaction to Next Paint an official Core Web Vital which replaces some other metrics and here’s what it is and why you should care . Google is doing a hell of a job trying to teach developers to keep their products fast and use search engine ranking as the carrot. The question I have though if that is still such a huge incentive, considering that 90% of search engine results are actually ads and not indexed web sites. Same for Bing and the Edge team – I really worry about web search, do you?

Git things

Linux 6.9 will be the first Git repo with ten million objects and yet Facebook doesn’t use Git . Over my career I used almost every version control system there is. CVS, SVN, ClearCase, StarTeam, Microsoft Visual Source Safe, Bazaar, Mercurial. And the latter is what Facebook uses, because, to them, the Mercurial team appeared more open to outside contributions than Git was. I love Git, but I often wonder if it had had the same meteoric rise if GitHub didn’t exist.

Code and tools

One of the challenges in the CODE100 competition in Amsterdam was a ᓚᘏᗢ pics challenge.
Here is the README and the dataset . Could you have done it? The challengers didn’t struggle as much with this one as the first one, which was all about string manipulation.

Other news in code were that the excellent Eloquent JavaScript book has a new, free edition! I really enjoyed this book as it takes the language serious.

Eric Lawrence from Fiddler fame worked on Chrome, IE(?) and Microsoft Edge and he claims that browser extensions are powerful and potentially dangerous) . I agree. There is no doubt that browsers became as good as they are now by offering extensibility. Thus the browser makers could learn what people needed and create native solutions. Having worked on many browsers myself, my problem was that people still kept using these extensions when the browser offered the same functionality. Any extension can slow down the browser, make your surfing experience worse and spy on you. The latter is the worst problem as oftentimes you find extensions that are great and created by well-meaning developers who get bored with maintaining them soon and sell them to companies who add all kind of nasties. Good news is that there is an extension called Under New Management which informs you when the ones you have installed changed owners.

PDFs are not going anywhere soon, despite not being an open web standard. If you want tools to do all kind of things to PDFs without buying and installing Acrobat, there is I ❤️ PDF which has lots of PDF tools in one place.

Can you name all the parts of a URL? You can rehearse using url-parts .

Don’t you hate it when your React app doesn’t react that swiftly? Million Lint identifies slow React code and provide suggestions to fix it.

More videos

We asked Jenny from Boss Three Quick Questions (2m18s)

That’s Jenny from Boss, the company, not your average Jenny from the block.

• Simi Olabisi How Microsoft empowers the World to Achieve More(1h)
• Jennifer Reif shows us how to Transpose One Profession to Another(1h)
• Carly Richmond shows The Path to Public Speaking in Tech(1h)