Forking SQLite, generative AI for music, saying no to sprints, awesome diagramming tools & state machine facts (News)
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
7min 14sec Oct 10, 2022
The libSQL community is forking SQLite, StabilityAI announces Haromai and Dance Diffusion, Robin Rendle doesn’t believe in sprints, Shubham Garg curates some awesome diagramming tools & Chris Pressey writes up some must-read facts about state machines.
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Featuring:
Jerod Santo
What up nerds...
Budweiser Commercial
Jerod Santo
I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 10th 2022.
You know, it's been months since we heard a significantly unpopular opinion on Go Time. Well, except this one:
Erik St. Martin
Jerod Santo
So, yesterday on Twitter we asked Go Time's followers to help us out and post their most unpopular tech opinions. That resulted in a fun thread of spicy takes like user @mylescristopher saying: "infrastructure as code is almost always a waste of time", @robertoguerra19 saying: "TDD is a cult"
Emma Bostian
You did not just say that!
Jerod Santo
To which @britanyellich replied: "Okay maybe, but it's a good cult!"
Michael Scott
Jerod Santo
And @a4w_m6h saying "Your choice of database is more important than your choice of programming language."
I actually agree with that one... There's a link to the thread in your show notes. Hop on there and add your unpopular opinion. Who knows, maybe we'll feature it in a future episode.
Ok, let's get in to the news.
libSQL is a fork of SQLite that is both open source, and open contributions. Everyone loves SQLite, and there's a lot to love, but not everyone is in love with its contribution model, which is pretty much limited to Richard Hipp and his team.
The creators of this fork want to see a world where everyone can benefit from all of the great ideas and hard work that the SQLite community contributes back to the codebase. Who forms this new community? Right now it appears to be just Glauber Costa and his team at
ChiselStrike, but they're hoping others will join them. They're siren call asks what do you think SQLite could become?
Could it become a distributed database? Could it be optimized with an async API? Could it be embedded in the Linux kernel? Could it support WASM user-defined functions?
If these are questions you'd like to see answered, join the libSQL community and start hacking.
Jerry Maquire
Jerod Santo
StabilityAI is back in the news already. This time they're announcing Harmonai, a community-driven org releasing open source generative audio tools to make music production more accessible and fun for everyone. The first of these tools: Dance Diffusion, which is kinda like Stable Diffusion, but for music.
Simon Willison
You're a wizard and you've found a new spell.
Jerod Santo
What kind of music are these tools capable of today? Here's one sample audio file generated by Harmona i, and here's another. Sound familiar? I think we just got journeyrolled by Dance Diffusion. It's a work in progress...
Robin Rendle doesn't believe in sprints. Has he been listening to The Changelog?
Robin says, "I’ve never seen a good team improved by sprints and I’ve never seen a crappy team improved by them either... In fact, every efficient and productive team I’ve worked on has ignored the concept of sprints altogether; people are more focused without them, they communicate better. When you’re on a team like that, then it’s easy to see how everyone else mistakes the bureaucracy around the work for the work itself."
He goes on, as you can imagine. And if you appreciate a solid rant, definitely read the whole thing. What I appreciate about these kinds of posts is that they question the status quo, which is healthy. Reminds me of Lucas Da Costa questioning our stand-up practices:
Lucas Da Costa
Jerod Santo
Speaking of Lucas, he praised cumulation charts on the pod. He thinks they're an awesome diagram for managing software production systems. Meanwhile, Shubham Garg created an entire repo of awesome diagramming tools used by software engineering teams. His list lays outs different factors you should consider when picking a tool such as cost, open or closed source, ease of use, code vs hand drawn, and visual appearance.
Bookmark this one for the next time you need an awesome tool to help create that awesome diagram.
While we're talking about tooling, let's talk about state machines real quick. Chris Pressey's Facts about State Machines repo is a must-read for anyone unfamiliar with tech. Chris says,
"I hold the opinion that state machines are often misunderstood and under-applied. And that's why I wrote this. The goal of this list of facts is not to teach you what state machines are or how to use them; there are plenty of other resources for that. Rather, the goal here is to motivate their usage and to highlight things about them that are frequently overlooked, but nonetheless relevant."
This is not your typical primer or intro-only write-up. It starts there, but quickly goes deep into state charts, implementation strategies, nesting state machines, and much more. The guy knows his stuff. And you can know it, too, by giving it a read.
Neo
I know kung fu.
Morpheus
Show me.
Jerod Santo
That is the news for now. We'll be back with a fresh show on Friday. The topic of conversation: taking Postgres serverless. That is what Nikita Shamgunov and his team at Neon are trying to do, and they're off to a great start having already separated compute and storage. This is a great episode for anyone with a vested interest in data storage (which is pretty much all of us) and the future (which again, all of us).
Have a great week! We'll talk to you then.
