Was Jamstack a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon?  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Was Jamstack a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6bc3dc70-c240-4681-ae45-58a23a9783dc ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Jamstack's Future** - The term "Jamstack" has become diluted, losing its original meaning. - Zach Leatherman suggests refocusing its definition and broadening community leadership. Transcript: Jerod Santo Okay, let's get into the news. Eleventy creator and former Netlify employee Zach Leatherman writes about the tension and future of Jamstack. Quote, some stakeholders and detractors have declared the Jamstack dead, in part evidenced by the recent shuttering of the Jamstack Discord, the discontinuation of Jamstack Conf, As Netlify pivots toward the marketing term composable in a new conference under that name, and the end of the Jamstack community survey, end quote. Netlify coined the term, but it seems pretty clear that they are done with it. Where does that leave everyone else who is keen on building websites stacked with Jam? Zach thinks a post-Netlify Jamstack opens up opportunities to refocus the definition and strengthen the community with a broader group of leaders and stakeholders. ([Time 0:00:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db837736-8008-484a-83b4-cb4803455572)) - **Data Visualization Best Practices** - Avoid common data visualization pitfalls like using pie charts for precise comparisons or bar plots for mean separation. - Chenxin Li offers guidance on improving data visualization practices. Transcript: Jerod Santo Agree with Zach and want to partake in the future of this once thriving, but perhaps propped up by Zerp-enabled marketing dollars community, join them by filling out the survey on thefutureofjamstack.org. By Chen Chen Li, laying out 13 bad practices in data visualization and how good friends help their friends avoid these easy to make graphene foibles. If you ever made a pie chart or used a bar plot for mean separation, violin plots for small sample sizes, bidirectional color scales for unidirectional data, or have no idea what it is That I'm talking about. ([Time 0:01:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/da8b24bb-7d81-40c8-9812-63d79409f0fa)) - **Laravel Pulse** - Taylor Otwell created Laravel Pulse, inspired by Phoenix Live Dashboard, to address performance monitoring needs. - The tool helps identify slow jobs, endpoints, and active users, originating from a need to manage overloaded queues. Transcript: Jerod Santo Ha ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! Want to skim through these examples and explanations. Laravel creator Taylor Otwell recently teased a new admin tool that is coming soon to GitHub saying quote, Laravel Pulse delivers at a glance insights into your production applications Performance and usage, track down slow jobs and endpoints, find your most active users, and more. End quote. This very much reminds me of Phoenix Live Dashboard, but extra spit-polished and perhaps more useful out of the box. The idea was born when Otwell and co. Were frustrated that they couldn't quickly identify individual that were overloading their queues on Forge. ([Time 0:02:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff650436-7d6c-45ca-b3c1-4182d8c98d1f)) - **Long-Term Refactors** - Prepare for long-term refactors by involving the whole team and documenting the process in an internal knowledge base. - Max Chernyak advocates for this approach to mitigate stress and confusion. Transcript: Jerod Santo Max Cherniak has a theory that long refactors get a bad rap because most of them take far longer than we expect. The length leads to stress, an awkward code base, a confused team, and often no end in sight. A few years ago, he began trying a method where he would prepare an intentionally long-term refactor instead. The results were surprisingly positive. Max says, quote, long-term refactors involve the whole team from the beginning, which is one of their most powerful aspects. So far, I participated in about 10 big refactors using this method across two companies with at least three different teams, and I've yet to see it go wrong. End quote. He details the approach and its drawbacks, so you can try it for yourself with eyes wide open. But before you even start, Max says you will need the following. One, an experienced software engineer with a vision for the refactor. Two, a team of software engineers at various levels of expertise, three, an internal knowledge base, and four, less than five to ten long-term refactors already in progress. ([Time 0:04:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/41b07eaf-5b91-48b8-ba97-dd7b4c30e60f)) - **Libraries vs. Services** - Libraries offer more self-reliance than services because users can run them independently. - Spencer Baugh and Justin Searles emphasize the cost-effectiveness and control of libraries. Transcript: Jerod Santo Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks. Quote, a service has constant administration costs which are paid by the service provider. A library instead moves these costs to the user of the library. For any developer with limited resources, this means a library, where viable, can provide the same functionality to the user at a lower cost to the developer than a service. End quote. By library, he means any software that can be run by the user, like shared objects, modules, servers, command line utilities, stuff like that. By service, he means any software which the user cannot run on their own. Spencer's stance harmonizes with what Justin Searles and I discussed on our recent It Dependencies episode of Change Talk and Friends. Speaker 2 There's a theme here that I think, you know, something about dependency shopping that we haven't really dug into that I have identified as being a big motivator for me personally, in Terms of like, what is the principle that's driving my decision-making process around dependencies and what I use and whether built versus by. And I think it's self-reliance. If you go to like the self-hosted subreddit, you know, it's kind of like the digital equivalent of prepper culture of like, you know, people, uh, trying to cordon themselves off from, From the rest of the world. And I don't typically identify with that group or that instinct when people talk about, you know, privacy rights, extremists,ists or or people who say you know like i want to own my data Yeah i think that is a these are sufficiently confusing flags to plant in the ground and just how kind of you know online everything is these days but when i think of it through the frame Of self-reliance like at the end of the day how many other people could knock over my sandcastle and i want to keep that number as low as possible. ([Time 0:05:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/10dd6f69-1d4b-4997-aba7-727d9e1a5276))