Here are some things I did last year, and an outlook on what to expect in the new year.

bas.fm – Conversations with people in tech

I launched my podcast, bas.fm, last summer.

I want to share conversations with people in tech, so that we can all benefit from different perspectives on the development of our industry, rather than just watching massive changes from the sidelines.

I will continue releasing episodes tomorrow, starting with the awesome Dan Vega. We have an interesting conversation about the fundamentals of software engineering. Make sure you subscribe to the
YouTube channel, or on your favorite podcast app to not mis’t miss the next episodes.

If you want to know what’s in there, watch my announcement video:

Stelvio: Python framework for Serverless on AWS

I joined Michal Martinka to build Stelvio: AWS for Python devs.

Stelvio is a framework for Serverless on AWS. I’m super excited about the progress we’ve made in the last year. You can now generate complete serverless apps in pure Python, deploy them to AWS, and even run your Lambda functions locally.

Here’s a short clip on what that looks like:

But we’re not stopping there. We’ve also launched the Stelvio Early Explorer program, where we’re actively reaching out to people building awesome stuff on AWS with Python.

If you want to help us shape the future of this Open Source project, we’d love to hear from you. Check out the contact form at stelvio.dev/ee.

Personal Connections

First Covid, then layoffs, now AI. We barely recovered from one before being thrown into the next.

This is why I’m convinced more than ever that personal connections are what count these days.

I am already planning my conferences and meetups for 2026. Certainly, one of the best ones of 2025 was Commit Your Code in Texas. Danny, the organizer behind it, is already planning the next one. It’s a conference with incredible value at an affordable price. I’ve talked with Danny on my podcast, too.

I’m also excited to share that I’m officially an ambassador at Torc. Torc, now being part of Randstad, is a staffing company that puts community first. And they mean it. There is an active Discord, where you can geek out, get career advice, or CV reviews for free. This is an awesome opportunity to level up your networking skills and advance your career. If you want to learn more, there’s also a conversation on my podcast I had with Taylor, Head of Community at Torc.

Happy New Year

I hope you’ve already had a great start to 2026 and have an incredible year ahead of you and your loved ones.

Feel free to reach out, and let’s connect. Happy to hear from y’all!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🧑‍⚖️ It’s the interest rates

“I’ve been working with the internet since ‘95'. You see the pendulum move back and forth” – A short clip from the “We Are Developers World Congress” caught my attention. David Heinemeier Hansson, known as DHH for the creation of Ruby on Rails, said these words yesterday. He continues saying that the era of “free money” that we’ve seen from 2009-2021, has come to an end (“at least for a while”).

That’s not really new. I’ve covered the job market, interest rates, and the economic impact of AI on the tech industry several times in previous issues of this newsletter.

However, he makes a clear point on productivity. Money isn’t free anymore (i.e. interest rates are above zero), so productivity matters again. Instead of hiring more people, the goal is to make the existing team members more productive. So, let’s take a deeper dive:

Technologies

Remember, when all these cool frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, or Django started? People came from a world of old-school Java and SOAP, moving to script languages, and REST. A major step towards simplification of development. After that, we’ve seen again more complex things like GraphQL.

Self-hosted architectures are on the “re-rise” as well. In a recent paper AWS submitted to UK regulators, they say about their “competition”:

AWS also says that customers may switch back to on-premises for a number of reasons, including "to reallocate their own internal finances…"

The Numbers

While those stories are purely anecdotal, we need to look at some real numbers.

The assumption is that “free money”, i.e. low interest rates, leads to over-hiring, and lower productivity. For the broader economy (ex-agriculture), this seems true:

The period between 2009 and 2022 with low interest rates also has low rates of change in productivity. The spikes can be attributed to the aftermath of two recessions: the subprime crisis, and the covid-recession.

If that’s true, it seems likely that these observations should be reflected in founding of new companies. And, indeed, the number of startups in the “Productivity” category of YCombinator has shown an increase since 2019.

However, this is misleading, as it does not account for the total number of startups in each batch. In fact, “Productivity” startups float around 6% with no significant deviation over time.

But there is another category of YC startups: “Engineering, Product and Design”, in short: DevTools. Apart from the outliers in 2006 and 2009 (based on the small numbers of all startups), we see a sharp increase starting in 2022, quite precisely when interest rates were rising.

What are the conclusions from these observations:

• Hard times create hard workers (an aftermath of recessions)

• There’s no free lunch. When money is free, productivity suffers

• We will see a decline in over-engineering, probably a de-acceleration of cloud adoption, and a rise in tools and services that reduce development complexity

📰 Interesting Reads

• Can You Trust Your Phone?

• Apple Mobile Processors Are Now Made in America. By TSMC

• Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🧑‍⚖️ The Times They Are A-Changin’

Apple held their keynote yesterday. As an Apple fan, these keynotes have not been the same since Steve Jobs passed and certainly not since they’re not live, anymore after Covid. The rhetoric, mimic and gestures of the Apple managers are so streamlined, impersonal and lacking originality that in combination with the same bullshit bingo phrases repeated year after year become so boring. Yes, I know that this is the slimmest gadget you ever produced and despite encouraging people to buy a new one every year, this one is bazillion times less impactful to the planet. “Corporate Memphis”, an attempt not to offend anyone, so as not to step on anyone's toes and drown any originality in soulless arbitrariness, is so clearly visible that the whole prerecorded presentation might as well be completely AI-generated.

But that’s not my point. Beyond the rehearsed speeches and shiny gadgets, two announcements stood out to me: Sleep apnoea detection on the Apple Watch, and hearing tests in a software update for the AirPods Pro 2. Both features are healthcare related, and thus, highly regulated. It’s no coincidence that Apple awaits approval from the FDA (USA), and regulatory bodies in Germany and Japan – covering three continents, each with the strictest regulation in place. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

At the same time, they announced some expected, yet impressive features for “Apple Intelligence” which they interestingly refer to as “Machine Learning”, not so much as AI.

Barely any of those features are available in the EU. But you can delete the messages app and install Fortnite. Whether this is the result of intentional malicious compliance with EU regulations or EU regulations being so strict that even Apple cannot handle it, doesn’t even matter at this point.

What’s important, is that the future of tech – like anything else – is not in the hands of engineers but of bureaucrats and corporate lawyers more than ever.

Forgotten are the times when nerds could pursue their passion and change the world with simple tools and a soldering iron or keyboard, unchallenged by unsuspecting functionaries and profiteers. If you’re nostalgic, there are two books that offer a glimpse into that era and remind us of what's at stake:

• Fire in the Valley by Michael Swaine

• How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough

I mentioned it last week: A risk in tech is not whether AI replaces software development jobs, but rather whether AI is accessible and affordable for “indie” developers and teams. Rumours are that OpenAI’s next models could cost $2,000 per month.

This trend is concerning. As AI becomes less accessible (due to higher prices or stricter regulation) to indie developers and small teams, we risk seeing a future where the barrier to entry into tech markets is unbearably high. The creativity that once defined the tech landscape could give way to monopolized, corporate-driven progress.

It’s a similar story with the cloud: You’re tricked into thinking you “need” scalability, when you don’t. Once locked in, it’s payday. On Vercel, for example, Pieter Levels would pay $35,000 a month. Or, as DHH puts it: “You don't have much need for auto-scaling when compute is cheap. It's a cloud solution to a cloud problem. When you own your own cores, you just get enough that it doesn't require constant monitoring”.

As the iPhone demonstrates, AI and tech regulation are becoming inseparable, and the days of unfettered innovation by passionate nerds may be slipping away, replaced by the dictates of bureaucrats and lawyers. The question is no longer whether AI will change the world, but whether we’ll still have room to shape it ourselves.

📰 Interesting Reads

• EU, UK, US, Israel sign world’s first AI Treaty

• Everyone assumes it's game over, but Intel's huge bet on 18A is still very much game on

• This German startup is Europe’s best hope for developing AI advancement outside Silicon Valley

• Prediction: Microsoft Azure To Reach $200 Billion In Revenue By 2028

🐍 Web Scraping With Python And Scrapy

I’m excited to announce today's release of my brand-new, first-of-its-kind miniguide on Web Scraping with Python and Scrapy, and guess what? It's completely free, courtesy of ScraperAPI! Whether you're new to scraping or just looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start collecting data from the web like a pro. Think of all the possibilities—tracking prices, gathering leads, or even doing a bit of market research. And here's the best part: download the miniguide now, and you'll snag 10% off on all ScraperAPI services. Happy scraping!

Get the miniguide for free

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

📉 Is “Learn to Code” Over?

The US job market seems to be in slow, but steady decline since 2022.

I used the number of job postings on Indeed as reported by St. Louis Fed as a proxy measurement. What’s interesting though, is the number of job postings for Software Development Jobs. I tried to make sense of job market data in a previous issue of this newsletter back in April.

As of now, there are still more or less the same models that could explain the “tech hiring bubble”:

• Covid 2020-2022: Lockdowns and the rise of remote work, vastly accelerated by government stimuli, led to a surge in demand for software developers. This increased wages and number of jobs. Low interest rates led to a boom in Venture Capital, primarily in digital transformation markets.

• Rising inflation (from 2021) and supply chain disruptions (aftermath of primarily the Covid era and the Russia-Ukraine war) led to monetary policy tightening, leading to a decrease in investments of VCs, and thus, to a market correction after over-hiring.

• The mass layoffs starting in 2022 and the decline in tech stocks, along with rising interest rates, led to a cultural shift from growth (“free money”) to profitability (“high interest rates”) in most tech companies.

Times were eventful over the last four or five years, so seeing markets overshoot and correct, is not surprising.

If that would not be enough to stress the markets, there is more to come. According to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, India is projected to be the global hub of developers by 2027.

On top of that, AI plays an important role in developer jobs. With Co-Pilot making developers faster by 55% (according to Dohmke), this would be “an acceleration not seen since the industrial age”. There’s a lot of marketing in this statement. Everything seems to be AI-powered these days. As of now, training AI models and generating responses, requires vast amounts of energy. Markets react to this already heavily. It’s a long time since we saw an “architecture war” in the chip market. The rise of NVIDIA and ARM is a direct result of AI.

In my personal experience, AI coding assistants like Co-Pilot, Cursor, or Pieces, make me more productive. I spend less time writing boilerplate code or handling repetitive tasks. I use Grammarly to check my writing and increasingly use ChatGPT for research. Sometimes, I generate placeholder images with Dall-E or Grok. I do not believe that LLMs are somewhat near “general artificial intelligence” nor that we achieve primate-level intelligence in the foreseeable future.

Given the substantial training costs of AI models — ranging from $4 million for Davinci to $78 million for GPT-4 and up to $191 million for Gemini Ultra — along with the significant energy consumption involved, I see a potential risk for the tech industry. Many of the AI tools we use today, like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot, might become too expensive to offer as widely available services. Larger companies, however, could afford to run their own in-house models. For instance, if the cost to operate a model as powerful as Gemini Ultra is around $200 million, and assuming a software developer earns an average salary of $200k, with a productivity gain of 50%, this would be cost-effective for a team of 2,000 developers. If tools like Co-Pilot become unaffordable or unavailable to individual developers and smaller companies, we could see a growing divide in how technology is utilized between small and large enterprises.

For decades, tech has been an arena where “anyone with a laptop” (along with a brilliant idea and a strong network) could create something impactful. In the future, AI might replace developers — not by eliminating their jobs entirely, but by creating a landscape where the tools that once levelled the playing field are only accessible to the largest players. Jobs may still exist, though on a smaller scale, but individual developers and smaller companies might no longer have access to the same resources as the big players.

📰 Interesting Reads

• Starlink Diefies Order to Block X in Brazil

• Zuckerberg says he regrets caving to White House pressure on content

• Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

• Founder Mode

• Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

🐍 Web Scraping With Python And Scrapy

I’m excited to announce today's release of my brand-new, first-of-its-kind miniguide on Web Scraping with Python and Scrapy, and guess what? It's completely free, courtesy of ScraperAPI! Whether you're new to scraping or just looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start collecting data from the web like a pro. Think of all the possibilities—tracking prices, gathering leads, or even doing a bit of market research. And here's the best part: download the miniguide now, and you'll snag 10% off on all ScraperAPI services. Happy scraping!

Get the miniguide for free

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🩴 “Level” Up Your VPS Game?

Big News: Pieter Levels, known as @levelsio and creator of NomadList, PhotoAI and other successful single-man startup operations, travelled to Austin. After tweeting a lot about his experience in the States, last week the reason for his travel became clear: He was interviewed by Lex Friedman on his podcast.

Pieter, always known as the index.php and jQuery guy, raised some controversy with his tech stack choice and him operating more or less everything on a single Digital Ocean VPS. Let’s take a deeper dive into his insights.

Level’s operations

The “early” levelsio startups, like NomadList, HoodMaps, and RemoteOK, were conceptually very close: A data source narrowed down to a specific niche, built from public sources, crowdsourcing, or selling ads. Some interactivity like message boards, or direct messages, and you’re there. Technically, these sites are quite simple, from a software development point of view. No real-time data, no large datasets, no media encoding, no Single-Sign-On, and not even close to large Social Media sites in terms of concurrent users. The frontends are not complex, either. Basically, they just display tabular data on server-side generated HTML.

The newer startups – all in the realm of Generative Artificial Intelligence – like PhotoAI, TherapistAI and others, are not complex either. Basically, those are just frontends to paid APIs that offer AI models running on cloud GPUs – an opportunity that levels saw in 2022.

Besides the technical similarities, all of Level’s operations are low-cost products, where nobody seriously gets hurt if they go down – even for a longer period of time.

Level’s choices

While you could still debate the choice not to use a framework at all, Levels just used the tools he felt most comfortable with. I started my first Internet projects with PHP as well, and luckily discovered Django quite early (way before the 1.0 release back then). Implementing stuff like Auth (yes, including Social Auth) was always something I considered available out of the box. I don’t feel that Auth services like Auth0 are making me more productive than – for example – using django-allauth. For servers, databases, and other infrastructure services, there a lots of cheap alternatives to cloud based offerings. Even a 1GB VPS from DigitalOcean or Hetzner can already handle an impressive load of concurrent users (Here is my benchmark from December 2023). If you really need geo-redundancy, hot failover, and other cool stuff, really depends on the use case. “Not trusting” his products because of the tech stack is a bit a far reach given that those products only provide access to a simple database.

Levels questions the marketing of cloud providers.

Maintainability vs. Reusability

His technical choices must also be seen in the light of his business choices: Levels does not want a VC involved (a point which is discussed at length in the podcast). He also wants to work on his own and go to market very early (in the early days of PhotoAI he used a TypeForm and sent out generated images by hand).

At this point, Levels most likely has built a collection of libraries or code snippets that he can reuse in upcoming projects. Given that his projects are similar to each other, it’s also likely that those code snippets are feature-frozen making them vastly reusable for himself.

Under maintenance aspects, however, the index.php + jQuery combination seems far from optimal. In the podcast, he also mentions that he has a hard time finding someone who wants to work on his codebase without rewriting it.

Conclusion

What can we learn from Pieter Levels?

Starting with a simple stack in which you are comfortable, seems like a good way to start. The knowledge and experience that you will gain using “vanilla technologies” will also help you evaluate SaaS/IaaS/PaaS offerings: You will know what they offer and when and why you need them or not.

Some use cases, also used by Levels, such as web-scraping or AI, can be built on paid APIs. For my scraping projects, I rely heavily on ScraperAPI, for example.

In a team context, relying on a framework is beneficial. Even if the framework is bloated, there is most likely one way to solve particular tasks, like routing or Auth. Not having to discuss those with a team drives productivity a lot.

⛓️ Telegram Founder Arrested

Access on the tarmac: French security forces arrested Pawel Durov, founder and head of the chat app Telegram, at Le Bourget airport in Paris on Saturday evening after he landed on a private jet. Since the emergence of messenger and social media platforms, there has been no known case in which Western authorities have arrested the operator of a service used by millions.

However, the French authorities took their time to explain or even confirm the arrest. An official statement on the arrest was released as late as Monday afternoon.

The National Cybercrime Unit and the Anti-Fraud Office are investigating Durov, a police spokesperson said. He is accused of failing to cooperate in cases of online crime and financial crimes that took place on Telegram.

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that Durov had been arrested as part of legal proceedings and that it was “in no way a political decision”.

Telegram was also said to be doing too little in the area of content moderation and cooperating insufficiently with the authorities. The police are also apparently accusing Durov of glorifying terrorism. The terrorism offence would allow the authorities to detain the Telegram boss for 96 hours without charge. This four-day period ends on Wednesday evening. Durov's interrogation is still ongoing, according to reports.

Pressure on Telegram has also increased at EU level in recent months. However, according to a spokesperson, the EU Commission was not involved in Durov's arrest.

The strictest requirements of the DSA only apply to large online platforms, so-called VLOPs with more than 45 million users. Telegram claimed in February that it only had 41 million users in the EU.

By comparison, X has around 360 million users worldwide and more than 130 million in the EU.

Who is Pavel Durov

In December 2011, Russia experienced the largest anti-Kremlin protests since the end of the Soviet Union. 10,000 people also demonstrated in Durov's hometown of St. Petersburg against election fraud and Putin's return to the presidency.

At the time, Durov was still head of the social network VKontakte, his Russian copycat of Facebook, which had more than 100 million users at the time. The fact that opposition groups were calling for demonstrations via the network displeased the Russian government. The FSB domestic intelligence service ordered Durov to close the groups. Instead of complying with the order, he published the letter from the intelligence service on Twitter. Three days later, armed members of the Omon special police were at the door of his apartment. “They seemed to want to break the door,” Durov later recalled in an interview with the New York Times. He watched the officers through the monitor of his intercom system and did not open the door. After an hour, they disappeared.

Since then, Durov has been largely unreachable, just like the Telegram team. 25 to 30 people reportedly work in Telegram's core team. Former employees who still have connections to the team confirm this; few names are public – for security reasons.

The investigation into Durov, who is critical of the state, is also likely to focus on “Ton”. Telegram users can use the Ton coin to buy various things directly on the platform, such as vanity usernames, and the service also gives channel operators a share of the advertising revenue. In the meantime, the Ton Coin has risen to the top ten of all cryptocurrencies – and the Durov brothers have effectively achieved what Mark Zuckerberg failed to do with his Diem project.

Over the weekend, however, it became clear that the markets also find it implausible that Durov's fate is not closely intertwined with Ton. Immediately after news of Durow's arrest made the rounds, the value of the coin plummeted by almost 20 percent.

🐍 Web Scraping With Python And Scrapy

I’m excited to announce today's release of my brand-new, first-of-its-kind miniguide on Web Scraping with Python and Scrapy, and guess what? It's completely free, courtesy of ScraperAPI! Whether you're new to scraping or just looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start collecting data from the web like a pro. Think of all the possibilities—tracking prices, gathering leads, or even doing a bit of market research. And here's the best part: download the miniguide now, and you'll snag 10% off on all ScraperAPI services. Happy scraping!

Get the miniguide for free

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

In this issue, Chris Nowicki shares some insights into his journey to be more productive in his life as a developer.

Have a great week ahead!

🕸️ JavaScript is Dead, Long Live TypeScript

Big news for Node.js developers: as of July 2024, Node.js has introduced native support for TypeScript, signalling a shift that might eventually make JavaScript a thing of the past for many. If you've ever been frustrated by the hoops you had to jump through to configure TypeScript in Node.js, you're not alone. While still experimental, this new feature allows TypeScript to be used directly in Node.js without the usual setup hassles.

The initial implementation is simple — Node.js will strip away TypeScript's type annotations at runtime without transforming the code, similar to what Deno and Bun are already doing. This means that while you can now run TypeScript code in Node.js, some features like enums or namespaces won’t work just yet. It's an early-stage development, but it’s a step in the right direction.

This type-stripping feature is powered by the @swc/wasm-typescript module, which uses WebAssembly to handle TypeScript parsing quickly and efficiently. While there are still some limitations — such as needing to name files with a .ts extension and the lack of support for TypeScript in node modules — these are expected to be addressed in future updates.

Looking ahead, the Node.js team plans to decouple type-stripping from specific Node.js versions, allowing for more flexibility and updates independent of Node.js releases. This could eventually lead to full support for TypeScript features and better integration with tools like tsconfig.json.

While there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic, it's still early days. The Node.js team has set an ambitious roadmap, but only time will tell how quickly these features will be fully realized. For now, it’s exciting to see Node.js catching up to the likes of Deno and Bun, bringing much-needed innovation back to the platform.

🐍 Web Scraping With Python And Scrapy

I’m excited to announce today's release of my brand-new, first-of-its-kind miniguide on Web Scraping with Python and Scrapy, and guess what? It's completely free, courtesy of ScraperAPI! Whether you're new to scraping or just looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start collecting data from the web like a pro. Think of all the possibilities—tracking prices, gathering leads, or even doing a bit of market research. And here's the best part: download the miniguide now, and you'll snag 10% off on all ScraperAPI services. Happy scraping!

Get the miniguide for free

🎙️ Chris’s Thoughts

Chris Nowicki, a full stack dev from Cleveland, TN, gave an inspiring talk about “A Framework to a better YOU”. I asked him to highlight the main aspects of his journey to find a productivity framework. Here’s what he shares for this newsletter:

There are 86,400 seconds, 1,440 minutes, and 24 hours in a day. How we choose to spend our time matters! Many of us are always searching for ways to be more productive and do more. We seek out new to-do apps, calendars, and productivity methods that might help us. When we think about productivity, we often overlook how self-care impacts our day-to-day ability to be productive. Here are a few areas to consider when it comes to self-care:

EAT - Stay nourished throughout the day. Eat healthy, whole food meals whenever possible.
SLEEP - Aim for at least 7 hours of sleep each night. If circumstances in your life make that difficult, try to get more sleep than you usually do.
HYDRATE - Make sure you're drinking enough water. Aim for at least 64 oz. of water a day. My daily goal is usually set to 128 oz. (1 gallon).
MOVE - Step outside and go for a walk. If you can’t get outside, consider a desk treadmill. Aim for 10,000 steps a day, ideally spread out over two walks.

My wife is a mental therapist, and when her clients aren’t taking care of the basics, she knows they won’t be in the mindset to do the deep work required to heal. The self-care basics above support our mental and physical health, which ultimately drives our productivity in the long run. If you don’t have habits in these areas, don’t dive in all at once. Start with small daily goals (think Atomic Habits, 1% improvement a day) to build up gradually.

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

In this issue, Eddy Vinck shares some insights into his journey of building BlogRecorder besides his day job.

Have a great week ahead!

📉 Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI

You might have thought that the drama surrounding OpenAI had reached its peak last year, but the developments in 2024 have shown that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The events of the past few months not only raise amusing but also deeply concerning questions that go far beyond mere competition between tech giants.

In March 2024, Microsoft made a bold move by establishing its own AI division, "Microsoft AI," signalling clear intentions to compete with OpenAI. They chose Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of DeepMind, as the head of this new division, sparking both curiosity and scepticism. Suleyman is undeniably a technical genius, but his controversial leadership practices at Google raise questions about how he will shape this new chapter at Microsoft. Regardless of these concerns, it is evident that Microsoft wants to assert its independence from OpenAI — despite its massive investments in the company.

Apple Bets on OpenAI – and Puts Microsoft in a Tight Spot

Then came June 2024, and with it, Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). Apple proudly announced the integration of advanced AI features into its operating systems. Siri is set to not only listen better but also respond more intelligently. The surprising part? Apple is using ChatGPT to power these improvements — without paying for it. In an agreement that promises OpenAI massive exposure on Apple devices, the two companies have created a win-win situation. Microsoft, which has invested over 10 billion dollars in OpenAI in recent years, is likely viewing this development with mixed feelings. A hard blow, one might say, but this was only the beginning.

A Power Play Behind the Scenes: The Bizarre Boardroom Shuffle

The game continued in July 2024 when Apple unexpectedly gained a seat on OpenAI’s board, only to give it up a week later—simultaneously with Microsoft. Officially, this move was prompted by regulatory concerns from the U.S. antitrust authorities, but the timing raises many questions. It seems that the big tech companies are increasingly pressured to curb their influence on crucial future technologies. These developments clearly show that even in an industry often perceived as unregulated, there are limits—and these are increasingly being enforced by the authorities.

From Partners to Rivals: The Fault Line Becomes Visible

Finally, on July 25, 2024, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, a new AI-based search engine that directly competes with Google and other search providers. This announcement marks another turning point because just days later, Microsoft officially listed OpenAI as a competitor in their annual report. The once-strong partnership seems to be seriously faltering, raising the question of how the relationship between the two companies will evolve.

The developments surrounding OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple are not just a fascinating power play but also raise fundamental questions: What does it mean for the future of AI when such critical technologies are concentrated in the hands of a few companies? While the rivalry between these tech giants is intriguing to watch, we must remember that this is about more than just profits and losses. The future of AI could have profound implications for all of humanity—and this decision should not be left solely in the hands of tech corporations.

🇪🇺 EU, Trump, Musk, Breton

Yesterday, Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on X. I usually do not comment on such political occurrences, and I won’t make an exception in this case, either.

I cannot resist commenting on Mr. Breton, Commissioner of the Internal Market at the European Union, and spiritual father of the Digital Services Act, however.

Mr. Breton, as an EU official, took pleasure in threatening X under the pretext of the safety of EU citizens in advance of said interview between a US citizen and a former president of the United States, broadcasted by a US company. In his threatening letter to X (officially represented by its CEO Linda Yaccarino), addressed to Elon Musk personally, and ironically published on his personal X account, Mr. Breton fails to explain which safety concerns could potentially occur from listening to an interview with a presidential candidate in another continent.

I felt the immediate urge to publicly explain that – as a European – I never voted for Mr Breton, holder of both, French, and Senegalese citizenship (the latter apparently for tax reasons). Then, I found out, nobody did. He was appointed.

While regulations, such as the Digital Services Act are outright harmful to Europe’s economy, as I pointed out in a previous issue of this newsletter, the EU has positive aspects, Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights being one of them.

🎙️ Eddy’s Thoughts

During THAT Conference, I met Eddy Vinck again. He is a Software Engineer, and is working on his side project, BlogRecorder. Impressively, he sponsored the conference, hustled a lot and reached a 1000$ turnover milestone just weeks after his launch. I asked him to share some insights into his journey. Here is what he recorded:

What is something that you changed your mind about in the last months?

When I look back at the recent months, one major realization stands out: I should have launched BlogRecorder much sooner. Initially, I took too much time working on the product before launching. In hindsight, this approach delayed valuable user feedback. I set up paying subscriptions and had a small group of testers, but I missed out on early insights that could have come from a wider user base. The lesson here is to launch quickly, get feedback early, and improve as you go.

What are you working on right now, and what are your goals for the next year?

Right now, I'm fresh off a conference where I did some in-person marketing for my app, BlogRecorder. The feedback has been invaluable, and I'm planning to implement new features based on user requests. Here's what's on the horizon:

• Allowing users to upload audio, not just record within the app.

• Removing the 15-minute limit on recordings.

• Personalizing the AI model for each user to better match their writing style.

• Introducing preferences for the AI-generated article's tone—be it business-like or casual.

These updates are all about enhancing the user experience and delivering on what my community is asking for.

For the next year, I would like to make BlogRecorder work for teams and organizations and start selling subscriptions in the B2B space. I have some ideas for collaborative features, too.

Could you improve a skill, a life hack, or your health in recent times?

Over the past year, I've been committed to maintaining my health and losing a lot of excess weight, but as the launch drew near, I found myself sacrificing gym time to put in more work hours. The decision to work more was intentional, but in hindsight I regret not staying more active.

Balancing life and work as a big lesson in general: Leading up to THAT Conference which started 6 weeks after launching BlogRecorder I overworked myself by taking on too much work with too few breaks. A few weeks before the conference I recognized this, and forced myself to stop working outside of my day job for a couple weeks, even though I had not finished my presentation yet. If I hadn't done that, then I probably would've burned myself out. Although this did result in having some deadline stress, but I think it was the better choice here.

🎥 GitHub Actions Talk

I finally managed to upload the video of my talk on “GitHub Actions for Fun & Profit”.

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

📉 Market Crash?!

The market crashed!!! Did it, really? The Nikkei Index experienced a daily loss not seen since 1987, Intel devalued a lot, as did NVIDIA.

On a larger time-scale, however, the “market crash” in the Dow Jones feels like nothing. And, the Nikkei recovered slightly – today, it had a 10.23% plus.

There are a couple of factors that potentially could have led to the losses.

Yen Carry Trade

The Yen carry trade involves borrowing funds in yen, which has low interest rates, to invest in higher-yielding assets elsewhere. With the recent market crash, investors likely rushed to unwind these trades to avoid further losses, selling off assets in other markets and buying back yen to repay their loans. This sudden repatriation into yen would have contributed to the market crashes, as massive sell-offs drive down asset prices. Moreover, with yen interest rates expected to rise and USD rates to fall, the cost of maintaining yen-funded investments increases, making the carry trade less attractive and prompting more unwinding. This created a cascading effect, amplifying market volatility and the downturn.

The relative difference is of importance here. So even a small increase can bring the whole setup down.

Job Market Report and General Recession Expectation

In July, job growth in the United States decelerated significantly, with the addition of only 114,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, the highest since 2021. Investors' concerns about an economic slowdown were reflected in sharp declines in various stocks, especially in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which entered correction territory. The disappointing job figures and other indicators, such as deteriorating manufacturing employment and significant layoffs announced by Intel, have heightened worries about a potential recession and raised questions about the Federal Reserve's handling of interest rates.

Despite the overall job market cooling, certain sectors like healthcare, construction, and leisure and hospitality saw job gains in July. However, the information sector experienced a notable job loss. The Sahm rule, an economic indicator, suggests the economy could be nearing a recession. Although some economists, like Claudia Sahm, believe the current unemployment rate increase may overstate the labor market's weakness, there is a consensus on the need to watch for signs of stabilization. The overall slowdown in hiring and concerns over the direction of the labor market continue to weigh heavily on economic outlooks.

Intel, NVIDIA, AMD

Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD were a bit special in the market turbulence of the last days: Intel struggles with “aging” processors that break if operated at a higher load (affecting both, the 13th and 14th generation of Core processors).

AMD, on the other hand, makes losses with their GPUs, and NVIDIA’s stock may just have been due for a correction – after all the AI hype.

Side Note: US brokers down?

According to downdetector.com customers of some of the larger US brokers had issues accessing their accounts or placing new orders – which expectedly – led to conspiracy theories on Twitter. The issues seem to be solved by the time of writing. I could not find any news outlet that picked up these outages, so it probably was just DNS? ;)

🤝 THAT Conference

As I’ve mentioned in one of the last issues of this newsletter, I attended THAT conference last week – that’s also the reason why there wasn’t a newsletter last Tuesday. This year, I had the pleasure of giving a talk on GitHub Actions, showcasing some exciting example repositories. Connecting with both new and familiar faces made the event incredibly warm and rewarding. What sets THAT Conference apart is its intimate and personal atmosphere, with engaging offerings for spouses and children that make it a true family affair. Highlights included a mouthwatering pig roast and a lively waterpark party, adding a splash of fun to the fantastic professional exchanges. Can’t wait for next year!

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 The Crowdstrike Issue

What is CrowdStrike?

Crowdstrike is a world-leading US company in the field of IT security. One of its products, called Falcon Sensor, is used to monitor activity in real time, detect malicious activity in data traffic and block attacks. According to media reports, a faulty Falcon update may have caused the disruption.

For many Crowdstrike customers, nothing worked at all on Friday morning because their computers only displayed the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” error message and no longer booted up. Many users who are not direct Crowdstrike customers but use the Microsoft 365 service, for example, were also affected.

Behind the scenes

Apparently, a file full of null bytes caused the Falcon service to crash. Since the Falcon service runs privileged at system startup, the clients were caught in an endless loop. 

Microsoft and Crowdstrike are two different companies. Why did the Crowdstrike Falcon service have such extensive system permissions? Microsoft blames an EU regulation from 2009. Following a complaint, Microsoft reached an agreement with the EU in 2009, in which security software manufacturers must be given the same access to Windows as Microsoft. This has now proved fatal, according to Microsoft.

Critical infrastructure was affected, for example, numerous flights were cancelled. Interestingly, Southwest Airlines was less affected. Insiders suspect that the infrastructure there is still running on Windows 3.11. Not a joke.

In 2010, there was a problem at security manufacturer McAfee, which also paralyzed the internet at the time.

The McAfee CTO at the time, George Kurtz, is now the founder and CEO of Crowdstrike, which, along with Dmitri Alperovitch, an American with Russian roots and founder of a geostrategic think tank in Washington, has given rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories.

From a due diligence point of view, the only thing that remains to be said is that system-critical software that can lead to a total failure by mistake because it updates itself via the Internet can also lead to such a disaster on purpose. Trust in Crowdstrike must have been high, especially since the software is not suitable for use with critical infrastructure according to its own license terms (section 8).

Reddit also wonders why Crowdstrike should be worth 83 billion dollars.

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 Apple, Microsoft bringing AI to end user devices

Alphabet is in advanced negotiations to acquire the cybersecurity start-up Wiz. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal. The purchase price is around 23 billion US dollars.

It would be the largest takeover of the internet company Alphabet, Google's parent company. Wiz, founded in Israel in 2020 by CEO Assaf Rappaport and now based in New York, is one of the fastest-growing software start-ups in the world. Wiz offers cybersecurity products for cloud-based development work with real-time threat detection based on artificial intelligence. Rappaport was General Manager at Microsoft Israel.

Wiz was valued at 12 billion US dollars in a financing round at the beginning of the year and received one billion US dollars. The backers include well-known investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Wiz has its own cloud data centers worldwide. A new location in Dubai, UAE, was recently announced. As of February 2024, Wiz had around 900 employees, with most sales and marketing staff based in North America and Europe, while developers are based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Wiz works with most services from market-leading cloud Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Google is in third place in cloud computing behind Amazon and Microsoft. Last year, revenue in Google's cloud business increased by 26% and the division reported an operating profit for the first time.

📰 Other readings

• Linus Torvalds says RISC-V will make the same mistakes as Arm and x86

• Goldman Sachs: Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?

• Zed on Linux is here

• AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach

• Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 Apple, Microsoft bringing AI to end user devices

It's been a while since Apple changed its company name. Since 2007, the company has no longer been called Apple Computer, Inc, but simply Apple, Inc.

Then came Cloud, subscription software and now: AI.

This is certainly not the first time (and probably not the last) that the end of the personal computer has been proclaimed.

Microsoft has announced an explosive tool: Recall. On ARM computers, the software collects screenshots to make the usage history of the no longer quite so personal computer searchable with the help of AI.

The data Recall generates by observing the user ends up in the Windows user profile folder under AppData, for example in C:\Users\bas\AppData\Local\CoreAIPlatform.00\UKP. There is a subfolder with a GUID name that contains an SQLite3 database and an “ImageStore” subfolder with the screenshots in JPEG format.

Alexander Hagenah has published "TotalRecall", a Python script on GitHub that backs up and analyzes the data contained in the database. This makes it easy to check on the command line whether a particular word appears in the data. Hagenah demonstrates this using the search term “password” as an example, which inspires headlines suggesting that passwords can be extracted from the AI data fog. This is not wrong, but the password must presumably have been displayed legibly on the screen.

The concerning nature of the function lies less in the fact that it stores individual secrets in the database than in the aggregation of the data: if bad guys have intercepted the data, they can quickly obtain screenshots from the user's online banking thanks to AI and can assess whether the victim's account balance is worth further effort. The data is presented on a silver platter and the database provides the table of contents.

But it's not just bad guys who might be interested in the aggregated data. After all, you can also learn a lot about the user's habits from this treasure trove of data. In the SQLite database, for example, there is a table that neatly documents how many seconds the user has spent in which application. Companies like to monitor their employees. With Recall, they only need additional software for targeted analysis. Perhaps specialized AI will help again?

Meanwhile, Apple presented new features yesterday.

As many had hoped, Apple let the AI cat out of the bag at the end of the WWDC keynote. Apple's AI is deeply integrated into the system, understands users and knows about them. The company emphasizes its high data protection standards. The computing capacity of the device and Apple's own servers with Apple chips are used for larger AI models. Many basic models are executed directly on the devices so as not to reveal any private details to Apple. More complex tasks are handled by servers, which Apple calls "Private Cloud Compute". Apple also wants to be able to quickly adapt and improve the AI models.

Apple also announced the integration of ChatGPT into all systems. The company is currently relying on the current language model GPT-4o from OpenAI. No account will be required. When accessing the OpenAI servers, the IP addresses are made unrecognizable and, according to Apple, OpenAI does not store any requests. Users will receive a warning when they access ChatGPT.

Elon Musk has already announced that he will no longer allow Apple devices in his companies.

With Apple's new features, a number of third-party providers are likely to lose a large part of their business model:

• Password Managers like 1Password

• Hiking Apps like Alltrails

• Writing helpers like Grammarly

• Phone recorders like Tapeacall

• Math Notes Apps like Soulver

• iPhone Mirroring tools

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 Why OpenAI wanted to get rid of Sam Altman

There has been much speculation about the reasons for the failed coup. Now Helen Toner, a former board member of the ChatGPT company, provides some answers in the TED AI Show podcast.

Altman was unexpectedly replaced as CEO of OpenAI in November 2023. The CEO had not been honest with the board, it was said at the time without further explanation - which led to much speculation about the reasons.

One of the triggers for the leadership dispute was a paper co-authored by Helen Toner. “Sam started lying to other board members to force me off the board,” says Toner in the interview. However, she also says that the importance of the dispute over the paper was overstated in the media.

Communication between the CEO and the board had been poor for some time. According to Toner, they had not been informed about the surprise launch of the chatbot ChatGPT in December 2022, which the board learned about via Twitter.

The pressure that ultimately led to Altman's return came from the OpenAI staff. They threatened to migrate to Microsoft.

Toner accuses Altman of lying, manipulating and creating a “toxic atmosphere”. Some employees had acted out of fear of their boss. Employees had approached the board with reports of “psychological abuse”. She also cites Altman's dismissal at Y Combinator as an example.

Public criticism of this kind has so far been rare at OpenAI. However, the recent revelation of a rigorous confidentiality agreement has caused irritation. OpenAI now wants to amend this.

“We are disappointed that Ms. Toner continues to raise these issues,” said new CEO Bret Taylor in a response. An independent committee had already “comprehensively investigated” the events of November, and over 95% of employees had called for Altman's reinstatement as CEO and the resignation of the previous board.

Several high-ranking employees recently left OpenAI, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who quickly distanced himself from his involvement in the attempted coup.

In the interview, Toner again talks about the need for regulation of so-called artificial intelligence. There seems to have been disagreement at OpenAI in this area too.

AI researcher Jan Leike has already found a new employer following his departure from OpenAI. He will take over the management of a security team at competitor Anthropic, whose remit is very similar to that of OpenAI's disbanded technology impact team.

📰 More headlines

• I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened

• Signal: Will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees

• Things you wish you didn't need to know about S3

• The decline of the user interface

• Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 The Success of NVIDIA

The chip company NVIDIA presents its financial report, the share price jumps above 1,000$.
In one of the last issues of my newsletter, I dealt with the RISC architecture, which is well on the way to stealing Intel's thunder.

NVIDIA - the name comes from the Spanish “envidia”, which means “envy” - is a big beneficiary of the changing computing environment and, of course, the AI boom.

What about the annual report that NVIDIA published last Wednesday? Profit: Increased sevenfold in just one year. Turnover: Better than expected at 26.04 billion dollars in the first quarter. Return on sales? Almost 50%. The share price jumped well above 1,000$ in early US trading on Thursday. Competitors and investors could be envious.

“The next industrial revolution has begun,” said Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The Group has been benefiting from lush demand for several years now: first, the computer parks for the Bitcoin network needed fast chips, then came the computer boom during covid. However, since the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT with so-called artificial intelligence in November 2022, demand has become “stratospheric”, as they say on the stock exchange.

After all, if you want to feed and train AI models with huge amounts of data, there is no way around NVIDIA’s high-performance H100 chip. The company has now secured almost 100% market share in the data center market.

However, there are now more and more doubters who do not see NVIDIA’s legendary rise as a sure-fire success. According to estimates, the four corporations Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet alone account for 40% of NVIDIA's sales of high-performance chips. The fact that these tech giants are now working on their own chips should not have escaped NVIDIA’s notice. This would allow the companies to free themselves from the clutches of NVIDIA's dominance and tailor the chips to their highly specialized needs.

Intel recently presented its own top chip “Gaudi3”. Although it may still lag behind NVIDIA's latest developments in terms of technology, it will increase pressure on chip prices.

In this respect, NVIDIA CEO Huang had to justify himself several times during a conference call with analysts in the eyes of the stock market. In the future, his company will not only want to sell more individual chips but also combine them into supercomputers. And if that wasn't enough, Huang also announced more business with car manufacturers and healthcare companies, which will also have to rely more heavily on artificial intelligence in the future. On top of this, a partnership with Dell is intended to bring special computers for artificial intelligence to medium-sized companies that do not directly require an entire data center.

Stock price is still rising since the earnings report. RISC, more than AI, could drive further growth, depending what Intel still has up its sleeve.

📰 More headlines

• Writing a Unix clone in about a month

• Storing knowledge in a single long plain text file

• 3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe

• The war on encryption is on the rise. Through a shady collaboration between the US and the EU

• Sam Altman Is Showing Us Who He Really Is

• Making EC2 boot time 8x faster

• ICQ will stop working from June 26

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 (Open)AI (again)

In a probably unnoticed act of honesty, OpenAI has admitted that “AI” is probably still miles away from being “intelligent”. As I have written here several times, LLMs are a remixing of content, not a deliberate creation by an intelligence. Admittedly, this looks very impressive, but it is a far cry from the dystopian rule of machines. However, OpenAI set up a team to prevent precisely this rule by machines - and has now fired them. Obviously a marketing stunt that was no longer needed.

But in case anyone was wondering why remixing works so well and what role “Whisper” speech recognition played in this, although speech recognition has less to do with LLMs and more to do with traditional machine learning: By the end of 2021, OpenAI had read the internet and moved on to transcribing all sorts of YouTube videos and also using them as training data. Please support this channel by hitting the subscribe button!

Meanwhile, while some people have jumped off the OpenAI bandwagon (Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Evan Morikawa), it has come to light that OpenAI, which has just released GPT 4o, is committing its employees to a lifetime ban on criticism.

I’m not the only one who is bearish on OpenAI. Here is another hot take.

🐍 PyCon & Python 3.13

Three years ago, the Python Language Summit 2021 was about making CPython faster. A lot of improvements have been made since. Most notably, PEP 703 adds an experimental flag to remove the GIL in Python 3.13.

PyCon 2024 was happening last week in Pittsburgh, PA. I would have loved to attend, but I couldn’t make it. Glyph Lefkowitz has an interesting field guide on “How to Pycon” on his blog. This applies to other conferences equally well and is a great bookmark for your next one.

For now, I have heard some great things about these talks in particular:

• What makes a Python debugger possible and how can we make it 100x faster

• Ruff: An Extremely Fast Python Linter and Code Formatter, Written in Rust

• Continuous Deployment and Release of Django Apps

• Hatch: The only tool you need

• PEP 683: Immortal Objects - A new approach for memory managing

• pytest for unittesters

• Event-Driven asyncio: A Case Study of Trio's API

• Overcoming GIL with subinterpreters and immutability

• Combining Django ORM & FastAPI in a Single App

• CPython's Compilation Pipeline

• SPy (Static Python) lang: fast as C, Pythonic as Python

• Building FPGA-based Machine Learning Accelerators in Python

• A low latency deepdive of Python with Cython

• Sync vs. Async in Python: Tools, Benchmarks, and ASGI/WSGI Explained

• Building a JIT compiler for CPython

🇪🇺 EU (again)

The EU Digital Markets Act (and to some extent the GDPR) attempts to regulate “Big Tech” to promote users’ rights. As with all regulations, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Of course, “Big Tech” is “complying” in “creative” ways, such as Meta’s Pay to Play or Apple’s compliance plans that include complicated fees and restrictions. The EFF has seen that the well-intentioned actionism actually made the situation worse. There is another disparity between goals and unintentional consequences going on in the US with Article 230.

Pieter Levels has some interesting analysis pieces on his Twitter, including an analysis of the age of European vs American big companies or the Euro as currency.

His e/acc initiative (European Accelerationism) pointed out two objectives that revolve around founding bureaucracy and taxes.

That – at least – is an actionable thing that could be lobbied into legislation. However, there is a fundamental difference in the mindset of how regulation should work. On the one hand, we have (more or less) free markets, like in the US and a dictatorial centrally planned system to foster aggressive growth at all costs like in China. Europe’s “a bit of both” attitude could be crushed in between.

📰 More headlines

• Bend (parallel high-level language that looks like Python)

• Static Python Language

• Trial HIV vaccine triggers elusive and essential antibodies, pointing the way toward a successful vaccine

• How Google Does Code Reviews

• Design Docs at Google

• Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5

• Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

• VMWare Fusion Pro now available free for personal use

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

📱 Apple Introduces the M4

At the last Apple Event, the company introduced a new iPad. Why is that relevant news?

• The accompanying commercial did not have a single living being involved, yet Apple had to apologize for hurting feelings. Are we really that sensitive?

• For the first time, Apple’s ARM chip was introduced in an iPad, not in a Mac first

• The iPad being the thinnest Apple device of all time now, brings some Jony Ive vibes back

Ok, all of that is gossip. But there is another story behind the M4.

Let’s start with Apple’s reasoning behind “Apple Silicon”. When you think of CPUs, you might think of gaming computers, laptops, and servers. In those markets combined, Apple is a small player with approx. 10% market share in the desktop market (and arguably 0% in the server market). However, nowadays smartphones and tablets outperform entry-level desktop hardware and are shipped in two orders of magnitude.

Flashback to the 90s: The rise of the home computer. After the success of the 286, 386, and 486, Intel’s “Pentium” processor became the best-selling CPU of that time, and it was timed very well: In essence, it marked the era of the personal computer. At that time, CPU companies had to produce their own chips. There was no TSMC in Taiwan. And speaking of manufacturing capabilities, Intel had a lot of it, giving them a competitive advantage in terms of unit costs. The x86 CPU (the “Pentium” being the 586) is a “complex instruction set computer” (CISC) and could be produced by Intel’s blue men at low unit costs. The Intel CPU competed with “Reduced Instruction Set Computers” (RISC), which were simpler to design and easier to produce. The only problem: The manufacturers like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, HP, IBM, (and Apple) and others didn’t have the production capabilities and aimed for a market of high-end workstations. As a result, they needed fewer chips and ended up with higher unit costs despite the simpler architecture.

Back to today: The market has completely flipped. As mentioned in the introduction, small computers, like smartphones, tablets, bike computers, toasters and fridges account for many, many more units than traditional workstations, laptops, or servers. That’s why RISC processors won the second half of the architecture wars. That’s also why Apple is making their own CPUs: In 2020, Intel and AMD combined sold approximately 275 million x86 CPUs – while Apple sold 285 million devices (Macs, iPads, and iPhones) – each with their own chip.

In the RISC market, there exist arguably two competing designs: ARM and RISC-V. Apple’s Silicon chips are based on the ARM architecture which is licenced by ARM Holdings plc (which now belongs to Nvidia whose GPUs are RISC processors basically).

The success of the CPU manufacturer Apple, Inc (skilfully disguised as a lifestyle tech gadget company) brought the competition onto the scene: Microsoft (which tries to make Windows work on ARM) and Qualcomm (another ARM licensee) showed benchmarks for the freshly released Snapdragon X that beat Apple’s M3. Maybe that’s the reason why Apple released the M4 in a hurry for the iPad before releasing the new Macs.

But what about the RISC-V chips? In contrast to ARM’s RISC designs, the RISC-V design is essentially open source and overseen by the non-profit RISC-V foundation. However, its design is far less performant and energy efficient. It could play a huge geopolitical role, though. Trade and patent wars with China and sanctions imposed on Russia could lead to greater pressure to innovate on that platform. China already has huge manufacturing capabilities – not as sophisticated as Taiwan, but they will likely catch up. If they do, that could disrupt the whole chip market with all implications. US lawmakers already investigated how to potentially restrict China’s use of the open platform.

On a side note, it’s interesting to see that the perceived shift in buzz from Crypto to AI has also a technological foundation in the sense that both depend on RISC chips, with Nvidia profiting on both use cases. Well done, Nvidia.

📰 More headlines

• Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

• Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’

• The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey

• Exploring Hacker News by mapping and analyzing 40 million posts and comments for fun

• Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

☕ Coffee Time

A lot of buzz has been around thdxr, adamdotdev, theprimeagen, teej_dv, and iamdavidhill. These four guys launched terminal.shop. This is probably the first startup to accept orders for $25 coffee packets via SSH only: ssh terminal.shop.

The coffee is sold out, but it’s interesting for other reasons as well:

First, it points out some interesting considerations regarding SSH security when connecting to unknown hosts: When connecting to the terminal.shop host via SSH, you expose your public key by default. Apart from possible tracking issues, this is not a security risk per se. However, when SSH Agent Forwarding is enabled, terminal.shop could – in theory – hijack the connection to connect to other hosts on your behalf. Clockwork has an extensive article on SSH agent hijacking.

Second, text-based user interfaces – if done right – can make a stunning user/developer experience. Luckily, there is textual – a framework to create TUIs with Python. Its founder, Will McGugan, took the opportunity to recreate the terminal.shop app with textual. He also made a live coding video about it.

📈 LLMs and Vector Search

AI is still the number one topic in tech for the moment. Time to dive into some of the technical details. No, not prompt engineering!

Miguel Grinberg has published an excellent article about LLMs' inner mechanics without too many mathematical details.

Another important concept behind the AI buzz of recent times is vector databases. Alex Garcia created a vector search engine as an extension for SQLite. For the high-level concept, refer to Jide Ogunjobi’s slides. There is also a quick and dirty vector db implementation in Python called babyvec which offers some interesting insights into implementation details.

📰 More headlines

• Social engineering takeovers of open source projects

• Why you should take a look at traefik, even if you don't use containers

• How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode

• Dear Europe, please wake up

• Why SQLite uses bytecode

• Airpods as Fitness tracker

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🧑‍💻 Software Development Job Market: What’s going on?

As promised in the last issue of my newsletter, here is an analysis of the job market.

According to Indeed software development is the sector with the sharpest decline in job postings (as of Dec 29, 2023).

Job Postings on Hacker News confirm this claim.

The number of postings on Hacker News ranged in the all-time low area. In contrast, the number of people actively seeking a job increased to a new high which was only superseded by the spike at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Comparing the Hacker News data to the FRED (St. Louis FED) data, the decline in job postings does not only appear steeper but has also set in earlier in tech compared to the overall private sector.

If we (falsely) assume all of the job postings led to a newly created job (and did not replace any), we’d see the disparity between the overall private sector and the tech sector already begins mid-2021.

Is all of that an expression of corporate greed? Like, software companies operate on high margins, and thus, any position cuts would result in higher earnings per share?

Since 2023 (after a sharp decline) that seems to be the case for NASDAQ 100 (for lack of a better proxy for the tech industry).

However, earnings per share do not reflect such a steep rise, meaning that the operating margin is not increasing and in fact, ranging below the five-year mean.

Could it just be that the tech industry is not “new” anymore? And just part of the “normal” economy? That there is not a big disparity between “old economy” and “new markets”?

Still, tech operates on higher OpEx and thus, is more sensitive to changes in interest rates.

📈 Tech Trends

Here are some interesting charts on the relative importance of different technologies mentioned in Hacker News “whoishiring” posts over time:

📰 More headlines

• Open Sourcing DOS 4

• Google has laid off their Python Foundation team

• ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

• Oracle’s Jump to Nashville Surprises Austin

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🌐 Edge Computing: Vercel reverts to Node.js

Vercel is reportedly reverting all edge rendering back to Node.js. The idea behind “edge computing” is that the server processing a user’s request is geographically as close to the user as possible, thus minimising response time by reducing network latency. If the request hits a static file, like an image or a CSS file, it’s relatively easy to replicate these files across the globe and the server can send the file requested very quickly. That’s basically how CDNs work.

In Robert Boedingheimer’s talk about web performance that he gave back in February at THAT conference, he mentions that latency is way more crucial to the performance that a user experiences than bandwidth.

So, the next idea is that instead of serving static files on distributed mini servers, we could bring a runtime “to the edge” and have it code executed close to the user, too. This is what’s called “edge computing”.

The only problem here is that the name (and the idea) is somewhat misleading: In most cases, the bottleneck is the connection to the database, not the computing power: A vast majority of the code executed “on the edge” is for retrieving data from a database. If the database itself is not located near the user that adds another round-trip to the database server for each query.

For relational databases (or databases that are designed for ACID in general), replication is way harder because of the CAP theorem.

If we assume a latency of 100ms for the connection between the user and the edge server, and an additional latency of 300ms between the edge and the database server, a request with just one query would have a total latency of 400ms, adding 300ms for each additional query.

If the site was delivered by a server near the database server (but far away from the user), the perceived performance would clearly be better.

The CAP theorem states that in a distributed computer system, it is impossible to simultaneously guarantee consistency, availability, and partition tolerance; only two of these properties can be achieved at any given time. Hence, replication to other locations must guarantee the consistency of the data. In some NoSQL databases are designed to guarantee “eventual consistency”, replication is easier.

So, the combination of “edge computing” and “a database” is not the problem here. The problem is the data is not being replicated like the code.

There are solutions to this problem, for example:

• Azure CosmosDB

• Deno KV

• Cloudflare D1

• AWS DynamoDB

📊 Sneak Preview: Job data

I had a couple of follow-up coffee chats with people I talked to back in 2022. The conversations were very insightful again (and if you’d like to chat with me, I’d appreciate it if you’d book a slot in my calendly).

However, the perception of the current economic situation was surprisingly different for each person I’ve talked to.

So, I decided to have a look at some data. I started analyzing the job postings on Hacker News and collected other economic data from different sources.

I’m still not done with the analysis, but here are some preliminary findings:

• The oft-cited story of overhiring during Covid and the subsequent job cuts is supported by the data

• The situation appears to have stabilized since the second half of 2023, albeit at a low level

In other news, Walmart’s Ibotta IPO’d with a rise of 17% on the first day.

Expect a more detailed analysis of the job data in one of the next newsletter issues.

🇪🇺 EU: Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act in the EU has been applicable for almost a year now, but I haven’t covered it in my newsletter, yet.

The regulation stipulates that corporations with a market capitalization of more than 80 billion Euros are to be classified as digital gatekeepers if they control at least one platform.

In the first phase, these gatekeepers were announced:

• Alphabet Inc. (Google)

• Amazon

• Apple

• ByteDance (TikTok)

• Meta Platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads)

• Microsoft (LinkedIn, Windows)

In essence, it is about ensuring that a platform’s own services are no longer given preference on the respective platforms. It is therefore about “linking” services. For example, Google has switched off access to Google Maps from its own Google search. Instead of a link to Google's map service, a non-clickable preview image appears at best.

What's going on? Is it a mistake? Has Google deliberately made its search worse? No! The reason is compliance: It is part of the changes that Google had to make for the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). More than twenty functions in Google Search have been completely removed or at least significantly adapted. Google explained this around two months ago, but without giving any specific details.

While the change to Google Maps integration seems to annoy end users in particular, other DMA adjustments to Google Search are controversial, too. The mandatory changes to Google Flights, Hotel and Travel are not to everyone's liking either. After all, they have unpleasant side effects.

A few weeks ago, several European airlines and hotels warned that Google's DMA adjustments could harm them. The reason: previously they were able to advertise their offers directly via Google, but now searchers are increasingly landing on intermediary platforms such as Booking or Expedia. Hotels and airlines now fear that the change could cost them up to 50% of their previous traffic.

Additional requirements for restricting access to porn will apply soon as well, according to the EU.

At least, there is a Chrome extension to bring the Maps link back and the first alternative App Store has launched for iOS.

📰 More headlines

• Is the ‘Dead Internet’ theory suddenly coming true?

• How Shopify Scaled their Database

• Ten years of improvements in PostgreSQL's optimizer

• Cross Account Replication(CAR) of S3 buckets with Terraform

• Mental Health in Software Engineering

• A quick post on Chen’s algorithm

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🧑‍💻 AI: Are we there, yet?

Is it already time to cite the Hype Cycle with respect to AI and my predictions for 2024?

First, Texas grades exams with AI, but refuses to call it “AI”. This seems to be the first step to using AI in administrative law. Whether or not, the grading itself is reliable or not, the whole process will for sure trigger some lawsuits.

Second, Devin, the AI software engineer was debunked. The admittedly impressive demo for the product launch was likely doctored. This acts as a reminder that large-language models (LLMs) are just a statistical way of recombining already-known knowledge on a very large scale. Indeed, the scale is so large that prices for storage hardware, even for good old HDD have risen by 20% since Q3 2023. At the same time, OpenAI continues to crawl the web and has reportedly hit a silly content farm. OpenAI is still trying to expand to new markets like Japan while the excitement about ChatGPT, Copilot and other tools seems to be decaying.

The other part of the AI boom has been computer chips. At least, innovations in this space are here to stay. The Bloomberg article about why making computer chips has become a new global arms race has some valid points.

Google continues working on its own “AI” chip. I found it very difficult to get my hands on Google Cloud Instances with NVIDIA chips. Maybe that’s why they intensify working on a competitive chip. If Google works on a chip, Meta has to follow, obviously. If they’re using the chip to detect and label AI-generated content on Facebook?

And while Apple continues to be on the bleeding edge of consumer ARM chips with their new iPhone SOC and the upcoming M4 (an “AI chip”, of course), Microsoft still struggles with bringing Windows to ARM – but they’re at least confident they can beat Apple.

Third, Devin is not the only victim of disappointed expectations: The Apple Vision Pro is not a hot topic, anymore. Apart from memes with stupid-looking people wearing that headset, I’ve not seen anyone talking about it; and I’ve seen the 2 months old device trading on eBay for 50-60% of the purchase price. In fact, owners seem to complain about fitting issues and – like with Google Glasses – an actual useful “killer app” is yet to be found.

The hot kid on the block, the Humane AI Pin, also disappoints. Started with bloated expectations, “The Verge” editors changed their minds about the $700 device with a devastating verdict: “There’s only one problem: it just doesn’t work.”

📰 More headlines

• Your Plug-In Hybrid Won’t Save the Planet

• Top 100 Consumer Generative AI apps

• The State of Generative AI

• Naval Ravikant’s Airchat is a social app built around talk (btw, find me on AirChat and hit me up for an invite if you like!)

• Does it still matter to be in the Bay Area? (Hacker News discussion)

• AI ‘apocalypse’ could take away almost 8m jobs in UK, says report (unless government “takes action”)

• How To Found a Company In Germany: 14 “Easy” Steps And Lots Of Pain

💻 Tech Pieces

• An incomplete list of software development metrics

• If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

• PostgreSQL Index Advisor

🥩 Totally Off-Topic

I made this season’s first homemade BBQ sauce!

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz, Python, and DevOps.

Have a great week ahead!

🧑‍💻 Gen Z: What are they like at the workplace?

Gergely has interesting insights on Gen Z software engineers and how they’re observed at the workplace. Overall, it turns out they have higher expectations for salary, promotions and benefits while at the same time being harder to retain with little “loyalty”.

From my anecdotal evidence that makes sense: In addition to the usual division in society, I have also noticed a division in the attitude of young colleagues towards work. They want to aim high, earn a lot of money and have a great career, or they want more freedom, work less and in turn accept lower earnings. Mediocrity and default options had had their day, it seems. And I think that's a good thing.

☁️ Cloudflare: Improved Offerings

Cloudflare seems heavily invested in AI, but also has a lot of news to share from their Developer Week 2024:

• D1 and HyperDrive (their “hosted SQLite” and “SQL Proxy”) are now in GA. There is an interesting article about D1 on their blog. I recently played a little with their D1 service. So expect a blog post to come.

• The “Workers” service (Function as a Service) now supports Python via WASM. I haven’t looked into it, yet, but of course, that sounds interesting!

• Cloudflare recently acquired PartyKit and now offers real-time WebRTC apps in their “Calls” product.

• A lot more stuff can be found in their Developer Week Wrapup article.

🇪🇺 EU vs. Apple: PWAs and Third-Party App Stores

The EU, known for bringing USB C to the iPhone, has another beef with Apple: The App Store. A lot of complaints about Apple’s model of revenue sharing has occurred and deals have been made behind closed doors.

Following EU regulation, Apple allows third-party app stores and Epic Games has announced to launch one.

In an act of what some would call “Malicious Compliance”, Apple announced to disable PWAs but recently reverted the decision. There is a longer article by Thomas Steiner on the issues following the EU vs Apple thing.

As a customer, I don’t always like Apple's business decisions, but I don’t feel any urge to be protected by bureaucracy. Like in the browser wars era: The anti-trust regulations on Internet Explorer didn’t do much. All it took to turn the page completely was a better product from someone else: Chrome didn't take long to dethrone Internet Explorer.

⚖️ Open Source: Redis License Change and Rebranding

Redis, probably the most popular choice for caching backends, and a spiritual successor of Memcached, changed its license. Goodbye BSD, hello SSPL. That’s not big news as it was announced on March 20, 2024. A day later, they published an article on their blog, titled “The Future of Redis”, in which one of the most prominent points is about “Generative AI”. Yesterday, they announced a rebranding on their 𝕏 Account.

There are a two things to mention: All of the license changes we’ve seen recently in popular is targeted at cloud giants, like AWS. As arstechnica puts it: “[AWS], you cannot continue reselling Redis as a service as part of your $90 billion business without some kind of licensed contribution back”. The business model behind Open Source infrastructure software, like MySQL, Elastic Search, or – now – Redis, has always been to provide an excellent product free of charge to ensure widespread adoption and to cash in on larger scale installations and customization. Turns out, in a world where software is increasingly running on servers in an oligopoly, that seems no longer feasible. Free (libre) Software gave us freedom from big tech, and now big tech found the loophole through “the cloud”. Ironically, it’s now big tech that forks free software to have a version with a more permissible license (which is what I expect to happen to Redis, too). We’ve come from terminal computers to personal computers, and now we’re back to relying on computing power operated by “big tech”. Since the adoption of technology is ubiquitous in society now, I suspect that there is no way back from these oligopolies or relevant smaller entities. Founding a “big cloud competitor” will soon be (or already is?) as impractical as founding a new telco. As much as I hate to say this, “tech” in and of itself is on the verge of becoming an old boring industry.

The second one is about Redis and “AI” and the rebranding: AI is the hype. Unlike “Crypto”, which has some brilliantly architected solutions to something between the lines of libertarian ideas and get-rich-quick-schemes, AI promises nothing less than the star-treky “Hey, Computer” magic.

Romanticising this idea of technology that feels like magic, brings associations of great minds tinkering with bleeding-edge technologies to create a “soulful machine” that helps the human being. That – in essence – is the same spirit of some engineers sitting in a Silicon Valley garage soldering some transistors to make the impossible a reality: The personal computer.

In that sense, the license change due to the monopolization of cloud providers and the focus on AI are closely related to each other. They both solve the same problem: Once from a legal and bookkeeping perspective, and once through finding a new hacker spirit.

Making the rebranding more mass-appealing and less techy points towards the same direction.

📰 More headlines

• X (formally Twitter) is testing 'Adult Content’ Groups

• The best printer is still whatever Brother printer is on sale as HP is turning printers into a subscription

• Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj among 200 artists claim that AI music “must be stopped”

• The quest to legitimize longevity medicine

💻 Tech Pieces

• The Kubernetes Operator Model

• Cache is King: A guide for Docker layer caching in GitHub Actions

🏕️ Side Note / Summer Camp

The line-up of THAT Conference in Wisconsin has been announced and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to give a talk about GitHub Actions.

THAT Conference, or the “Summer Camp for Geeks”, has by far been the best conference series I’ve been to.

If you consider joining the geeks from July, 29th till August, 2nd, please book a ticket using the code “CampCounselor” to get 25% off the ticket price.

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you! 

Of course, I need your help with this. 

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 600+ readers!

• What is something you learned?

• What are some books that recently influenced you?

• What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

Reach out to me on this form. 

Let me know how I can make the newsletter better. 

I set up a short feedback form here. 

It would mean the world to me if you spent a minute or two filling it out!

Best,