Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. 

Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.

We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!

Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?

Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.

Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords. 

Julianna grew up in Idaho, where she didn't even know what computer science was. After stints as a software engineer and product manager, she found a role where could figure out what the organization should be building: CTO and founder. 

Their first product was email magic links, which is more complicated than you think. Most importantly, how do you always avoid the spam folder? Copy changes in an email can make all the difference. 

Developer tooling is undergoing a renaissance now that smaller companies are getting into the game with API offerings. The big thing that differentiates good tools from bad is easy to understand  documentation. 

The right metaphor for API services isn't SaaS, it's eCommerce. Plug it in into your app without giving up design and user experience. 

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss. 

Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL. 

Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s. 

Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?

We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.

We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community.

Prosus has a global reach and will help us meet the needs of developers and technologists everywhere. 

Have no fear: there will not be a paywall on the community sites. We have separate free and paid products for a reason. 

We combined our Ads and Talent businesses into Reach & Relevance, which gives companies the opportunity to showcase their products and engineering organizations to software engineers around the world. 

Remote work is here to stay, and a lot of knowledge workers are starting to adapt the processes that software engineers have been using for years. 

Our lifeboat shoutout goes to Jordi Castilla for the answer to the question: Convert HH:MM:SS into minutes using JavaScript

Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. 

His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.

We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.

You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI?

 

 

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.

Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking  the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.

Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command

Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn't enough memory to use the local Basic copy.

Throughout his career, he's oscillated between using databases and building databases. He started at Caltech and NASA, using databases to store and organize space data and chip data. Then he built databases at Oracle, including versions, 5 6, 7, and 8.

After that it was back to using databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems. 

He built databases at AWS with Amazon RDS, then moved to Grab Taxi, the Uber of Southeast Asia, and finally back to MongoDB, where he is building again.

You can find Mark on Twitter here.

This week's lifeboat badge goes to Erik Kalkoken, who answered the question: In a Slack, is there a way to see all the members that is part of that channel? 

This year over 80,000 respondents took the time to share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development.

We learned a lot about the way developers learn. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. 

Roughly a third of respondents responded to our question on mental health. This is twice the percentage that offered feedback in 2020 and may reflect a growing awareness of the importance of mental health’s and the impact of the ongoing pandemic.

Another trend that may be linked to the pandemic is work status. We see a greater percentage of respondents working part-time or in school, while those indicating full time employment decreased. This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment.

Check out the full results of the 2021 Dev Survey here.

We chat discrete mathematics, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption. But don't worry, we also break it down in laymen's terms.

Interested in working in security? Mahmoud will personally extend an offer to anyone who solves this puzzle.

Puzzles not your thing? You can still learn more about Very Good Security and its open positions here.

Mahmoud is on Twitter here.

 

 

You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.

You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Mantas, who answered the question: Determine if all the values in a PHP array are null