Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
My coffee is nice and hot and I’ve collected a lot of material to share this week. There’s no way I can share it all. A lot of it centers around American Politics and the rift between WordPress and WP Engine.
I hope you enjoy the links I’ve selected for you. 😁
ATLANTA — Today, The Carter Center and the world celebrate the 100th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter. As the longest-living U.S. president in history, he stands as a beacon of leadership and compassion, inspiring people around the globe.
I remember as a kid folks being very critical of Jimmy Carter, especially around the Iran hostage crisis. But, there’s no denying he is a wonderful man whose real legacy started after he was President. He’s an American Hero and a great example of human kindness and compassion. He walks the walk.
Happy 100th Birthday Mr. President! 🎂
Kris Kristofferson, the award-winning country singer and actor who worked with Johnny Cash and Martin Scorsese, has died aged 88.
Kris Kristofferson was a Renaissance Man. He earned a Masters degree at Oxford University, served in the US Army, was an actor, and he’s probably best know as a musician. He was also a badass. I tend to look up to folks like that.
A part me me hopes the dust-up between Toby Keith and Kris Kristofferson, as penned by Ethan Hawke for Rolling Stone, actually happened. 😄
RIP 🪦
The Cincinnati Enquirer • Mark Wert and Jason Hoffman
Pete Rose, MLB all-time hits leader, dies at 83
As a boy I was a Reds fan and vividly remember the 1976 World Series. I was a Johnny Bench fan as a boy and became a catcher because of him. The fact that they hammered the Yankees by sweeping them in the series was icing on the cake. My MLB team allegiance changed over the years but I’ll always be a fan of The Big Red Machine and The Great Eight, Rose among them.
It’s high time Major League Baseball allows Rose to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
RIP Charlie Hustle. 🪦
My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.
The WordPress community is in complete turmoil at the moment. I would not be shocked to see this completely fracture the community into competing factions, forking WordPress, and building how they see fit.
I’m a big fan of WordPress, even though I complain about it not being able to make static sites. It is a very nice plug-n-play system for everything from a simple one person blog, to a small business, to a huge corporation managing a very large, heavily trafficked site.
I’ve tried to get a job there I like it so much. I’d still love the opportunity to work on their iOS client or Tumblr iOS client apps.
They’ve done a lot for the open source community and Matt has always come across as one of the good guys.
I really hope this gets resolved without blowing up the community.
Former GOP official Michael Steele unfurled an epic rant bashing voters who would consider sending “incompetent” Donald Trump back to the White House.
Michael Steele is the former Chair of the RNC and lieutenant governor of Maryland. The man is a politician and life long Republican. He’s the type of person I usually disagree with politically but I respect him. He’s nothing like the modern GOP turned MAGA cult.
Anywho. So many real Republicans have come out against the Orange Man, yet the polls are still tight? I don’t get it and I’m still terrified we might get Orangey for a second term.
NASCAR is running an unlawful monopoly on the sport of stock car racing, alleges a suit filed on Wednesday by stock car teams 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports against the sanctioning body and its CEO Jim France. 23XI is, of course, the team co-owned by NBA legend Michael Jordan and racer Denny Hamlin.
My popcorn is ready! I hope 23XI — pronounced 23 11 — and Front Row Motorsports make some headway for NASCAR teams. I know I’m new to NASCAR but if you read what the two teams claim it’s shocking what NASCAR gets away with. How teams manage to exist is beyond me. It’s a terrible business, if that’s what you’re after. It seems you need deep pockets or sponsors with deep pockets just to keep a team afloat, much less be competitive.
Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store
This can’t be a surprise to anyone given how fiercely YouTube protects its product. Of course I wish they’d left Christian alone because he makes beautiful software.
I know nobody from YouTube will see this but I wish they’d offer to give Christian some cash for it and hire him to continue working on it.
Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
With all the kerfuffle between WordPress and WP Engine it’s hard to watch Mozilla head down this road. They’re one of those organizations we could look up to as an open source advocate and maintainer of one of the most used pieces of software in the world.
Hopefully they’re able to find their way back to their roots and continue to maintain Firefox.
Right now, if you know how to really read the polls, or if you have access to the various private and internal polling being conducted by and shared only amongst the elites, Wall Street, and Members of Congress, then you already know that this election was over weeks ago. Trump simply refused to believe that “Sleepy Joe” was no longer his opponent and that there was instead “some woman” claiming she was “Black” who was now going to pummel him on Election Day. He soon became unhinged, ranted for hours about Hannibal Lecter, Haitians cannibalizing your pets, and a nonstop drone of oral diarrhea spewing misogyny, racism and essentially claiming that if he loses “it will be the Jews’ fault.”
I’m steeling myself for the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Seeing articles like this give me some hope for a Harris Waltz win. If they do win I expect a lot more violence this time around. I hope that can all be suppressed before it can happen but it won’t surprise me if it does.
All news outlets and social media sites need to agree to not give the Orange Man any airtime for speeches after the election or at least be ready to cut away at an instant.
JOSEPH SHAVIT • The Brighter Side
In a groundbreaking development poised to reshape the energy landscape of Saskatchewan, Canada, a compact nuclear reactor with the capacity to operate for eight years without water is set to come online by 2029.
I hope this works out. It could provide us with clean energy for years and years to come.
Rust developers are stuck in an endless hamster wheel where every month / week there is a new best way to do something, and the previous way is now deprecated, kind of like in the fronntend development world with the weekly hottest JavaScript framework.
I know Rust and other languages rely on the community to make the language better but I am surprised the actual framework support for the platform often comes from outside sources.
Rust should have runtime library support just like the C and C++. Basic stuff plus heavily used things like networking and other frameworks layered on top of those. All using common framework patterns and maintained by the main Rust development team.
Something that makes developing in Apple platforms are the shared frameworks that work the same on Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. Sure, the UI bits are different, but a lot of other code is the same. I’d say 80% of Stream code is shared between Mac and iOS and it’s maintained by Apple and ready for each new release of their OSes.
At Meta, React and React Native are more than just tools; they are integral to our product development and innovation. With over five thousand people at Meta building products and experiences with React every month, these technologies are fundamental to our engineering culture and our ability to quickly build and ship high quality products.
I’ve been working in React Native off and on since June of this year. It’s a fine framework and definitely allows developers to move quickly. Especially web devs with React experience. They can come to a project and be instantly productive.
This Facebook Engineering piece reads like marketing material at times but giving developers the means to develop for everything from iOS to Android to Windows to XBox to PlayStation is real and that’s powerful.
It doesn’t mean all the UI looks exactly the same just like Mac and iOS apps can share a bunch of code and have a different UI, but that ability to share a large portion of code is extremely powerful to a development team.
I still love writing native apps in their native frameworks and expect to keep Stream 100% native. I still love using C++ for cross platform work even though I haven’t had the need for it in years. Then you have Rust gaining ground. We have good choices for cross platform work, including Swift.
Something I really dislike about using React Native and TypeScript is the lack of real tooling for debugging in a full IDE. I’d love to be able to debug between Swift and TypeScript right inside Xcode but TypeScript/JavaScript tooling is arcane. Hopefully someone way smarter than me will make that happen.
Anyone know if Rust fully integrates into Xcode and Microsoft’s Visual Studio?
