The idealization of farming by tech (News)

0:04What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is Changelog news for the week of Monday March 31st, 2025. Here's a perfectly joyous use of tech. The Jumbotron operator for the Indiana Pacers adds a crying filter to visiting Laker fans' faces during game breaks. The effect compounds as the Laker fans begin to laugh along, giving the appearance of uncontrolled sobbing. You just gotta see it for yourself. Okay, let's get into this week's news. The idealization of farming by tech. In a hashtag long post, Theodore Morley wonders why we tech workers so frequently point our wanderlust towards hands-on trades. Quote, why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops?

1:02Is this specific to some subgroup in tech that I happen to cross paths with regularly, or is it a broader modern ennui? End quote. Quote, Theodore grew up working on a farm, so his desire to escape manual labor so he could be getting paid to sit in an air-conditioned office makes him puzzled by our seemingly collective desire to move the opposite direction. Quote, Why would people who are so comfortable, whose job was to me a lifelong goal, want to do exactly what I worked so hard to move away from? I suspect the answer is tied up in the nature of our work in the modern world, as well as in the inspection of who has been mythologized in American history.

1:43End quote. An enjoyable deep dive follows, but I believe the old adage explains this phenomenon well. We always think the grass is greener on the other side, even though we get to specify the exact RGB values of our digital grass. Still, it pales in comparison to its natural analog. Know this before choosing Next.js. Eduardo Bucas, who works at Netlify, a Vercel competitor, so keep that in mind, says this, quote, there is nothing wrong with a company profiting from an open source software it created, especially when that helps fund the development of the project. In fact, there are plenty of examples of that model working successfully in our industry.

2:26But I think that can only work sustainably if the boundaries between the company and the open source project are abundantly clear with well-defined expectations between the maintainers, the hosting providers, and the users about how and where each feature of the framework can be used. I want to explain why I don't think this transparency exists today. My goal is not to stop anyone from using Next.js, but to lay out as much information as possible so developers and businesses can make an informed decision about their technology stack. This post was prompted by how Vercel recently handled a critical security vulnerability with Next.js, which Eduardo describes as so poor, reckless, and disrespectful to the community that it has exacerbated my concerns about the governance of this project.

3:16He lists three facts that give him pause regarding the project. Number one, no adapters. Number two, no official serverless support. And number three, Vercel-specific code paths. Exan is the CSV magician. Quote, Exan, that's X-A-N, is a command line tool that can be used to process CSV files directly from the shell. It has been written in Rust to be as fast as possible, use as little memory as possible, and can easily handle very large CSV files, even gigabytes. It is also able to leverage parallelism through multi-threading to make some tasks complete as fast as your computer can allow. It can easily preview, filter, slice, aggregate, sort, join CSV files, and exposes a large collection of composable commands that can be chained together to perform a wide variety of typical tasks.

4:12End quote. This tool looks super handy for anyone who works with CSV files regularly. It even has its own expression language, so you can perform complex tasks. Oh, and its terminal support is on point. It's now time for sponsored news. Heroku plants new roots with FIR. The next generation of Heroku is called FIR and is being built on open source standards and cloud-native technologies like the Open Container Initiative, cloud-native build packs, Open Telemetry, and Kubernetes. This next technology stack represents the next decade and beyond for Heroku while building on their core principle, Maximize developer productivity by minimizing distractions.

4:59Here's what Heroku's Terrence Lee has to say about Fur. Quote, Fur is still the Heroku you know and love. It's rooted in the world's renowned developer experience while built on a bedrock of security and stability. We achieve this by offering seamless functionality out of the box with the flexibility to customize as needed. In today's complex development landscape, minimizing cognitive load is crucial. This allows you to focus on what truly matters, delivering value to your customers. End quote. Follow the link in your chapter data and the newsletter to learn all about it, and thanks to Heroku for sponsoring Changelog News.

5:36What we can learn from Milk Kanban. Pavel Brodzinski takes us back to Kanban's roots and original purpose. Quote, in its original meaning, Kanban represented a visual signal, the thing that communicated, well, something. It might have been a need, option, availability, capacity, request, etc. In our Kanban systems, the actual Kanban is a sticky note. It represents work, and given its closest environment, such as a board, columns, other stickies, visual decorators, etc., it communicates what needs or needs not to be done. It's a visual signal all the way. end quote. He then tells a story of how his office mate Kassia designed a perfectly simple Kanban system for milk inventory.

6:25Yeah, milk inventory in their office. It's a good example with an even better lesson. Read it for yourself using the link in your newsletter. There is no vibe engineering. Sergei Telovolnikov weighs in on vibe coding, the tech industry's buzzword du jour, and quite honestly, one of my favorite terms of late. The term caught on and Twitter quickly flooded with posts about how AI has radically transformed coding and will soon replace all software engineers. While AI undeniably impacts the way we write code, it hasn't fundamentally changed our roles as engineers. Allow me to explain. Sergey's overarching point is one Amal Hussain and I agreed about on ChangeLog and Friends last week, and that's that vibe coding as a practice is here to stay, but whether or not it will ever produce production-grade applications, Hmm, that's still a big question mark.

7:19Sergey says, quote, It is possible that there will be a future where software is built from Vibe-coded blocks, but the work of designing software able to evolve and scale doesn't go away. That's not Vibe engineering. That's just engineering, even if the coding part of it will look a bit different. That's the news for now, but also scan our companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on, such as stamina is a quiet advantage apple needs a snow sequoia and a desktop from a bygone era get in on the newsletter at changelog.com slash news all right have a great week leave us a five-star review if you dig the show and i'll talk to you again real soon