The new $30,000 side hustle (News)

0:29What up nerds? some Sherwood news research, Disney Plus will likely subject you to more ads than anyone else, eating up about 13 to 16 % of your watch time. Netflix, on the other hand, shows you ads about 3 to 4 % of the time. These numbers are different depending on what you're watching, and they may change at any moment, but I found them interesting nonetheless. Okay, let's get into this week's news. The new$30 ,000 side hustle. Bloomberg reports, but I link to Megan McDonough's commentary on LinkedIn because paywall, that employee referrals have become a lucrative side hustle for tech workers.

1:11Quote, platforms like Blind and ReferMarket are connecting job seekers with company insiders willing to offer referrals for a fee. End quote. I'm not surprised that this is a thing, but I'm certainly disappointed. How can you feel good about making money by referring a complete stranger for a position? I guess you get over it because it's an easy 30K. Crazy times. While this phenomenon is likely rare, it is indicative of a job market that is way out of whack. The 30K income referenced in the headline is one individual who produced more than a half a dozen successful hires for the company after referring more than 1 ,000 job candidates to his employer.

1:56Mistakes engineers make in large codebases. Sean Godecki has spent a decade working on large established codebases, which he defines as having single digit million lines of code, like 5 million, somewhere between 100 and 1 ,000 engineers working on the same codebase, and the first working version of the codebase is at least 10 years old. I can't say I've ever worked on a codebase in this category, so I'll have to take Sean's word for it. And that word is, quote, there's one mistake I see more often than anything else, and it's absolutely deadly, ignoring the rest of the code base and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way.

2:36In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing code base in order to keep your nice, clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small code bases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it. In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy code base as possible in order to maintain consistency. Apple is killing Swift. Jacob Bartlett tells the brief history of Swift and why he believes, and its creator, Chris Latner, seems to agree, that it has fallen from its original great vision. Quote, today we're going to learn how modern programming languages are governed.

3:17I'll explain how Swift's dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become. End quote. Jacob describes Python's BDFL roots, Rust's community-driven roots, and Kotlin's corporate-backed roots. Then he compares these to Swift, which he calls corporate dictator for life. Quote, Modern Swift is a slave to the top-down whims of the Apple MBA cabal, who prize secrecy and sneer at community input. unshackled from Lattner's influence, or even the relentless drive to craftsmanship imposed from jobs, it's all about shipping the latest proprietary profit driver.

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5:27Here's the diagram it created when I passed it changelog.com source code. Check the chapter image if you're listening audio only or look at your screen if you're watching the video. You can click on each component to go straight to the code it represents and you can export the mermaid code for use elsewhere. Exploring a stablecoin bank. Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and MasterCard's duopoly. Quote, right now, Visa and MasterCard charge merchants an egregious 2 % to 3 % swipe fees, which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe fees.

6:08This is partly why Visa and MasterCard's profit margins are each higher than 50%. Small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and MasterCard since they control 80 % of the credit card market. A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees, rightfully so, and if they could opt for a lower fee network that wouldn't limit their TAM, total addressable market, they'd switch in a heartbeat. End quote.

7:03Quote, require government intervention, of which I'm a perma bear. That is the news for now, but also scan this week's companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, such as Introducing Work, a simplistic build system like Make, and Command Runner like Just. Awareness Syndrome, which is kind of like Imposter Syndrome, but not. And of course, our award-worthy unordered list of awesome links. Get in on the action at changelog.com slash news. In case you missed it, we had Rachel Blotnick talking buttons and Matt Ryer singing songs on the show last week, both of which are available in full video on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash changelog.

7:53And coming up this week, we are joined by Embedded FM's Alicia White to talk all about programming things that are not computers. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.