Working from home is powering productivity (News)

0:29What up nerds? Oh well, let's get into this week's news. Working from home is powering productivity. Here's Nicholas Bloom writing for the IMF. Quote, WFH increased about tenfold following the outbreak of the pandemic and has settled in at about five times its pre-pandemic level. This could counter slowing productivity and deliver a surge in economic growth over the next few decades. If AI yields additional output, the era of slow growth could be over, end quote. Nicholas's research into this topic focuses on how work from home, one, increases inputs like labor and capital, and two, grows productivity.

1:16However, like all things, it does have its downsides, including the damage to city centers and large reduction in valuations of commercial office space. Still, Nicholas concludes, quote, Being an economist usually means balancing winners and losers. Analyzing changes in technology, trade, prices, and regulations usually has mixed effects with large groups of winners and losers. When it comes to working from home, the winners massively outweigh the losers. Firms, employees, and society in general have all reaped huge benefits. In my lifetime as an economist, I have never seen a change that is so broadly beneficial.

1:55The expropriation of advanced custom fields. Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves. His latest move? Taking over the advanced custom fields plugin, which is used by millions. Here's WP Engine posting on X, quote, We have been made aware that the advanced custom fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org, A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21-year history of WordPress. End quote. To see it for yourself, visit the ACF plugin page, which lives at wordpress.org slash plugins slash advanced dash custom dash fields.

2:45And what you'll see, at least as I publish this on October 14th, 2024, is Automatic's own secure custom fields plugin. This is technically inside the realm of WordPress.org's guidelines, which says they can remove any plugin for any reason. But it is not inside the realm of what's cool or reasonable in the open source world. Ruby on Rails creator David Hennemeyer-Hensen says it well. Quote, weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot allow to form precedence. They must remain neutral territory, little Switzerland's in a world of constant commercial skirmishes. A United States software engineer pay heat map.

3:28Levels.fyi, which is a site started to help job seekers compare pay across different companies, has added a salary heat map. With it, you can 1. Explore the interactive heat map of total compensation pay ranges across the United States, organized by DMA regions, and accompanied by a color-coded legend. 2. Click into a region and uncover insights on salary percentiles, breakdown of total compensation components, and top paying companies. And 3. Send them feedback. They want to know, what else would you like to see? Check your chapter image for a screenshot of the heatmap in action and try it yourself by following the link in the newsletter.

4:10It's now time for sponsored news. DevOps is now multiplayer. We're excited to see Adam Jacob and team make the next frontier of DevOps automation generally available. DevOps is now multiplayer and real time. You can define and manage your infra as a living architecture with everyone that needs to be involved playing their role in parallel. DevOps was never a solo game, so why should you remain siloed in PRs and merge requests just waiting? That's the old way. You also have full programmability. You can write small, reactive functions to model new services in minutes. You can customize existing models to conform to organizational security policies and contribute back to the community if you'd like.

4:57All of this from within the app. Plus, full batteries are included. Everything your team needs to run a production infrastructure is in the box. There is no need for other platforms, glue code, or state file management. Everyone is on the same page all the time. The icing on the cake is always up-to-date change sets. Just like Git, change sets essentially fork the entire hypergraph of functions. This allows teams to propose changes, validate the safety and security of their configurations, and keep things up to date as the environment changes. To experience DevOps in multiplayer mode, go to systeminit.com.

5:35They have a generous free tier, so please try it out yourself. Once again, that's systeminit.com. The disappearance of an internet domain, also known as nomo.io. This piece by Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the internet really is. Quote, On October 3rd, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius about 1 ,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have.

6:14The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry's preferred top-level domains,.io. End quote. Once the treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Will the.io domain go with it? Probably not. There's too much value tied up in it for that to happen, in my opinion. but it certainly could. And that's kind of scary, isn't it? Cognitive load is what matters. Warning, I'm highly tempted to quote this entire article. I will do my best not to, but you've been warned. Quote, there are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental.

7:00What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code. End quote. All right, that's it. I'm stopping right there. Just go read it. The overarching point is that we should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. But how?

7:36That is the news for now. But also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention. Like Chris Wanstroth on Life After GitHub. Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter? Spoiler alert, yes. A sweet Firefox theme for the Tooie enthusiast. and our award-worthy list of unordered links. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work. And I'll talk to you again real soon.