TLDR 2022-08-03

You’re spending too much time on pull requests. And every PR comes with tedious tasks you wish you could automate: Assigning reviewers. Rebasing branches. Backporting.

If this sounds all-too familiar, check out Mergify. It’s the most powerful merge queue tool that offers speculative checks, batch merges, and multiple queueing options. Coordinated with any CI and fully integrated to GitHub. Used every day at Amazon, Uber, and Netflix.

“Mergify is contagious. Once you've set up a workflow where there are no more stale pull requests, you want to deploy that everywhere.” - Martynas Mickevicius, Software Engineer. Find out what all the fuss is about: Sign up for free with your GitHub account.

Passkeys are unique digital keys that are easy to use, secure, and stored on-device. They can not be stolen in a data breach and users can't be tricked into sharing them. The feature will be available on third-party devices through the use of QR codes. Apple plans to use Passkeys to completely replace passwords. Many more details about how Passkeys work are available in the article.

Facebook has been testing a new streaming platform called Super. The platform allows users to host interactive livestreams, engage with fans, and earn revenue. Facebook has been reaching out to creators to test out the platform, paying them between $200 and $3,000 to use the feature for 30 minutes. The pitch deck that Facebook has been sending creators to get feedback on its sponsorship model is available in the article.

Israeli scientists have developed mice embryos made up entirely of stem cells and grown inside a bioreactor. The embryos lived for up to 8.5 days, long enough to develop the beginnings of a brain, a neural tube, and an intestinal tract, as well as a beating heart. While the technique has many limitations, it is an important step in the development of technology that can generate an embryo from scratch.

NASA has released a new image of the Cartwheel Galaxy from the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy has an active black hole at its center. It is located 500 million light-years away. The new data will help astronomers better understand how stars are formed. The image is available in the article.

pls is a pretty and powerful ls. It works in a similar way to ls, but it adds many more developer-friendly features, such as node filters, file sorting based on attributes, a details view, and more. pls is a simple tool for looking at the contents of directories and not a complete replacement for ls. Screenshots are available.

OneDev is a self-hosted Git server with CI/CD and Kanban. It features out-of-the-box symbol search and navigation, code search with regular expressions, and much more. A detailed overview of each of its features with GIF examples is available.

This article introduces Node-RED, a popular open-source tool used to connect different types of hardware and APIs. You’ll learn core concepts of flow-based development with Node-RED and how to create workflows, through an example of storing sensor data using an MQTT broker and InfluxDB. Read the tutorial

The DALL·E 2 Prompt Book is a free 82-page e-Book on getting started with DALL-E 2. It contains guides on how to create different styles, prompt engineering, variations, merging images, and much more. The full e-Book is available on the website.

Twitter has issued a number of subpoenas to associates of Elon Musk. The subpoenaed have been requested to provide information on checklists, timelines, presentations, decks, organizational calls, meetings, notes, and recordings related to Musk's deal to purchase Twitter, as well as any information regarding the discussion of bots and spam. Some of the subpoenaed were not originally believed to be involved in the deal, and at least one associate was never really involved. The trial is set to commence on October 17.

Discourse Chat allows users to shift between faster-paced chat and slower-paced discussions.

This article looks at the results from a survey conducted with engineers who interviewed with Google and Facebook during their current hiring freeze.

Y Combinator has shrunk the number of startups within its accelerator for the Summer 2022 batch to around 250 companies.

Everyone knows that it's hard to migrate a database or rewrite code in a new language, so early technical decisions tend to stay.

The layoffs will mostly affect staff in operations, marketing, and program management.

New research suggests that animal-assisted pollination may have emerged long before plants moved ashore.