Why couldn’t the programmer work late into the night?
She didn’t have a LAMP.

Thanks for joining us on episode 18 of Real Time Overview for Wednesday, June 6th. I’m your host, Michael Fienen. A little birdie told me I should consider including the date in these episodes, and I am nothing if not accommodating.

Before we get too far into things, obviously we need to address the elephant in the news when it comes to web development this week, and if you’ve been living under a laptop, that’s the announcement that Microsoft will be acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. This is an incredibly significant development for the platform, and one that reminds me very much of SmugMug’s acquisition of Flickr earlier this spring. It’s also second only to LinkedIn in terms of the size of the acquisition for Microsoft – paying over three times the $2 billion valuation GitHub had a few years ago.

There’s already been a ton written on this, and I’m not going to call out any specific articles here and now. However, if you go by the show notes at drunkenux.com, I’ll have links to several articles that look at both sides of the acquisition. Obviously developers of all kinds have had strong reactions to this announcement. But bear with me for a moment, and consider why this works out.

Much like Flickr’s acquisition, this is moving the GitHub platform to an owner that understands development and open source. Before anyone jumps all over me for that statement, understand that the Microsoft of today is not at all the one of years past. Depending on how you slice it, Microsoft as an organization is one of the top users of GitHub over the past 3 years. This move should be seen as one that positions Microsoft to be a powerful engine in the development world for years to come – for better or worse. But CEO Satya Nadella seems incredibly driven to create a company that helps developers thrive.

And don’t forget, GitHub wasn’t exactly in a good place. They recently reported losing over $30 million a quarter, on $350 million of venture capital. Without a major business model shift – one that developers likely wouldn’t have enjoyed – they’re lifespan was incredibly finite.

What do you think? Will Microsoft just monetize GitHub into extinction? Will the platform grow and thrive? Or should they have held out and hoped to find their financial footing? Will you stick with it, or move to another platform like BitBucket or GitLab? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this big piece of news, and what it means for open source projects moving forward. Let us know either through Twitter or Facebook, or leave a comment in the show notes.

Getting back to what we do best though, swing by Hacker Noon and check out Andrew Walls’ article on Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design. Rams is an industrial designer who helped drive the success of Braun through the middle part of the 20th century. It was his thinking and technique that solidified the consumer product company’s success into the modern day. More importantly, he understood how to design for both form and function.

In fact, this is his second principle: that good design makes a product useful. Wells notes as an example when Apple removed the USB port from Macbooks. This was a decision made largely for aesthetics. USB ports are still incredibly popular and highly used, and the choice to take them out wasn’t the same as removing something like a floppy drive.

Another one of Rams’ principles that will weigh heavy on a lot of web designers is that good design is long lasting. Every month or so someone will put out an article on design trends for a given year or month. The consideration you have to make is whether or not the best designs can ever really be called a trend.

Much like Don Norman’s work, Rams’ approach to design is something that, while not rooted in web design, has an incredible amount of insight to offer to how we think about it and approach it. There’s a lot more in Andrew’s article, and you shouldn’t miss it. Go check it out at Hacker Noon.

Look, we’re all gonna deal with this a lot better if we just admit that we’re going to be talking a lot about GDPR compliance for the forseeable future. That being said, we might as well see if we can make things as easy as possible. Web magazine SpeckyBoy has an article that includes 8 Resources to Help Designers with GDPR Compliance.

Their list includes a number of helpful resources, collections, and tools that should help you feel more comfortable not just solving compliance issues, but also just generally understanding it more so that it’s easier to talk about. For instance, everything’s easier with a checklist, so they found a GDPR focused one you can use. If you’re a WordPress user, they’ve linked a plugin to help address a number of compliance related tasks. How about a command line tool for scraping your site and finding tools that might be breaking your compliance?

I’m a big fan of putting as much in your toolbox as you can get so that you can find the right tool for the job you need to perform. SpeckyBoy’s article is a nice starting point for some of those tools, which can also lead you down a rabbit hole that gives you a lot more to work with. You can check out the complete list at their site, and let us know if you’ve found any good GDPR resources yourself that they didn’t include in their list. We’ll be sure to share it out with our listeners.

If you’ve used PHP and WordPress for more than a hot minute, you’ve undoubtedly broken things in a way that simply drops you to the white screen of death. This can be a frustrating problem that challenges your problem solving skills, especially if you don’t know much about server logs, or have access to them. Thankfully, Spacema Studio has put together some tips you can review then next time your WordPress site goes down and leaves you wondering how to track down the problem.

Their suggestions range from the common steps of disabling plugins and themes, to how to enable debugging mode, and checking for things like failed updates. Their steps are fairly lightweight, but will help resolve many common issues developers run into. If your issues are more complicated and you need a bit more information, the show notes will also have a link to the WordPress Codex section on how to debug it and where the log file is stored for your site.