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Episode 539: Adam Dymitruk on Event Modeling

Adam Dymitruk, CEO and founder of Adaptech Group, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of the event modeling approach to discovering requirements and designing software systems. Adam explains how the structured approach eliminates the specifics of implementation details and technology decisions, enabling clearer communication for all stakeholders while keeping conversations focused on the business opportunity. Using concrete examples of event modeling in practice, they examine event modeling in the context of other related approaches and methodologies, including event sourcing, event storming, CQRS, and domain-driven design.

 




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Episode 540: Joe Nash on DevRel

Joe Nash of Twillio's TwilioQuest discusses the role of developer relations/advocate, which is a role at tech companies in-between developers, marketing, sales, and HR. Host Felienne speaks with Nash about the skills people need if they want to become...




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Episode 541: Jordan Harband and Donald Fischer on Securing the Supply Chain

Open source developers Jordan Harband and Donald Fischer join host Robert Blumen for a conversation about securing the software supply chain, especially open source. They start by reviewing supply chain security concepts, particularly as related to open..




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Episode 542: Brendan Callum on Contract-Driven APIs

Brendan Callum, engineering manager for the Pinterest developer platform team, discusses the "spec first" approach to API development and how it's different from "API first." Brendan speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about the challenges and advantages...




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Episode 543: Jon Smart on Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Successful Software Delivery in Enterprises

Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility, discusses patterns and anti-patterns for the success of enterprise software projects. Host Brijesh Ammanath speaks with him about the various common...




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Episode 544: Ganesh Datta on DevOps vs Site Reliability Engineering

Ganesh Datta, CTO and cofounder of Cortex, joins SE Radio's Priyanka Raghavan to discuss site reliability engineering (SRE) vs DevOps. They examine the similarities and differences and how to use the two approaches together to build better software...




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Episode 545: John deVadoss on Design Philosophies that Drive .NET/Azure

We talk with John deVadoss about the philosophies underlying the development of .NET and Azure software. We discuss the "Fiefdoms and Emissaries" concept of building loosely coupled systems, talk about strengths and drawbacks and how to build services...




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Episode 546: Dietrich Ayala on the InterPlanetary File System

Nikhil Krishna speaks with Dietrich Ayala about IPFS in depth. They cover what it is, how it works in detail and how one could leverage IPFS and libp2p in one's own application or to host one's content. The discussion goes into the IPFS ecosystem...




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Episode 547: Nicholas Manson on Identity Management for Cloud Applications

Nicholas Manson, a SaaS Architect with more than 2 decades of experience building cloud applications, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about identity and access management requirements for cloud applications. They begin by examining what a digital...




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Episode 548: Alex Hidalgo on Implementing Service Level Objectives

Alex Hidalgo, principal reliability advocate at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. The conversation covers the meaning...




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Episode 549: William Falcon Optimizing Deep Learning Models

William Falcon of Lighting AI discusses how to optimize deep learning models using the Lightning platform, optimization is a necessary step towards creating a production application. Philip Winston spoke with Falcon about PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning...




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Episode 550: J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller on Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations)

J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller discuss cloud financial operations (FinOps) with host Akshay Manchale. They consider the importance of a financial operations strategy for cloud-based infrastructure. J.R. and Mike discuss the differences between operating your own data center and running in the cloud, as well as the problems that doing so creates in understanding and forecasting cloud spend. Mike details the Cloud FinOps lifecycle by first attributing organizational cloud spend through showbacks and chargebacks to individual teams and products. JR describes the two levers available for optimization once an organization understands where they're spending their cloud budget. They discuss complexities that arise from virtualized infrastructure and techniques to attribute cloud usage to the correct owners, and close with some recommendations for engineering leaders who are getting started on cloud FinOps strategy.




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Episode 551: Vidal Graupera on Manager 1-1 with Direct Reports

Vidal Graupera, an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, speaks with SE Radio’s Brijesh Ammanath about the importance of managers' one-on-one meetings with direct reports. They start by considering how a 1:1 meeting differs from other meetings...




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SE Radio 553: Luca Casonato on Deno

Luca Casonato joins SE Radio's Jeremy Jung for a conversation about Deno and Deno Deploy. They start with a look at JavaScript runtimes and their relation to Google’s open source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine V8, and why Deno was created. They discuss the WinterCG W3C group for server-side JavaScript, why it's difficult to ship new features in Node, and the benefits of web standards. From there they consider the benefits of creating an all-inclusive toolset like Rust and Go rather than relying on separate solutions, Deno's node compatibility layer, use cases for WebAssembly, benefits and implementation of Deno Deploy, reasons to deploy on the edge, and what's coming next.




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SE Radio 559: Ross Anderson on Software Obsolescence

Ross John Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at University of Cambridge, discusses software obsolescence with host Priyanka Raghavan. They examine risks associated with software going obsolete and consider several examples of software obsolescence, including how it can affect cars. Prof. Anderson discusses policy and research in the area of obsolescence and suggests some ways to mitigate the risks, with special emphasis on software bills of materials. He describes future directions, including software policy and laws in the EU, and offers advice for software maintainers to hedge against risks of obsolescence.




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SE Radio 560: Sugu Sougoumarane on Distributed SQL with Vitess

Sugu Sougoumarane discusses how to face the challenges of horizontally scaling MySQL databases through the Vitess distribution engine and Planetscale, a service built on top of Vitess. The journey began with the growing pains of scale at YouTube around the time of Google’s acquisition of the video service. This episode explores ideas about topology management, sharding, Paxos, connection pooling, and how Vitess handles large transactions while abstracting complexity from the application layer.




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SE Radio 566: Ashley Peacock on Diagramming in Software Engineering

Ashley Peacock, author of the book Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques, speaks with SE Radio host Akshay Manchale about diagrams in software engineering. They discuss the power of diagramming and some reasons we don’t fully use it as often as we should. Ashley contrasts historical use of UML diagrams versus modern diagrams, which don't have hard rules about representations. The episode examines different types of diagrams through an example application and how it could be built with modern tools such as Streamy to simplify the building, versioning, and maintenance of diagrams.




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SE Radio 570: Stanisław Barzowski on the jsonnet Language

Stanisław Barzowski of XTX Markets and a committer on the jsonnet project joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a conversation about the jsonnet programming language. A superset of JSON, jsonnet adds programming language capabilities, particularly to address the need to handle large but mostly repetitive JSON configurations. They discuss the project’s history, use cases for Grafana and Kubernetes config, and interoperability with YAML. They examine jsonnet details, including the command line, constrained capabilities of the language, and objects and inheritance, and then consider the toolchain: compiler, formatter, and linter, as well as test frameworks and testing, package management, and the language’s performance. Barzowski describes four implementations -- go, C++, Rust, and Scala -- as well as popular libraries and the standard library.




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SE Radio 574: Chad Michel on Software as an Engineering Discipline

Chad Michel, Senior Software Architect at Don’t Panic Labs and co-author of Lean Software Systems Engineering for Developers, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about treating software development as an engineering discipline. They begin by discussing the need for engineering rigor in the software industry. Chad points out that many developers lack awareness of good engineering practice and are often unaware of resources such as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). Among the many topics explored in this episode are design methodologies such as volatility-based decomposition and the work of David Parnas, as well as important topics such as quality, how to address complexity, designing for change, and the role of the chief engineer. This episode is sponsored by ClickSend. SE Radio listeners can get a $50 credit by following the link.




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SE Radio 579: Arun Gupta on Open Source Strategy and Community

Arun Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel Corporation, discusses open-source strategy and community with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi. They explore the business case and business model for why and how big tech participates in the open-source ecosystem. Arun describes ways to foster a culture of engagement with open source within companies such as Intel, Amazon, and Apple. They then consider how the principles can be applied to closed-source software within a company. Finally, they discuss some of the benefits that Intel has gained from more than 20 years of open source contributions and look at the company’s plan for the year ahead. SE Radio is rought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 580: Josh Doody on Mastering Business Communication for Software Engineers

Josh Doody, author of Mastering Business Email, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how software engineers can master business communication. They begin with an exploration of various communication modes, including Slack, virtual meetings, emails, and presentations. Josh shares several strategies to improve communication skills and cross-cultural communication, but if there's one key take away from this episode, it might be: “use positive language for any medium of communication; be kind and use positive words.” Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 597: Coral Calero Muñoz and Félix García on Green Software

Coral Calero Muñoz and Felix Garcia, professors at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, speak with host Giovanni Asproni about green and sustainable software—an approach to software development aimed at creating software systems that consume less energy and produce less CO2 during their entire lifetimes with minimal impact on their functionality and other qualities. The episode starts by describing why green software matters, particularly in the context of global warming, and introducing the key concepts. Continues discussing the current status of the field, in both academia and industry, and finishes with hints and tips that can be readily applied by development teams to make their systems greener. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 599: Jason C. McDonald on Quantified Tasks

Jason C. McDonald, author of the book Dead Simple Python, speaks with host Samuel Taggart about leveraging quantified tasks to improve estimation, particularly across projects. They discuss the origin of the concept and its relationship with story points, and Jason offers examples to show how quantified tasks can capture nuances in software tasks that are often lost with story points. He also points to the ability to compare them across projects as a major advantage of quantified tasks. Among other topics, they consider also how to use quantified tasks to analyze the stability of a codebase. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 604: Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson on Software Requirements Essentials

Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant with Process Impact and author of 14 books, and Candase Hokanson, Business Architect and PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner at ArgonDigital, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about software requirements essentials. They explore five different parts of requirements engineering and how you can apply them to any ongoing project. Wiegers and Hokanson describe why requirements constantly change, how you can test that you're meeting them, and why the tools you have at hand are suitable to start straight away. They discuss the need for requirements in every software project and provide recommendations on how to gather, analyze, validate, and manage those requirements. Candase and Karl offer in-depth perspectives on a range of topics, including how to elicit requirements, speak with users, get to the source of the business or user goal, and create requirement sets, models, prototypes, and baselines. Finally, they look at specifications you can use, and how to validate, test, and verify them. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 606: Charlie Jones on Third-Party Software Supply Chain Risks

Charlie Jones, Director of Product Management at ReversingLabs and subject matter expert in supply chain security, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss tackling third-party software risks. They begin by defining different types of third-party software risks and then take a deep dive into case studies where third-party components and software have had cascading effects on downstream systems. They consider some frameworks for secure software development that can be used to evaluate third-party software and components – both as a publisher or as a consumer – and end by discussing laws and regulations with final advise from Charlie on how enterprises can tackle third-party software risks. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.




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SE Radio 609: Hyrum Wright on Software Engineering at Google

Hyrum Wright, Senior Staff Engineer at Google, discusses the book he co-edited, “Software Engineering at Google,” with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer. Wright describes the professional and technical best practices adopted by the software engineers at Google. The wide-ranging conversation investigates an array of topics, including measuring engineering productivity and writing effective test cases. This episode is sponsored by the Algorand Foundation.




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SE Radio 612: Eyal Solomon on API Consumption Management

Eyal Solomon, CEO and co-founder of Lunar.dev, joins SE Radio’s Kanchan Shringi for a discussion on tooling for API consumption management. The episode starts by examining why API consumption management is an increasingly important topic, and how existing tooling on the provider side can be inadequate for client-side issues. Eyal talks in detail about issues that are unique to API consumers, before taking a deep dive into the evolution of middleware built by teams and companies to address these issues and the gaps. Finally they consider how Lunar.dev seeks to solve these issues, as well as Eyal's vision of lunar.dev as a open source platform. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.




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SE Radio 614: Wouter Groeneveld on Creative Problem Solving for Software Development

Wouter Groeneveld, author of The Creative Programmer and PhD researcher at KU Leuven, discusses his research related to programming education with host Jeremy Jung. Topics include evaluating projects, constraints, social debt in teams, common fallacies in critical thinking, maintaining flow state, documenting and retaining knowledge, and creating environments that encourage creativity. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 616: Ori Saporta on the Role of the Software Architect

Ori Saporta, co-founder and Systems Architect at vFunction, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the role of the software architect. The episode begins with Ori’s thoughts on what is typically missed or overlooked regarding this role. The conversation then explores aspects of both hard and soft skills required of software architects. Other topics include the relationship of the software architect to other roles, to design and process, and to quality. The show concludes by addressing the importance of dependency management by software architects. Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 621: Xe Iaso on Fly.io

Xe Iaso of Fly.io discusses their hosting platform with host Jeremy Jung. They cover building globally distributed applications with Anycast, using Wireguard to encrypt inter-service communication, writing custom code to handle load balancing and scaling with fly-proxy, why serving EU customers has unique requirements, letting users use docker images without the docker runtime by converting them to firecracker and cloud hypervisor microVMs, the differences between regular VMs and microVMs, challenges of acquiring and serving GPUs to customers. when to use Kubernetes, and dealing with abuse on the platform. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 626: Ipek Ozkaya on Gen AI for Software Architecture

Ipek Ozkaya, Principal Researcher and Technical Director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon, discusses generative AI for Software Architecture with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan. The episode delves into fundamental definitions of software architecture and explores use cases in which gen AI can enhance architecture activities. The conversation spans from straightforward to challenging scenarios and highlights examples of relevant tooling. The episode concludes with insights on verifying the correctness of output for software architecture prompts and future trends in this domain. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 627: Chuck Weindorf on Leaders and Software Engineers

Chuck Weindorf, a retired IT director and chief engineer with nearly 40 years' experience in software engineering, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the concepts in Chuck's book, Leaders & Software Engineers. Through personal anecdotes and insights gleaned from his extensive career, Chuck underscores quality assurance's critical role in building trust with users and fostering a proactive culture of defect resolution within development teams. He highlights how ethical considerations underpin trust and integrity within the software engineering profession.

Chuck and Jeff examine the significance of thorough documentation and the vital role of effective communication in overcoming silos within organizations, and ensuring that projects meet their intended objectives while maintaining high standards of quality and reliability. They discuss how to cultivate a positive, innovative culture within engineering teams. Chuck shares strategies for addressing challenges and opportunities presented by change, advocating for adaptability and continuous learning as essential qualities for both new and experienced engineers navigating the evolving technological landscape. He offers advice for those transitioning into leadership roles, emphasizing the importance of developing soft skills and the ability to empathize with and inspire team members. Finally, the episode explores the potential impact of emerging technologies, such as low-code platforms and artificial intelligence.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. 




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SE Radio 637: Steve Smith on Software Quality

Steve Smith, founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and organizations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 639: Cody Ebberson on Regulated Industries

Cody Ebberson, CTO of Medplum, joins host Sam Taggart to discuss the constraints that working in regulated industries add to the software development process. They explore some general aspects of developing for regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, as well as a range of specific considerations that can add complexity and effort. Cody describes how translating regulatory requirements into test specifications and automating those tests can help streamline software development in these regulated environments. 

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 641: Catherine Nelson on Machine Learning in Data Science

Catherine Nelson, author of the new O’Reilly book, Software Engineering for Data Scientists, discusses the collaboration between data scientists and software engineers -- an increasingly common pairing on machine learning and AI projects. Host Philip Winston speaks with Nelson about the role of a data scientist, the difference between running experiments in notebooks and building an automated pipeline for production, machine learning vs. AI, the typical pipeline steps for machine learning, and the role of software engineering in data science. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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A direct solution to the crystallography phase problem

-- Delivered by Feed43 service




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Professional societies and you

-- Delivered by Feed43 service




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Has the RSS Advisory Board Followed the Roadmap?

There has been recent discussion about the roadmap that was added to the RSS 2.0 specification in August 2002 announcing that there would be no new additions to RSS, freezing its set of elements and attributes forever and ever amen. The roadmap stated, "We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format."

The RSS Advisory Board was formed 20 years ago to publish the specification and "make minor changes to the spec per the roadmap," as stated in the launch announcement on July 18, 2003.

If you're wondering whether the board has followed the roadmap, this timeline of RSS elements answers that question. There are 44 elements in RSS. This table shows when each element was introduced, the group that added it, and the version in which it first appeared.

There were 33 elements added to RSS by Netscape in 1999 and 11 by UserLand from 2000 to 2002. No elements have been added by the RSS Advisory Board.

ElementDate AddedPublisherVersion
channel03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-description03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-link03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-title03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-image03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-image-link03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-image-title03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-image-url03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-textInput03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-textInput-description03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-textInput-link03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-textInput-name03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-textInput-title03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-item03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-item-link03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
channel-item-title03/1999NetscapeRSS 0.90
rss07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-copyright07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-docs07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-image-description07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-image-height07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-image-width07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-language07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-lastBuildDate07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-managingEditor07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-pubDate07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-rating07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-skipDays07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-skipDays-day07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-skipHours07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-skipHours-hour07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-webMaster07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-item-description07/1999NetscapeRSS 0.91
channel-cloud12/2000UserLandRSS 0.92
channel-item-category12/2000UserLandRSS 0.92
channel-item-enclosure12/2000UserLandRSS 0.92
channel-item-source12/2000UserLandRSS 0.92
channel-category08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-generator08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-ttl08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-item-author08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-item-comments08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-item-guid08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0
channel-item-pubdate08/2002UserLandRSS 2.0

A few judgment calls had to be made compiling this list. The image and textInput elements were originally placed under the top-level element of the feed, but that is counted as their introduction even though they later moved inside channel. The rss element wasn't in the first version of RSS created by Netscape. Instead the top-level element was rdf:RDF until it was changed by Netscape to rss four months later.




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The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20

"Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther."

Today is the 20th birthday of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the RSS specification. It was formed on July 18, 2003, when the copyright of the specification was transferred to Harvard University, which immediately released it under a Creative Commons license and deferred all matters related to RSS to the new board.

At the time of the board's launch, here's how the founding members described its purpose:

Is the advisory board a standards body?

No. It will not create new formats and protocols. It will encourage and help developers who wish to use RSS 2.0. Since the format is extensible, there are many ways to add to it, while remaining compatible with the RSS 2.0 specification. We will help people who wish to do so.

What does the advisory board actually do?

We answer questions, write tech notes, advocate for RSS, make minor changes to the spec per the roadmap, help people use the technology, maintain a directory of compatible applications, accept contributions from community members, and otherwise do what we can to help people and organizations be successful with RSS.

This remains the purpose 140 dog years later. In addition to maintaining the current RSS specification, we are the official publisher of Netscape's RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91 specifications and Yahoo's Media RSS specification.

We also offer an RSS Validator and RSS Best Practices Profile containing our recommendations for how to implement the format.

There's a resurgence of interest in RSS today as people discover the exhilarating freedom of the open web. Some of this is due to dissatisfaction with deleterious changes at big social sites like Twitter and Reddit. Some is due to satisfaction with Mastodon, a decentralized social network owned by nobody with more than one million active users. As long as there are social media gatekeepers using engagement algorithms to decide what you can and can't see, there will be a need to get around them. When someone offers an RSS or Atom feed and you subscribe to it in a reader, you get their latest updates without manipulation.

Here's to another 20 years of feeding readers, unlocking gates, helping developers adopt RSS and repeatedly getting asked the question, "Can an RSS item contain more than one enclosure?"




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Surprising Solidarity in the Fight for Clean Water and Justice on O’ahu

After a 2021 leak at the U.S. military’s Red Hill fuel storage facility poisoned thousands, activists, Native Hawaiians, and affected military families have become unlikely allies in the fight for accountability.






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How to Defeat the Far-Right: Lessons From the French Left

Analyst Jean Bricmont offers a deep analysis of how France's left-leaning coalition swept a plurality of seats in the recent snap elections.




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Inside Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally

Investigative journalist Arun Gupta offers an eyewitness account of the hate—and sense of belonging—on display at Donald Trump’s New York City rally.









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Texas Teen Courts Keep Youth Out of Prison

El Paso’s Teen Court is a peer-driven, youth-led program that centers the well-being of teenagers, instead of condemning them to the destructive criminal justice system.