The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Gerhard is back for Kaizen 22! We're diving deep into those pesky out-of-memory errors, analyzing our new Pipedream instance status checker, and trying to figure out why someone in Asia downloads a single episode so much.

Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft's GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz' 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!

Linus Torvalds pushes AI generated code, Jordan Fulghum thinks this is the year of self-hosting, FracturedJson formats for compact / human readability, Scott Werner believes a flood of adequate software is coming, and Sean Goedecke explains why generic software design advice is useless.

We're joined by Sid Sijbrandij, founder of GitLab who led the all-in-one coding platform all the way to IPO. In late 2022, Sid discovered that he had bone cancer. That started a journey he's been on ever since... a journey that he shares with us in great detail. Along the way, Sid continued founding companies including Kilo Code, an all-in-one agentic engineering platform, which he also tells us a...

Brian Guthrie lists his seven rules for moving faster in software, Continuous-Claude-v2 is a context management system for Claude Code, Gas Town is Steve Yegge's multi-agent orchestrator for Claude Code, Paul Dix sees a great engineering divergence in 2026, and Mattias Geniar thinks web development is fun again.

Our 8th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 8 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Ajay Kulkarni from Tiger Data (Co-founder/CEO) is on the pod this week with Adam. He asked him to get vulnerable and trace his path to becoming a CEO. They dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and explore how founder values end up forming company culture (whether you intend them to or not). From his enterprise days to building Timescale (and the rename to Tiger Data), we cover the whol...

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 49 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam for a trip down the Linux rabbit hole -- Docker vs Podman, building a Kubernetes cluster, ZFS backups with zfs.rent, bootc, favorite Linux distros, new homelab tools built with AI, self-hosting Immich, content creation, Plex and Jellyfin, the future of piracy and more.

We're joined by Zipline cofounder / CTO, Keenan Wyrobek. Zipline is on a mission to build the world’s first logistics system that serves all people equally via their fleet of autonomous drones that started in Africa delivering medical supplies and can now deliver packages (up to 8 lbs) directly to your door. They've solved a lot of gnarly technical and regulatory challenges along the way. We go de...

Why AI needs hard rules (not vibe checks), what Anthropic's acquisition of Bun's creators tells us about the AI takeover, Jonah Glover couldn't get Claude to recreate Space Jam's 1996 website, Google finally unkills something, and Bazzite is a distro for the next generation of Linux gaming.

Nick Nisi joins us to dig into the latest trends from this year and how they're impacting his day-to-day coding and Vision Pro wearing. Anthropic's acquisition of Bun, the evolving JavaScript and AI landscape, GitHub's challenges and the Amp/Sourcegraph split. We dive into AI development practices, context management, voice assistants, Home Assistant OS and home automation, the state of the AI bro...

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, stops by to help us explore his tech predictions for 2026 and beyond. Will companionship be redefined by consumer robots? Will quantum-safe become the only safe worth talking about? Is this the dawn of the renaissance developer? We're infinitely curious why Werner came to this particular set of conclusions. Are you?

Matheus Lima on what makes senior developers actually senior, Tega Brain created a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, Andrew Kelley moves Zig from GitHub to Codeberg, Matias Heikkilä says there's no free lunch for vibe coding, and your SSD data at rest might be at risk.

Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more.

Let's hear how Wikipedia actually works from long-time Wikipedian, Bill Beutler! Bill has been heavily involved with this "8th wonder of the modern world" for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Beutler Ink –a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations. We discuss: the official (and not so official) rules, the editor cabal (which isn't one), the busi...

Cedric Chin says comparisons of our current AI *maybe-bubble* to the dot-com bubble and the 2008 GFC are limiting, Matthew Prince does a post-mortem on last week's Cloudflare outage, "hl" is a fast / powerful log viewer for humans, Enthusiast Guy's Continuum 93 is a fantasy computer emulator, and a list of things that aren't doing the thing.

Practical AI co-host, Chris Benson, joins us to discuss the latest advancements in AI, drones, home automation, and robotic swarming tech. Chris defines "swarm" with detail/precision and it turns out that what most people are calling a swarm today is NOT a swarm!

Spencer Chang caught our attention with the alive internet theory website, but he creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. Spencer's experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and...

Nilo Stolte explains why Zig is "a totally new way to write programs", George Mack gives twelve actionable ways to be more creative, Mario Zechner shares his findings on using MCP vs Bash tools, Josh Collinsworth compares creating AI art to medieval alchemy, LibrePods unlocks AirPods features for Android, and our first ever Changelog News Classifieds.

Do you like director's commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week's News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React's seemingly perpetual dominance, and more.

Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is "good taste" in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News.

A new AI-led tech role has emerged with a massive increase of job postings, Corey Quinn explains why younger devs won't tolerate pain in the AWS, Thomas Ptacek makes the case that you should write an agent, Paul Kinlan goes deeper on his dead framework theory, and Andrew Gallagher says to stop vibe coding your unit tests.

On this seventh iteration of our award-worthy game show filled with obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery: past winners battle to determine the champion of champions. (Also, Adam.)

Andrew Nesbitt builds tools and open datasets to support, sustain, and secure critical digital infrastructure. He's been exploring the world of open source metadata for over a decade. First with libraries.io and now with ecosyste.ms, which tracks over 12 million packages, 287 million repos, 24.5 billion dependencies, and 1.9 million maintainers. What has Andrew learned from all this, who is using...