The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

A new badge for open source projects that won't be getting any maintenance, everything Chip Huyen learned from looking at 900 open source AI tools, CNBC writes up tech's renewed layoff trend, Teable is a Postgres-Airtable fusion & Target announces an open source fund.

Today you get Sorentwo for the price of one! We are joined by Shannon & Parker Selbert, both halves of the mom-and-pop software shop behind Oban, the robust job processing library that's been delivering our emails & processing our audio for years.

This week Adam went solo — talking to Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit, about all things Right to Repair. They discussed the latest win here in the US with Oregon passing an electronics Right to Repair law to allow owners the right to get their stuff fixed anywhere as well as limit the anti-repair practices of parts pairing. They also discussed the history of the DMCA, the challenges posed by...

Puter puts an entire operating system in your web browser, the kapa.ai team write down how to structure your docs for LLMs, Daytona is an open source Codespaces alternative, Gleam v1.0 has been released & Rolldown is a JavaScript bundler written in Rust.

Adam is joined by Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant — they discuss Bourbon, sniffing arms, better software, leading a successful startup, scaling teams, building vs acquiring, and Adam even gets Robert to commit to watching Silicon Valley!!

This week we're talking about DNS with Paul Vixie — Paul is well known for his contributions to DNS and agrees with Adam on having a "love/hate relationship with DNS." We discuss the limitations of current DNS technologies and the need for revisions to support future internet scale, the challenges in doing that. Paul shares insights on the future of the internet and how he'd reinvent DNS if given...

Apple backs off killing web apps (but the fight continues), Luka Kladaric writes about how to ship quality software in hostile environments, Deno's new package registry is an npm superset, Martin Fowler on the value of periodic face-to-face & Eugene Ghanizadeh wants us to get more decentralized than the Fediverse. Leave us nice words!

The Zed text editor has come a long way since Nathan Sobo came on the show last year to tell us about this follow-up to Atom. Zed is open source now, has the underpinnings of collaboration built in, is beginning its journey toward full extensibility, is coming to Linux soon & shows serious promise if Nathan's team can mix their secret sauce just right.

This week Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph for a "2 years later" catch up from his last appearance on Founders Talk. This conversation is a real glimpse into what it takes to be CEO of Sourcegraph in an era when code intelligence is shifting more and more into the AI realm, how they've been driving towards this for years, the subtle human leveling up we're all experiencing, the di...

Listen to our newest album called Dance Party as a podcast! This is an EPIC bundle of BMC bangers. We double dog dare you to listen and try NOT to dance 🕺

GPTScript is a new scripting language to automate your interactions with LLMs, Adam Wiggins conducts a retrospective on Muse, Nikita Prokopov surveyed a bunch of popular websites to see how much JS they loaded on their pages, Pages CMS is a no-hassle CMS for GitHub pages & Jim Nielsen writes about the subversive hyperlink.

Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew, and now CTO at Workbrew joins us to discuss open tabs, social media spam and distractions, TikTok's addictive nature, Apple Vision Pro and its potential future, the maintenance of software, the swing back to old school web development, the value of telemetry in open source projects, Mike's ongoing involvement in Homebrew and what they're working on at Workbrew...

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

Ship It is back! IEEE Spectrum writes about quantum computing's reality check, Maxim Dounin announces freenginx, Nadia Asparouhova goes deep on AI & the "effective accelerationism" movement, Angie Byron helps first time open source contributors avoid common pitfalls & Miroslav Nikolov writes up his advice for high-risk refactoring.

Jamie Tanna (who has a website) joins us to discuss the indie web, living with ADHD, sharing his salary history with the world & building DMD – a _dynamite_ open source tool to help you better understand the use of dependencies across your org.

This week we're joined by Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). They are responsible for representing the idea and the definition of open source globally. Stefano shares the challenges they face as a US-based non-profit with a global impact. We discuss the work Stefano and the OSI are doing to define Open Source AI, and why we need an accepted and shared def...

Changelog Beats drops a new Dance Party album, Will McGugan's new Toolong (`tl`) terminal app, Mitchell Baker is out as Mozilla CEO, Microsoft's Jordi Adoumie announces sudo for Windows, Tatu Ylonen tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22 & Jack Lindamood gives an "Endorse" or "Regret" rating for ~50 different services, tools & processes he used over the 4 years he led infrastructure at a...

We're taking you back to the hallway track at THAT Conference where we have 3 MORE fun conversations: one with Samuel Goff about the future of energy, one with YouTuber Jess Chan about the future of content creation & one with Vanessa Villa / Noah Jenkins about ag tech & the future of food.

This week on The Changelog we're talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she's had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide prod...

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist's world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.

We're taking you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

This week on The Changelog we're talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we're in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional en...

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Our old friend José Valim & his team have been hard at work adding gradual typing to Elixir. They're only 1-3% of the way there, but a lot of progress has been made. So, we invited him back on the show for a deep-dive on why, how & when Elixir will be gradually typed.

This week we're going deep on security and what it takes to shift left, seriously. Adam is joined by Justin Garrison (co-host of Ship It), plus two members of the BoxyHQ team — Deepak Prabhakara, Co-founder & CEO and Schalk Neethling, Community Manager and DevRel as well as fellow Changelog Slack member. We discuss how to shift left, the role of the developer and the burden of security, the import...