The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

It's our 13th Kaizen episode! We're back from KubeCon, we're making goals for the year, we're migrating to Neon & we're weighing the pros/cons of building our own custom CDN.

Justin Garrison joins us to talk about Amazon's silent sacking, from his perspective. He should know. He works there. Well, as of yesterday he quit. We discuss how the cloud and Kubernetes have transformed the way software is developed and deployed, the impact silent layoffs have on employees and their careers, speaking out about workplace issues (the right way), how changes in organizational stru...

Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes "all code is tech debt" is all wrong.

Hello 2024! We're kicking off the year with Dan Moore, author of ‘Letters to a New Developer’ — a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. We discuss the value of online communities for new developers, the importance of communication skills, and the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Dan shares his best advice for new developers,...

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we're featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening! 💚

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

What happens when you take four grizzled #define veterans and throw an Emma Bostian into the mix? Find out on this episode because our award-worthy game of fake definitions is back and this time it's even better!

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite's text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby's open source, self-hosted implementa...

Jerod is back with another "It Depends" episode! This time he's joined by Kris Brandow from Go Time and they're talking all things API design. What makes a good API? Is GraphQL a solid choice? Why do we do REST wrong? And WTF does HATEOAS mean, anyway?

This week on The Changelog we're joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said "[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist." Wise words. We discuss Hare (of course), why he's so passionate about all things open source, th...

ChatGPT's new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox's share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can't be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she's ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the "code is read more than written" cliche with his own: "code is run more than read."

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco? We also talk in-depth about Gergely's self-published book, The Software Engineer's Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

This week we're gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon...we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they're working on at Sidero Labs.

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.

This week on we're joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that's designed to bring developers and design to the same tool. The question they're trying to answer is "How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?" We go way back to Emil's startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to h...

The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a "eulogy" to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.

Jerod goes one-on-one with our old friend Justin Searls! We talk build vs buy decisions, dependency selection & how Justin has implemented POSSE (Post On Site Syndicate Elsewhere) in response to the stratification of social networks.

This week we're talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Wind...

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev's fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto's experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.

Mat Ryer returns with his guitar, an unpopular opinion & his favorite internet virus.

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that "new good internet." Cory's new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares h...

David Hugh-Jones has a lot to say about what makes a good comment, Hugging Face released a distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition, The New Stack reports on C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup’s plan for bringing safety to the language, Jeff Sandberg declares that CSS is fun again & Jose M. Gilgado praises the beauty of finished software.

We're joined this week by the beat freak in residence himself, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Listen along as we talk about how we make our beats, what inspires us for our music, and some behind the scenes on our latest albums.

Jean Yang's research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are *the* layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs. That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led he...