The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week we're talking with Daniel Thompson about Tauri and their journey to their recent 1.0 release. Tauri is often compared to Electron - it's a toolkit that lets you build software for all major desktop operating systems using web technologies. It was built for the security-focused, privacy-respecting, and environmentally-conscious software engineering community. The core libraries are writte...

Jarred Sumner's Bun comes out of the oven, Jeremy Brown doesn't want you prematurely optimizing, Armin Ronacher's not excited about his "critical" Python package, Daniel Thompson from Tauri thinks you should check out Rustlings, and we draw a straight line between Functional Programming jargon and boujee Gen Z slang.

Today we have a special treat: Bryan Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer! You may know Bryan from his work on DTrace. He worked at Sun for many years, then Oracle, and finally Joyent before starting Oxide. We dig deep into their company's mission/principles/values, hear how it it all started with a VC's blank check that turned out to be anything but, and learn how Oxide's integrated app...

We're listening! This week's experimental, super-brief Monday edition of "The Changelog" has the following new features: It's longer, there's no background music during the stories, and it includes stories previously not featured in the newsletter. If you like this better than the last one, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going... let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog!

Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that's still in use to this day. This time around we're going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free. Has James given up on the busine...

We're experimenting with something new: a super-brief Monday edition of "The Changelog" to help start your week off right and keep you up with the fast-moving software world. If you like this, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going... let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog. If you'd rather we didn't... also let us know!

Adam and Jerod are joined by Ken Kantzer, co-founder of PKC Security. Ken and his team performed upwards of 20 code audits on well-funded startups. Now that it's 7 or 8 years later, he wrote up 16 surprising observations and things he learned looking back at the experience. We gotta discuss 'em all!

This week Lee Robinson joins us to talk about his journey as a DevRel. We talk about what it means to be a DevRel, what orgs they fall under, how he runs his team at Vercel, Lee's three pillars of DevRel: education, community, and product, we compare the old days of DevRel vs now, and of course what makes a DevRel a good DevRel.

This week Jesse Grosjean joins us to talk about his career as a solo indie Mac dev. Since 2004 Jesse has been building Mac apps under the company name Hog Bay Software producing hits such as WriteRoom, Taskpaper, and now Bike. We talk through the evolution of his apps, how he considers new features and improvements, why he chose and continues to choose the Mac platform, his business model and pric...

This week we're peeking into the future again — this time we're looking at the future of modern code review and workflows around pull requests. Jerod and Adam were joined by two of the co-founders of Graphite — Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster. Graphite is an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship fast...

This week we're talking with Bruce Schneier — cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer (of many books). He calls himself a "public-interest technologist", a term he coined himself, and works at the intersection of security, technology, and people. Bruce has been writing about security issues on his blog since 2004, his monthly newsletter has been going since 19...

This week we're joined by Mike Riley and we're talking about his book Portable Python Projects (Running your home on a Raspberry Pi). We breakdown the details of the latest Raspberry Pi hardware, various automation ideas from the book, why Mike prefers Python for scripting on a Raspberry Pi, and of course why the Raspberry Pi makes sense for home labs concerned about data security. Use the code `P...

We’re talking with Woody Zuill today about all things Mob Programming. Woody leads Mob Programming workshops, he’s a speaker on agile related topics, and coaches and guides orgs interested in creating an environment where people can do their best work. We talk through it all and we even get some amazing advice from Woody’s dad. We define what Mob Programming is and why it’s so effective. Is it a r...

Today we’re talking with Zach Lloyd, founder of Warp — the terminal being re-imagined for the 21st century and beyond. Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal that's being designed from the ground up to work like a modern app. We get into all the details — why now is the right time to re-invent the terminal, where they got started, the business they aim to build around Warp, what it's going...

Frank Krueger joined us to talk about solving hard problems. Earlier this year he wrote a blog post titled "Practical Guide to Solving Hard Problems," and a lot of what he had to say really resonated with us. The premise is simple — if you have to write some code that you’re just not sure how to write...what do you do? What are the practical steps that you can take when you’re feeling stumped? Tod...

This week we're joined by Deepthi Sigireddi, Vitess Maintainer and engineer at PlanetScale — of course we're talking about all things Vitess. We talk about its origin inside YouTube, how Vitess handles sharding, Deepthi's journey to Vitess maintainer, when you should begin using it, and how it fits into cloud native infra.

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian's been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton. This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You'll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson's unique skillset, why Brian thi...

The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is "get that new project into production" and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to h...

This week we're joined by the "mad scientist" himself, Feross Aboukhadijeh...and we're talking about the launch of Socket — the next big thing in the fight to secure and protect the open source supply chain. While working on the frontlines of open source, Feross and team have witnessed firsthand how supply chain attacks have swept across the software community and have damaged the trust in open so...

This week we're talking to Toby Padilla, Co-Founder at Charm — where they build tools to make the command line glamorous. We talk about the state of the art, the next big thing happening on the command line and in ssh-land. They have an array of open source tooling to build great apps for the terminal and Charm Cloud to power a new generation of CLI apps. We talk through all their tooling, where t...

This week we're joined by Annie Sexton, UX Engineer at Render, to talk about her blog post titled Git Organized: A Better Git Flow that made the internet explode when she suggested using `reset` instead of `rebase` for a better git flow. On this show we talk about the git flow she suggests and why, how this flow works for her when she's hacking on the Render codebase (and when she uses it), the go...

This week we’re joined by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and we're talking about his extensive writing on work sample tests. These tests are an exercise, a simulation, or a small slice of real day-to-day work that candidates will perform as part of their job. Over the years, as an engineering leader, Jacob has become a practicing expert in effectively hiring engineers — today he shares a wealth of knowledge on...

This week we're joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled "Incident" shouldn't be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we're talking with Nora about all things incidents — the learning and growth they represent for teams, wh...

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as "the open source Firebase alternative," a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam's perspective, he's never been more excited about what they're bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone fro...