The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

At the tail end of 2019, we got together with Quincy Larson to celebrate ten years of Changelog & five years of freeCodeCamp by recording back-to-back episodes on each other's pods. Can you believe it's now five years later and we're all still here doing our thing?! Let's learn what Quincy and the amazing community at freeCodeCamp have been up to!

Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to op...

Will Crichton wishes some naming conventions would die already, GitHub user brjsp noticed that Bitwarden's new SDK dependency isn't open source, Joaquim Rocha details his forking best practices, Sophie Koonin explains why you should go to conferences & Mike Hoye puts WordPress on SQLite.

Zac Smith left his role leading Equinix Metal in June of 2023. Since then, he's been thinking deeply about the present and potential future of data centers, OEMs, chip makers & more.

This week we're going back in time to one of our top performing shows of all time where we talk with Matt Rickard about his blog post Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. These reflections are about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours. Most don't apply to beginners. He was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or soft skills. If you count...

Nicholas Bloom finds WFH is powering a productivity boom, Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves, Levels.fyi has added a salary heat map, Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is & Artem Zakirullin details how cognitive load is what really matters in software development.

Go Time co-host, Johnny Boursiquot, joins Adam & Jerod to discuss not making the (first) cut, applying Founder Mode, being a cog (or not), realizing that companies are posting fake engineering jobs & the (maybe) imminent demise of the .io TLD.

John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He's early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John's acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.

A bias against hyperlinking has developed on platforms, GitHub engineering continues to evolve Issues, Evan You announces VoidZero, some companies are only pretend hiring & Klaas van Schelven asks: does it scale (down)?

Abi Noda, co-founder and CEO at DX, joins the show to talk through data shared from the Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey, why devs are really unhappy, and what they're doing at DX to help orgs and teams to understand the metrics behind their developer's happiness and productivity.

Jerod is joined by the co-hosts of core.py , Pablo Galindo & Łukasz Langa, a podcast about Python internals by people who work on Python internals. Python 3.13 is right around the corner, which means the Global Interpeter Lock (GIL) is now experimentally optional! This is a huge deal as Python is finally free-threaded. There's more to discuss, of course, so we get into all the gory details.

OpenFreeMap puts OpenStreetMap data on your website for free, Fatih Arslan builds a Dieter Rams inspired iPhone dock, Joseph Gentle thinks the Rust programming language feels like a first-gen product & the web dev community is debating the viability of Web Components once again.

Nick Nisi joins Adam and Jerod to talk about Karaoke, ARC and the business model of web browsers, this WordPress drama, and an epic bonus for Changelog ++ subscribers.

Jerod is joined by Ryan Dahl to discuss his second take on leveling up JavaScript developers all around the world. Jerod asks Ryan why not try to fix or fork Node instead of starting fresh, how Deno (the open source project) can avoid the all too common rug pull (not cool) scenario, what's new in Deno 2 & their pragmatic decision to support npm, they talk JSR, they talk Deno KV & SQLite, they even...

Mahmoud Mousa releases Sidekick, a tool for hosting side projects on a cheap VPS, Ryan Dahl, has had enough of Oracle bogarting "JavaScript" but not even using it, Thomas Rampelberg's kty is a sweet terminal for Kubernetes, Redis users are considering alternatives after their relicense & a bunch of smart JS folks wrote up nine Node.js pillars.

Gerhard Lazu joins us for Kaizen 16! Our Pipe Dream™️ is becoming a reality, our custom feeds are shipping, our deploys are rolling out faster & our tooling is getting `just` right.

Jimmy Miller talks to us about his experience with a legacy codebase at his first job as a programmer. The codebase was massive, with hundreds of thousands of lines of C# and Visual Basic, and a database with over 1,000 columns. Let's just say Jimmy got into some stuff. There's even a Gilfoyle involved. This episode is all about his adventures while working there.

Scott Chacon writes up his insider take on GitHub's success, Sentry wants other companies to take the Open Source Pledge, Benj Edwards used AI to reproduce his late father's handwriting, Dave Kiss explains the current hype that PHP is getting & Taylor Otwell raises $57 million series A from Accel.

Jerod & Adam share our Zulip first impressions, react to Elasticsearch going open source (again), discuss Christian Hollinger's blog post on why he still self-hosts & answer a listener question: how do we produce podcasts?

Erez Zukerman shares the story of launching the ErgoDox EZ on Indiegogo (May 2015), what it takes to create customizable ergonomic keyboards, the benefits of split keyboards and custom key layouts, repairability and longevity, community engagement, and the attention to detail required in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and ke...

A Rust for Linux developer resigns amidst rising tension in the Linux community, Bret Victor shows off what he's been working on for years, Rachel (by the bay) laments how useless "SRE" has become as a role, Doug Turnbull makes the case for hiring junior devs & Baldur Bjarnason says the LLM honeymoon phase is about to end.

Emily Freeman joins the show alongside our Ship It co-host, Justin Garrison! We hear Emily's burnout story & learn how she and Forrest Brazeal are putting tech-focused influencers on tap. But first: area code turf wars, bad movie reboots & buying used DVDs... at Starbucks?!

We're joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip's origins, how it's open source, the way it's led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community...all the things.

The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk's Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing.

What happens when you take two #define champs (Taylor Troesh, Thomas Eckert), a grizzled veteran (Adam Stacoviak), a british bard (Mat Ryer), a PhD (Carol Lee) & you pit them against each other in a game of fake tech definitions?! There's only one way to find out...