The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they?re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher ? they?ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.

YouTuber ?Internet of Bugs? breaks down why AI ?software engineer? Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov?s attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashicorp?s Cease and Desist letter, Brian LeRoux introduces Enhance WASM & PumpkinOS is not your average PalmOS emulator.

Our beat freak in residence returns, this time to discuss the shiny new Dance Party album! We deconstruct its nostalgic mix, break down some of our favorite tracks & even learn that BMC is writing a mysterious book?

This week we?re talking to Scott Chacon, one of the co-founders of GitHub, to discuss the history and future of Git and Scott?s new project Git Butler, a branch manager tool that?s aiming to improve the developer experience of Git using Git. We also touch on the contentious topic of open source licensing and the challenges of defining ?Open Source?, FSL vs GPL, and more.

HashiCorp sends OpenTofu a nasty-gram in the wake of Matt Asay?s infringement claims, Polar is like Patreon but for software creators, a Common Corpus of LLM data is released on HuggingFace & Loki is an open source tool for fact verification.

Thisis our 14th Kaizen episode! Gerhard put some CDNs to the test, we?ve taken our next step with Postgres on Neon & Jerod pushed 55 commits (but 0 PRs)!

This week Adam is joined by Zeno Rocha ? the creator of the beloved Dracula theme and Co-founder and CEO of Resend. They discuss his personal journey and the challenges of balancing work and family life, how becoming a parent has given him new perspectives and influenced his decision to start his own company, the role of citizenship and immigration in his journey, how he prepared for the Y Combinator interview, meeting Paul Graham, the challenges of sending email, and the future of Resend and the possibility of a Series A round.

The big story right now is the recently uncovered backdoor in liblzma (aka XZ) ? a relatively obscure compression library that happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH. This incident is noteworthy for so many reasons: the exploit itself, how it was deployed, how it was found, what it says about our industry & how the community reacted. Let?s dig in!

Which is smarter: specializing in a particular tech or becoming more of a generalist? It depends! Which is why Jerod invited ?undercover generalist? Adolfo Ochagavía on our ?It Depends? series to weigh the pros & cons of each path.

Script flipped! Today we?re sharing two interviews of us on Other People?s Podcasts (OPP): Kathrine Druckman from the Open at Intel podcast invited us on the show at KubeCon NA in November and Den Delimarsky hosted Jerod on The Work Item podcast in February.

Redis? re-licensing prompts forks like Drew DeVault?s Redict, Matthew Miller thinks we need more community built software, Paul Gross makes the case that DuckDB is the new jq, Anton Zhiyanov shares how he makes a living as a developer despite being ?pretty dumb? & Baldur Bjarnason chimes in on the state of the web developer job market.

THE Cameron Seay joins us once again! This time we learn more about his life/history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI / quantum computing and how they might affect the tech labor market & more!

This week Adam talks with Kris Moore, Senior Vice President of Engineering at iXsystems, about all things TrueNAS. They discuss the history of TrueNAS starting from its origins as a FreeBSD project, TrueNAS Core being in maintenance mode, the momentum and innovation happening in TrueNAS Scale, the evolution of the TrueNAS user interface, managing ZFS compatibility in TrueNAS, the business model of iXsystems and their commitment to the open-source community, and of course what?s to come in the upcoming Dragonfish release of TrueNAS Scale.

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 Section 1201, the challenges of recycling products with glued-in batteries, the need for producer responsibility, the future of repairability, repair scoring systems to inform consumers, and so much more. Did you know that iFixit funds its advocacy work through the sale of its tools and parts? So cool.

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 the opportunity. We even discuss the cultural idiom ?It?s always DNS,? and the shift to using DNS resolvers like OpenDNS, Google?s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare?s 1.1.1.1. Buckle up, this is a good one.

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 direction of Sourcegraph as a result ? and Quinn also shares his order of operations when it comes to understanding the daily state of their growth.

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, Homebrew?s relationship with Apple, the importance of developer experience, and sooo much more.

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 definition. Of course we also talk about the potential impact if a poorly defined Open Source AI emerges from all their efforts. Note: Stefano was under the weather for this conversation, but powered through because of how important this topic is.

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 startup.

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 product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they?ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

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 engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

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 importance of tooling, the difference between authentication and authorization, and a mindset change for when security takes place ? it?s a matter of ?when? not ?who.?

Alex Ellis? new actions-batch project uses GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer, DevDocs.io combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface, Jarred Sumner announces Bun?s very own JavaScript shell, Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components & Martin Heinz writes an awesome guide to building an indoor air quality monitoring system with Prometheus, Grafana & a CO2 sensor.

Techno Tim is back with Adam to discuss the state of homelab in 2024 and the trends happening within homelab tech. They discuss homelab environments providing a safe place for experimentation and learning, network improvement as a gateway to homelab, trends in network connection speeds, to Unifi or not, storage trends, ZFS configurations, TrueNAS, cameras, home automation, connectivity, routers, pfSense, and more. Umm, should we make these conversations between Adam and Tim more frequent?

This week we?re joined by FreeBSD & OpenZFS developer, Allan Jude, to learn all about FreeBSD. Allan gives us a brief history of BSD, tells us why it?s his operating system of choice, compares it to Linux, explains the various BSDs out there & answers every curious question we have about this powerful (yet underrepresented) Unix-based operating system.

Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).

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 structure can lead to gaps in expertise and responsibility which can lead to potential outages and slower response times. By the way, we officially let the cat off out of the bag in this episode. Justin has joined the ranks here at Changelog and is taking over as the host of Ship It! Expect new episodes soon.

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, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking. So much wisdom and advice in this episode!

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.