What up nerds? Shabag! I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, December 18th, 2023. Can you believe it?
This is already our final news episode of the year. Thanks for reading and listening along in 2023. This episode diverges from our traditional fair. I reviewed the 50 previous episodes and picked, in my opinion, the coolest code, the best prose, and my favorite episode of the Changelog from each month.
Let's do it. We're in January, Twitter is still called Twitter, threads? Never heard of it. People are joining the Fediverse in droves.
Coolest code is GitSim, Jacob Stopack's Python-based CLI that quickly generates a visual of how any Git command would impact your local repo without actually doing it and potentially interrupting your dev workflow. Best prose goes to Justin Etheridge. There's no substitute for experience, but you can take a sizable shortcut if you're willing to learn from someone else's experience. Justin wrote down 20 things he learned from his experience as a software engineer, and there's a bunch of shortcuts in there, yours for the taking.
And my favorite episode in January, mainframes are still a big thing, with Cameron's say, Cameron's passion and enthusiasm for technology, plus his keen ability to explain complex topics to plebs like Adam and I make this a muscle-lessing conversation for anyone who regularly touches the keyboard. Next up, February. The AI gold rush is still on. Prompt engineering is losing its luster.
Microsoft's Sydney being is propositioning journalists. Coolest code is elk for Macedon. The open-source view-based web client for Macedon is beautiful, full-featured, and a shining example of a community that absolutely loves building cool software in public. Best prose?
Scalability is overrated by what seemed to be her. What seems to counter startup culture take on scalability is focused on business tasks, but all the same principles apply to software engineering. Some things should be built to scale, other things shouldn't, deciding which is which is often the hard part. And my favorite episode of the month, ironic juxtaposition acknowledged what it takes to scale engineering.
Rachel Poppin, former VP of engineering at GitHub, really knows her stuff. So he asks her to share everything she's learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering. Remember March? Chat, GPT plugins are about to change everything.
AI tech demos abound, GitHub co-pilot X is going to give it to you. Coolest code comes from Aaron Tenderlo Patterson, who took a BMW shifter and converted it into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control VIM. Need I Say More? No I do not.
Those belong to retools Ryan Lucas, who put together a gorgeous and comprehensive treatment of the history and legacy of Visual Basic. The lead, how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment. It's sudden fall from grace, and why it's influence is still shaping the future of software development. And my favorite change vlog episode of the month, bringing Whisper and llama to the masses.
The work Gorgi Gergunov is doing with Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp is so impressive and truly democratizing. These might be the most important software projects of the year, and I'm tickled that we got to sit down with Gorgi and pick his brain about them. In April, open source language models have started to fight back, Twitter's algorithm is kind of open source now, and past keys are bubbling up in Zeitgeist. Coolest code is a collaboration platform and get hosting for open source software, content and projects.
It's called Codeburg, and it's not run by a company, but a non-profit based number Lin. The service boasts about its community roots and commitment to privacy. They say your data is not for sale. All services run on servers under our control and no dependencies on external services.
Best pros? 90% of my skills are now $0, but the other 10% are worth $1,000. When Kent back writes a headline like that one, people stop and read. You probably already know or remember the context, but just in case Kent writes quote, my skills continue to improve, but chat GPTs are improving faster.
It's a matter of time. End quote. And my favorite episode of the month, LLMs break the internet. There's no better person to document, analyze, use, and prognosticate about LLMs with than our friend Simon Willison.
This one is just a hoot to listen to as Simon frequently oscillates, from frenzy to excitement to leery doomsday. We are now in May, and people are wondering if Big Tech really has an AI moat? People are wondering if Python will remain dominant? People are wondering, what's a battery database?
Coolest code is Mojo, a programming language for all AI developers? I thought Python was the programming language for all AI developers. It is, but maybe it won't always be, but even then, it still would be. Sorta.
Best pros goes to why chatbots are not the future. Amelia Watt and Burger makes her case that our current primary form of interacting with LLMs ain't it. I'm convinced. But what comes next?
And my favorite episode of May, introducing changelog and friends. This one is a bit self-serving, but I love our new talk show format and from the feedback we're getting. So do most of you. This was our inaugural episode where Adam and I lay out the idea, the plan, and what to expect.
Let's talk. In June, Apple unveils its new vision, Reddit goes dark, and AI may have poisoned its own well. Coolest code is Valtown. One of GitHub Jists could actually run, and AWS Lando were actually fun.
Valtown is a social website to write and deploy TypeScript, build APIs, and schedule functions from your browser. Cool stuff. Best pros. Some blogging myths by Julia Evans.
Julia is one of the most successful developer bloggers out there, so when she decides to write out some myths about blogging, it's worth paying attention to what she has to say. Myth. You need to be original. Myth.
You need to be an expert. Myth. Riding, boring, post is bad. And more.
My favorite episode in June. Don't make things worse. I will always love this episode for the simple reason that it was my first time meeting, Taylor Troach. You might love it because we dive deep on interesting topics like Yak Shaves, dependency selection, negative 10x engineers, and IKEA-oriented development.
It's now time for some sponsor news. Our friends at Neon have been taking the developer world by storm with their serverless postgres offering. What makes Neon's postgres different? They separate storage and compute to make on-demand scalability possible.
Compute activates on an incoming connection and scales to zero when not in use. Their storage is different too. The fault-tolerant scale-out system integrates with cloud objects towards, I guess, three to offload cold data for cost optimization. Very cool stuff.
Oh, and did you know you can try serverless postgres with just a single command? Type PSQL-HPG.neon.tech and you're up and running with a scalable, cost-efficient and easy-to-use database. Thanks again to Neon for sponsoring changewalk news. Check out what they're up to by following the link in your show notes.
We've reached July, Oracle's Smax IBM over Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Facebook launches threads, and Twitter is now called X. Coolest code goes to Elihuxables-Hwin, a command-line tool that helps you make better use of your shell by giving control R superpowers. Every line you write is stored, ready to be queried, and run again at any point from any machine you wish. Never forget.
Again. Street Redemption by Lucas Mathis. Lucas takes up one of the problems with using streaks as a motivator, and how he suggests you can design your app to provide some way to recover from a street gloss after it's happened. And my favorite episode of the month?
Storytime with Steve Yege. Steve Ranson raves about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. I'm not sure who had more fun. Us listening to his stories or Steve telling them?
It's now August. HashiCorp adopts the business source license. Debbie and celebrates 30 years, and captions are declared useless. Coolest code is from hardware hacker Ivan Koolashov, who modded the Mac Mini to run via power over ethernet and documented the entire wild adventure.
Don't try this at home, but do read this at home with your favorite beverage. Best Bros goes to things you forgot or never knew because of React. Josh Collins' worth's posts have contributed heavily to the pendulum starting to swing the other direction away from React lately. You can also credit RSC and React's ever-tighter association with Next.js as contributing factors, but Josh gets some credit too.
And my favorite episode, an aberrant generation of programmers, Justin Searles' widely read essay on enthusiast programmers and intergenerational conflict, becomes our most downloaded episode of the year. I guess everyone wants to hear about the looming demise of the 10x dev. In September, BUN 1.0 comes out of the oven, OpenTF, Vork Seriform, and Open Tofu, Vork's OpenTF's name. Coolest code is TextualWeb, which takes a textual-powered tooey and turns it into a web application.
That means you can now send your terminal app to your mom by pacing a link to it over iMessage. She'll be so proud of her little baby. Best Bros, the worst programmer I know by Dan North, who tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he's ever worked with, who also happens to be one heck of a programmer. Tim scored zero points on the company's productivity metric and almost got fired, but… And my favorite conversation, Open Source is that across roads.
Stephen O'Grady, from Redwunk, joins us to discuss the definition of Open Source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small, but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. October. InfluxDB. Drops Go for Rust.
Change Log. Drops. Some Beats. Netflix.
Drops. Dropping off DVDs. In your mailbox. Coolest code goes to Bruno, API Explorer.
Bruno is cool because it's a lot like Postman friends, but it stores your collections directly in a folder on your file system using a plain-text marketplace which is called Brue, or Brue, I suppose. You can use Git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections. Bruno is offline only, there are no plans to add glowsink to Bruno, ever. End quote.
Best pros. You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed. Jorge Medina hits close to home by describing the decision fatigue. Quote, it's exhausting, it's an epidemic, and it has turned us into digital hoarders.
End quote. His advice? Curate to create. And how do you go about that?
By building a curation system? Of course. And my favorite episode? The Beginning of the End of Physical Media.
Christina Warren, aka Film Girl, pours out a drink with us and laments the end of the golden age of access to the films we all love. This episode is quintessential, change on friends. In November, the internet watches open eye, unravel in real time, then re-ravel, then I'm not sure. Coolest code is SSHX, which lets you share your terminal with anyone by link on a multiplayer infinite canvas.
It has real time collaboration with remote cursors and chat. It's also fast and into an encrypted, with a lightweight server written rust, so you know it's cool. Best pros. The Beauty of finished software.
Jose Amgogado writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write a song of ice and fire, Jose goes on to praise the beauty of finished software. He says finished software is software that isn't expected to change, and that's a feature because you don't rely on it to do some real work.
And my favorite episode of November, backslashes our trash. We always force, I mean, ask Matt Ryer to make up songs for us when he comes on the show, but this particular episode he really delivers the goods with two smash hits, automatically, and the eponymous. Backslashes our trash. Finally, December.
I remember it like it was just yesterday. Also, today. And tomorrow or two. What day is it again?
Coolest code goes to Hare. Drudevall and his friends have set out to build a programming language that will last 100 years. It doesn't get much cooler than that. It's pros.
The chimerologists. The chimerologists. The chimerologists. The chimerologists.
No idea how you say that word. Robin Burgeon tries to formalize a name to describe people with a certain set of skills that no one can explain. And my favorite episode of the month, Pound of Fine, Game Theory, dude. What happens when you take four grizzled Pound of Fine veterans and throw an Emma Boston into the mix?
Find out on this episode because our award worthy game of fake definitions is back and this time it is better than ever. Alternate episode title, your best excuse yet to stop procrastinating and use your employers personal to build and fund to sign up for Changelog Plus Plus. So you can listen to the two, yes, two bonus rounds in which we reveal the actual winner of the game. Speaking of Changelog Plus Plus, it's time once again, it's time once again to shout out to our newest members, James M, Eduardo M, Adam D, Joshua L, Felipe L, Nicholas W, Ricardo M, Jack O, Todd B, Louis P, and Nicholas L.
We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard earned cash. If Changelog Plus Plus is new to you, that's our membership program that you can join to ditch the ads. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.