All Episodes - The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show.
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#define: props to astronomer
Welcome back to #define, our game of obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery. This time we're joined by three Changelog++ members, to see who has the best vocabulary and who can trick everyone else into thinking that they do.
Bringing Vitess to Postgres (Interview)
Sugu Sougoumarane, creator of Vitess, comes off sabbatical to bring Vitess to Postgres. We discuss what motivated Sugu to come off sabbatical, why now is the time, the technical challenges of doing so, the implementation details of Multigres (Vitess for Postgres). We also discuss the state of Postgres at scale.
Coding agents have crossed a chasm
David Singleton says coding agents have crossed a chasm, Anton Zaides explains how SWEs should approach the "squeeze", Mat Duggan has ideas for Kubernetes 2.0, Sean Goedecke does a nice job elucidating the coding agent commoditization, and one more good reason to write, even though it's hard.
We're all Builders now (Interview)
We're on location at Microsoft Build 2025 with Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division. Amanda leads product, design, user research, and engineering systems for some of the tools you use every day. We discuss the latest AI announcements from Microsoft at Build 2025, how AI is reshaping development tools, what's next for VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub's evolution, and even emerging editors like Windsurf that are forking the VS Code ecosystem.
The 'developer replacement' hype cycle
We're doing a live show in Denver this July, Danilo Alonso has seen the 'developer replacement' hype cycle many times, Dan Sinker says we're in the Who Cares Era, Cap looks like a solid alternative to typical CAPTCHA solutions, Michael Flarup on the return of texture, depth, and expressiveness in UI & Kan is an open source alternative to Trello.
Vibing into the vibe
Nick Nisi joins us to confess his AI subscription glut, drool over some cool new hardware gadgets, discuss why the TypeScript team chose Go for their new compiler, opine on the React team's complicated relationship with Vercel, suggest people try Astro, update us on his browser habits, and more.
The AI 2027 scenario
Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project lays out a potential scenario of superhuman AI's impact, Liam ERD generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from your database, Mozilla takes on Gmail with "Thundermail", algernon explains why grepping remains terrible & Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira rans on the insanity of being a software engineer.
Leading leaders who lead engineers (remastered) (Interview)
This week we're bringing you a remaster of our epic 2021interview with Lara Hogan -- author of Resilient Management and management coach / trainer for the tech industry. The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you're ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.
Everyone is talking about MCP
Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?
Friendly Feud: JS Party Edition
Our award-winning JS Party game show is back with a new name, a new channel, and the same ol' survey-response-guessing fun! The JS Party crew join us to see who knows y'all best. Survey says!
Antirez returns to Redis! (Interview)
Antirez has returned to Redis! Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what's going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good 'ol LLM inference discussions.
Kaizen! Pipely goes BAM
It's Kaizen 18! Can you believe it? We discuss the recent Fly.io outage, some little features we've added since our last Kaizen, our new video-first production, and of course, catch up on all things Pipely! Oh, and Gerhard surprises us (once again). BAM!
AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.
The state of homelab tech (2025)
Techno Tim joins Adam to catch up on the state of Homelab for 2025, the state of AI at home and on-prem (AI Homelab) and where that's heading, building a creator PC, choosing the parts for your build, GPU availability, Windows being user hostile, and why Tim is happy to be using Windows, Mac AND Linux.
From open source to acquired (Interview)
Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to the acquisition. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it's like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what's next for Benthos, and what it takes to enjoy the journey.
Other people's robots
Jerod & Adam discuss Nvidia's recently announced personal AI supercomputer, Waymo's latest infinite loop, what's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup, and whether or not AI has gone mainstream... warts & all!
The world of embedded systems (Interview)
Elecia White, host of Embedded.fm and author of Making Embedded Systems, joins us to discuss all things embedded systems. We discuss programming non-computers, open source resources for embedded, self-driving cars, embedded system like the GoPro, Traeger smokers, and even birthday cards. According to Elecia, embedded is going everywhere.
It's a peccadillo circus
Mat Ryer is back! He plays the piano, we tell each other truths/lies, we pay homage to the 8" floppy disk, Mat accepts an open source medal, and so much more. It's a real circus. MatGPT!
The power of the button (Interview)
Rachel Plotnick joins us for the first show of 2025 to discuss her book "Power Button" and the research she did, and why we love/hate buttons so much. We also discuss her upcoming book "License to Spill" as well as the research she's doing on energy drinks.
State of the "log" 2024
Our 7th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We're featuring 12 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
Mitchell Hashimoto joins the show to discuss Ghostty, the newest terminal in town. Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp, took it all the way to IPO, exited in 2023—and now he's working on a terminal emulator called Ghostty. Ghostty is set to 1.0 this month, so we sat down to talk through all the details.
Kaizen! Three wise men?
Gerhard is back for Kaizen 17! We discuss our CPU.fm changes in-depth, detail new Zulip / Neon integrations & put our Pipedream to the test. Oh, and a Gerhard surprise (of course)!
Building the developer cloud (Interview)
Kurt Mackey is back for a deep dive into what it takes to build the developer cloud. Kurt joins Adam to discuss the alliance between companies and cloud, something Kurt refers to as the "Rebel Alliance," cloud complexity vs usability, Fly's future with Postgres and why they've waited, thoughts on Neon and Supabase (Kurt shares a hot take), and our CDN saga and plan to build a simple CDN on Fly called Pipely (still a Pipedream).
ShopTalk & Friends
Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert join Adam and Jerod for a ShopTalk & Friends conversation on the viability of the web, making content, ads to support that content, Codepen's future plans, books, side quests, and social networks devaluing links.
Hack Club takes to the High Seas (Interview)
Jerod is joined by Hack Clubber Acon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Latta and the Hack Club crew that's incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff.
Let's archive the web (Interview)
Nick Sweeting joins Adam and Jerod to talk about the importance of archiving digital content, his work on ArchiveBox to make it easier, the challenges faced by Archive.org and the Wayback Machine, and the need for both centralized and distributed archiving solutions.
Waymos make bad neighbors (Changelog++ 🔐)
Adam & Jerod hallway-track-it before our All Things Open interviews. We discuss the trend in rebooting old school vehicles, our likes & dislikes of EVs, the Hummer's new crab walk, Tesla's gambit & more (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)
Tactile controls are back in vogue
IEEE Spectrum reports on the return to physical buttons and dials, Microsoft released GenAIScript, iFixit's Elizabeth Chamberlain announces a big Right to Repair win, Daniela Baron reimagines technical interviews & John O'Nolan, shares some thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media
Wine Web and a whole lot of Whatnot
We join the Whiskey Web and Whatnot podcast live from the hallway track at All Things Open 2024. Topics include: Chianti, content creation, open source, fake jobs, cancel culture, Silicon Valley (ding), frontend frustrations, the Roman empire & more.
Developing with Docker (the right way)
Daniel Quinn weighs in on how to develop with Docker The Right Way, Mitchell Hashimoto says Ghostty will be publicly released this coming December, Kevin Li writes about the value of learning how to learn, The Browser Company moves on from Arc & the React Native team ships its new architecture.
Naming conventions that need to die
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.
You'll rent chips and be happy
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.
Lessons from 10k hours of programming (remastered) (Interview)
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 the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment the amount of reflections on this thread in Zulip, we'll give you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt from the merch store. Good luck...
Working from home is powering productivity
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.
The indispensable cog
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.
The Moneyball approach (Interview)
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.
Developer (un)happiness
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.
The wrong place to slap a person
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.
Cursor wants to write all the world's code
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.
#define: piggyback
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...
Reinventing Kafka on object storage (Interview)
Ryan Worl, Co-founder and CTO at WarpStream, joins us to talk about the world of Kafka and data streaming and how WarpStream redesigned the idea of Kafka to run in modern cloud environments directly on top of object storage. Last year they posted a blog titled, "Kafka is dead, long live Kafka" that hit the top of Hacker News to put WarpStream on the map. We get the backstory on Kafka and why it's so widely used, who created it and for what purpose, and the behind the scenes on all things WarpStream.
What good programmers worry about
Waymo cars make bad neighbors, Leonardo Creed pulls together wisdom from Linus Torvalds & the Art of Unix Programming to conclude what good programmers worry about, Max Schmitt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience, ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor, Simon Tatham makes a list of code review anti-patterns & scientists confirm that 'flow state' is very much a thing.
The great escape room
Adam & Jerod catch up with our ol' friend, Suz Hinton! It's been a couple years since Suz was a regular on JS Party. Since then, she moved back to Australia, earned a degree in cyber security & won a fidget spinner from the NSA... but that's not all!
The Winamp era
You won't believe the bizarre secrets Jordan Eldredge found investigating corrupt Winamp skins (#7 will shock you)! You also won't believe how long we can wax nostalgic about the era of Napster, Aladdin & Pearl Jam.