Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. Hosts Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo face their imposter syndrome so you don’t have to. Expect in-depth interviews with the best and brightest in software engineering, open source, and leadership. This is a polyglot podcast. All programming languages, platforms, and communities are welcome. Open source moves fast. Keep up.
InfluxDB drops Go for Rust but gokrazy is really cool
InfluxDB finishes a multi-year rewrite in Rust, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be on sale by the end of the month, the Bruno team builds an open source API explorer that’s local-first and will never have a cloud, Xe Laso thinks gokrazy is really cool & Matt Rickard shares lessons from years of debugging.
#define: a game of fake definitions
Jerod gathers a group of friends for our first game show experiment here on Changelog & Friends! This is a game of obscure jargon, fake definitions & expert tomfoolery. Our contestants checked their imposter syndrome at the door, because they either know what these words mean or they fake it ’til they make their peers think they do.
Vibes from Strange Loop
This week on The Changelog we’re taking you to the hallway track of the final Strange Loop conference. First up is AnnMarie Thomas — an engineering, business, and education professor. AnnMarie gave one of the opening keynotes titled “Playing with Engineering.” We also caught up with many first-time and multi-time attendees who shared their favorite moments from Strange Loop over the years. You’ll hear from Richard Feldman, Colin Dean, and Taylor Troesch. Last up we talk with Pokey Rule. He gave a talk about his project called Cursorless which is a spoken language for structural code editing. Changelog++ subscribers get a super extended version of this episode which includes everything we recorded at Strange Loop. Become a Changelog++ subscriber
The missing sync layer for modern apps
ElectricSQL is a project that offers a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps, Ned Batchelder writes about the myth of the myth of “learning styles”, Carl Johnson thinks XML is better than YAML, Berkan Sasmaz defines and describes “idempotency” & HyperDX is an open source alternative Datadog or New Relic.
Open source is at a crossroads
This week we’re joined by Steve O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is 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. In Steve’s post Why Open Source Matters, he says “open source is at a crossroads” and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today’s conversation goes deep on this subject.
Death by a thousand microservices
Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.
What do we want from a web browser?
A hoy hoy! Our old friend Nick Nisi does his best to bring up TypeScript, Vim & Tmux as many times as possible while we discuss a new batch of web browsers, justify why we like the ones we do & try to figure out what it’d take to disrupt the status quo of Big Browser.
Attack of the Canaries!
This week we’re joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.
Bun 1.0 is here & Mojo is ready for download
Bun 1.0 is out of the oven, Mojo is now available for local download, Vince Lwt asked 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions & published the answers, Textual Web turns TUIs in to web applications & James Haydon dives deep to discover the bug that the UK air traffic control meltdown.
Doomed to discuss AI
Author, journalist, travel writer & software engineer Jon Evans joins us to weigh in on the cultural history (and present-day sentiment) of AI doom. Along the way, we talk plausible Sci-Fi, ultrasound drug delivery, the maybe-evolving laws of physics & even weirder stuff.
OpenTF for an open Terraform
This week we’re talking about the launch of OpenTF and what it’s going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp’s Terraform. We’re joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how HashiCorp’s license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it.
A portrait of the best worst programmer
Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he’s worked with (who also is a heck of a programmer), Kevin Lin declares that OpenTelemetry delivers on its promise for open observability, Justin Garrison details Terraform vs GitOps vs System Initiative, Inc. writes how Apple beats burnout & Aline Lerner’s advice on how (not) to sabotage your salary negotiations before you even start.
You call it tech debt I call it malpractice
Go Time panelist (and semi-professional unpopular opinion maker) Kris Brandow joins us to discuss his deep-dive on the waterfall paper, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system.
Back to the terminal of the future
This week on The Changelog Adam is joined by Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO of Warp. We talked with Zach last year about what it takes to build the terminal of the future, and today Adam catches up with Zach to see where they are at on that mission. They talk about the business model of Warp, how they measure success, reaching product/market fit, building features developers love, integrating AI, and the pros and cons of going open source (again).
OpenTF sticks a fork in Terraform
OpenTF announces they’re forking Terraform and joining the Linux Foundation, Meta gets in the LLM-for-codegen game with Code Llama, Matt Mullenweg announces WordPress.com’s new 100-year plan, Paul Gichuki from Thinkst learns that default behaviors stick (and so do examples) & Marco Otte-Witte makes his case for Rust on the web.