Changelog & Friends

Adam and Jerod get into the news, Jerod officially retires from the pod (and Changelog), plus a bonus for our Changelog++ subs!

Our ol' friend, Brett Cannon, is back to talk all things Python. But first! Star Wars, Machete Order, Lost, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, Murderbot, Ted Lasso, Project Hail Mary, David Attenborough, perpetual voice rights, and the AI uncanny valley.

Amal Hussein returns to tell us all about her new role at Istari, what life is like outside the web browser, how she's helping ambitious orgs in aerospace, what the SDLC looks like in 2026, and a whole lot more. Wait, moon vacuums?!

We discuss the buzz around Clawdbot / MoltBot / OpenClaw, how app subscriptions are turning into weekend hacking projects, why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street, and what it all means.

Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab'ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what's possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the "Year of Self-Hosted Software" while Adam reveals his homelab's secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI).

Gerhard is back for Kaizen 22! We're diving deep into those pesky out-of-memory errors, analyzing our new Pipedream instance status checker, and trying to figure out why someone in Asia downloads a single episode so much.

Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft's GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz' 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!

Our 8th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 8 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam for a trip down the Linux rabbit hole -- Docker vs Podman, building a Kubernetes cluster, ZFS backups with zfs.rent, bootc, favorite Linux distros, new homelab tools built with AI, self-hosting Immich, content creation, Plex and Jellyfin, the future of piracy and more.

Nick Nisi joins us to dig into the latest trends from this year and how they're impacting his day-to-day coding and Vision Pro wearing. Anthropic's acquisition of Bun, the evolving JavaScript and AI landscape, GitHub's challenges and the Amp/Sourcegraph split. We dive into AI development practices, context management, voice assistants, Home Assistant OS and home automation, the state of the AI browser war, and we close with a prediction from Nick.

Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more.

Practical AI co-host, Chris Benson, joins us to discuss the latest advancements in AI, drones, home automation, and robotic swarming tech. Chris defines "swarm" with detail/precision and it turns out that what most people are calling a swarm today is NOT a swarm!

Do you like director's commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week's News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React's seemingly perpetual dominance, and more.

On this seventh iteration of our award-worthy game show filled with obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery: past winners battle to determine the champion of champions. (Also, Adam.)

It's a FRIGHT...when your record a podcast with dead projects all around. Tech debt, poor choices, timing, market shift, and optimizing for the wrong things are all lurking around waiting to pop out at you! Just don't forget to push record.

It's our first Kaizen after the big Pipely launch in Denver and we have some serious mopping to do. Along the way, we brainstorm the next get-together, check out our new cache hit/miss ratio, give Pipely a deep speed test, discuss open video standards, and more!

Mike McQuaid and Justin Searls join Jerod in the wake of the RubyGems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money in open source, what sustainability really means for our community, making a career out of open source (or not), and more. Bleep!

Elixir creator, José Valim, is throwing his hat into the coding agent ring with Tidewave –a coding agent for full-stack web development. Tidewave runs in the browser alongside your app, but it's also deeply integrated into Rails and Phoenix. On this episode, José tells us all about it. Also: his agent flow, YOLO mode, an MCP hot take, and more.

Over the past two months, we’ve seen some of the most serious supply chain attacks in npm history: phishing campaigns, maintainer account takeovers, and malware published to packages with billions of weekly downloads. What is going on?! What can we do about it? Our old friend, Feross Aboukhadijeh, joins us to help make sense of it all.

Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, the co-founders of Oxide, are on the pod live (to tape) from the stage at OxCon. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. The best part was this on-stage discussion with Bryan and Steve. Enjoy!

Carl George joins the show to talk about Texas Linux Fest, Omarchy, Linux desktop environments, configuring Linux, and more. Use the code `CHL15` for 15% off your ticket to Texas Linux Fest.

Arun Gupta, now a "free agent" after his surprise exit from Intel, joins us to discuss how he's dealing with his first job hunt since the 1990s. Along the way, we talk about agentic coding strategies, what GPT-5's release implies about the future, and more. (US buys 10% of Intel)++

Our Changelog & Friends proof-of-concept with Mat Ryer has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Originally recorded: 2023-02-08 Mat joins us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that's been on our radar. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It's good fun.

Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company's $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he's avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++

Gerhard calls Kaizen 20, 'The One Where We Meet'. Rightfully so. It's also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipely live on stage with friends.

Adam & Jerod (plus zero other randos) dig into Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey results. We discuss SO's decline, the desire for younger devs to have real chats with real people, the rise of uv and more Python winning, why people are frustrated with AI, and more.

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.

Nick Nisi joins us to discuss all the Windsurf drama, his new agentic lifestyle, whether or not he's actually more productive, the new paper that says he maybe isn't more productive, the reckoning he sees coming, and why we might be the last generation of code monkeys.

Abi Noda from DX is back to share some cold, hard data on just how productive AI coding tools are actually making developers. Teaser: the productivity increase isn't as high as we expected. We also discuss Jevons paradox, AI agents as extensions of humans, which tools are winning in the enterprise, how development budgets are changing, and more.

Jeff Cayley joins Adam to talk about selling mountain bikes all over the planet and making some of the best outdoor and mountain bike gear, parts, and accessories you can buy. They have a killer YouTube channel as well.

Our old friend Chris McCord, creator of Elixir's Phoenix framework, tells us all about his new remote AI runtime for building Phoenix apps. Along the way, we vibe code one of my silly app ideas, calculate all the money we're going to spend on these tools, and get existential about what it all means.

Jerod tells Adam about how bad he hates the taste of Gin, sips on some Generative A Rye (on the rocks), they open the comments section for a bit, and then land the plane talking about being alone, naked, and afraid.

Justin Searls joins Jerod in Apple's WWDC wake for hot takes about frosty UIs. We go (almost) point-by-point through the keynote, dissecting and reacting along the way. Concentricity!

The ever-provocative Steve Yegge joins us fresh off a vibe coding bender so productive, he wrote a book on the topic alongside award-winning author Gene Kim. Steve tells us why he believes the IDE is dead, why babysitting AI agents is more fun than coding, when vibe coding might take over the enterprise, how software devs should approach coding agents, and what it all means for society.

We bring you back to Microsoft Build 2025 to nerd out with Craig Loewen on Windows Subsystem for Linux and Mads Torgersen on leading the design of C#.

We sit down with Scott Hanselman at Microsoft Build 2025 to discuss open sourcing all the things, cool stuff Windows can do, where we want (and don't want) AI to fit into our lives, building arcade cabinets, and so much more.

Welcome back to #define, our game of obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery. We've gathered some awesome friends, new and old, to see who has the best vocabulary and who can trick the everyone else into thinking that they do.

Kaizen 19 has arrived! Gerhard has been laser-focused on making Jerod's pipe dream a reality by putting all of his efforts into Pipely. Has it been a big waste of time or has this epic side quest morphed into a main quest?!

Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

Join us on a journey to make believe worlds with our good friend Mat Ryer. The assignment; we each get to make up a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule. This episode is sure to delight loyal fans and especially those who enjoy Mat Ryer on the show and a good/bad song or two.

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.

Richard Moot joins us to discuss Changelog helping Square launch a developer pod and the excitement around MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. What might it foretell about the future of human/robot relations?

Jerod turns Adam into Lego, a Walrus, and a Walrus in the style of Studio Ghibli...and so much more. This is a good one to watch on YouTube.

Long-time JS Party panelist Amal Hussein joins Jerod to catch up on her career path, to opine on the viability agentic coding, to feel all the feelings that AI brings out of us as developers, and to share something new in her life that changes everything.

Justin Searls from Breaking Change joins the show to discuss Apple's Intelligence blunder, the end of the good times in the tech industry, and POSSE Party, his in-progress product that lets "any dummy with a website enjoy a life of algorithm-free luxury."

Adam's friend on the frontend, John Long joins the show to explore his usage of AI, design tools and the stack he prefers. We talk Next.js vs Rails, maintaining open source, building websites with Framer, their mutual love for Figma, and more.

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!

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!

Jerod and Adam use Chris Kiehl's post on development topics he's changed his mind on (over the last 10 years) as a proxy for discussion on dev things they HAVE and HAVE NOT changed their minds on.