Changelog Master Feed

Anita Zhang is here to tell us how Meta manages millions of bare metal Linux hosts and containers. We also discuss the Twine white paper and how AI is changing their requirements.

Our friend Ron Evans is a technologist for hire, an open source developer, an author, a speaker, an iconoclast, and one of our favorite people in tech. This conversation with Ron goes everywhere: from high-altitude weather balloons, to life on Mars, to Zeno's paradox applied to ML, to what open source devs should learn from the Wu-Tang Clan & more.

Brian LeRoux joins Jerod to share how the Enhance team are bringing server side rendered web components to everyone. With Enhance WASM, you author components in friendly, standards based syntax and reuse them across multiple languages, frameworks & servers.

This week we're joined by Dustin Bluck to discuss his acquisition of the well known (and beloved) Castro podcast app to take it indie-focused once again. As previous users of Castro, we were excited to dig into the details behind this popular podcast client to see what's next, how the deal was done, a peek into the code, and where exactly this indie and creator focused podcast app can go.

What makes a good, bad, and truly great workshop? How do you put together a Go workshop that works, and how do you get the most out of workshops you attend?

We recently gathered some Practical AI listeners for a live webinar with Danny from LibreChat to discuss the future of private, open source chat UIs. During the discussion we hear about the motivations behind LibreChat, why enterprise users are hosting their own chat UIs, and how Danny (and the LibreChat community) is creating amazing features (like RAG and plugins).

Daniel Hooper lists out all the good ideas in computer science, Jeff Geerling declares 2024 the year corporate open source dies, Jared Turner says all kinds of works-in-progress are waste, Daroc Alden covers the leadership crisis in the Nix community & John Hawthorn explains why Ruby may be faster than you think.

In this episode Justin and Autumn are joined by Mandi Walls to take you back to a time before the cloud. Before Kubernetes. When a/s/l was common and servers were made of metal. Back to the days of AOL to discuss how chat rooms worked.

Frequent guest (and *almost* real-life-friend) Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent "open source meets business" drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative.

Ryan Carniato joins Amal & Nick to discuss Solid with a major focus on Signals, which are the cornerstone of reactivity in Solid.

First there was Mamba... now there is Jamba from AI21. This is a model that combines the best non-transformer goodness of Mamba with good 'ol attention layers. This results in a highly performant and efficient model that AI21 has open sourced! We hear all about it (along with a variety of other LLM things) from AI21's co-founder Yoav.

This week we're joined by Louis Pilfold, the creator of the Gleam programming language. For the uninitiated, Gleam is a functional programming language for building type-safe systems that compiles to Erlang and JavaScript and it's written in Rust. We discuss the inspiration and development of Gleam, how it compares to other languages, where it shines, the overwhelming amount of support Louis is getting through GitHub sponsors, what's next for Gleam and their near-term plans for a language server.

The 3 Musketeers return! Filippo Valsorda, Roland Shoemaker & Nicola Murino continue their deep-dive conversation with Natalie about Go's crypto libraries. Also listen to Part 1 and Part 2!

Forrest Brazeal is concerned about the open source threat from within, Vicki Boykis explains why Redis is forked, John O'Nolan and the Ghost team plan to federate over ActivityPub, Llama 3 is now available for "businesses of all sizes" & nolen writes up questions to ask when you don’t want to work.

If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics' scary cool new robot, Justin Searls' extensive use of the Apple Vision Pro, Thorston Ball moving from Vim to Zed, Firefox becoming hard to use, Beeper joining Automattic & more.

Paul Frazee joins the show to tell us all about how Bluesky builds, tests, and deploys mobile and web applications from the same code base.

Kelvin Omereshone is here to get you excited about boring, reliable tech. He believes a combination of Sails, Inertia, Tailwind & your frontend rendering library of choice are a great combo for building web apps. Tune in to find out why.

In this episode, Ben Burkert & Chris Stolt join Johhny to explore the ups & downs of trying to get secure local development environments set up, why it's hard & what you can do about it.

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.

2024 promises to be the year of multi-modal AI, and we are already seeing some amazing things. In this "fully connected" episode, Chris and Daniel explore the new Udio product/service for generating music. Then they dig into the differences between recent multi-modal efforts and more "traditional" ways of combining data modalities.

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...

Why would you want to switch your developer environments from containers to nix? Ádám from LastPass has a few reasons.

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.

How does Google build Search? What about YouTube and Google Drive? We rely on Chrome's Lighthouse scores when optimizing our websites, but what does _Google_ prioritize? Recently the Angular and Wiz teams announced their intention to responsibly merge their internal frontend framework, Wiz, with Angular to bring some of Wiz's best ideas to Angular. We're chatting with Minko from Angular and Jatin from the Wiz team to learn about how Wiz has been used in Google historically, what it's good at, and why it's worth bringing some of its ideas to Angular.

Daniel & Chris delight in conversation with "the funniest guy in AI", Demetrios Brinkmann. Together they explore the results of the MLOps Community's latest survey. They also preview the upcoming AI Quality Conference.

Natalie is joined by Carlos Becker (a Brazil-based software developer who maintains GoReleaser and other OSS software) to discuss how `GOOS` and `GOARCH` spark joy.

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.

Verónica López, Kubernetes SIG Release tech lead & distributed systems engineer, joins Justin & Autumn to share her experiences deploying services at scale.

This is 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.

Felix Geisendörfer & Michael Knyszek join Natalie to discuss Go execution traces: why they're awesome, common use cases, how they've gotten better of late & more.

In this fully connected episode, Daniel & Chris discuss NVIDIA GTC keynote comments from CEO Jensen Huang about teaching kids to code. Then they dive into the notion of "community" in the AI world, before discussing challenges in the adoption of generative AI by non-technical people. They finish by addressing the evolving balance between generative AI interfaces and search engines.

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.

Justin & Autumn take you with them to the 2024 SoCal Linux Expo where they asked six fellow attendees about their favorite open source projects and their least favorite commands.

Jerod, KBall & Nick discuss the latest news: Devin, Astro DB, The JavaScript Registry, Tailwind 4 & Angular merging with Wiz. Oh, and a surprise mini-game of HeadLIES!

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.

In this episode Matt, Bill & Jon discuss various debugging techniques for use in both production and development. Bill explains why he doesn't like his developers to use the debugger and how he prefers to only use techniques available in production. Matt expresses a few counterpoints based on his different experiences, and then the group goes over some techniques for debugging in production.

Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we're bringing you conversations all about AI's complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog.

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.

What's the difference between productivity engineering and platform engineering? How can you continue to re-platform with a moving target? On this episode, we're joined by Andy Glover, who spent ten years productivity engineering at Netflix, to discuss.

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.

In this episode we answer any/all questions from a new Go developer. Features, best practices, quirks of the language... it's all on the table for discussion.

Daniel & Chris explore the state of the art in prompt engineering with Jared Zoneraich, the founder of PromptLayer. PromptLayer is the first platform built specifically for prompt engineering. It can visually manage prompts, evaluate models, log LLM requests, search usage history, and help your organization collaborate as a team. Jared provides expert guidance in how to be implement prompt engineering, but also illustrates how we got here, and where we're likely to go next.

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.

Kyle Quest joins the show to tell Autumn & Justin all about the evolution of DockerSlim & minimal container images. Why are small container images important? What are different strategies to make containers smaller? Let's find out!

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.