Changelog News

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?

Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.

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.

Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she's learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

Bill Maher excoriates the software industry for making our lives more difficult, two professors from the University of Washington put together a curriculum to help us manage life in the ChatGPT world, Daniel Delaney thinks deeply on chat as a dev tool UI, Benedict Evans explores our assumptions that computers be 'correct' & the Thoughtbot team writes up six cases when not to refactor.

Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.

Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a low-level code PR written 99% by DeepSeek-R1, Adam Wathan announces the release of Tailwind CSS 4.0, Matheus Lima opens up the Computer Science history books to create list of influential papers, Namanyay Goel thinks AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers & Russell Baylis shares what he's learned about optimizing WFH lighting to reduce eye strain.

Benj Edwards wants to put the "personal" back in "personal computer", the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.

Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift's original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard's duopoly.

M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, Simon Willison's year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM, Allen Pike describes a method for magic, Tom Critchlow thinks small databases are magic & James Stanier agrees with me about Parkinson's Law and the usefulness of deadlines.

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

We're making some big Changelog changes in 2025, the previously featured Stanford study on ghost engineers doesn't live up to the hype, Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repository into a simple text ingest of its codebase, Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyrd / Eventbrite & Matheus Lima warns us about six mistakes that new managers make.

Alex Russell answers the question, "If not React, then what?" Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch's Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare's R2 competitor.

Ben Affleck's take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram's CodingFont.com is like Zoolander's Walk Off but for coding fonts.

Evan Doyle says AI makes tech debt more expensive, Hunter Ng researches the ghost job ad phenomenon, Gavin Anderegg analyzes Bluesky in light of its recent success, Martin Tournoij rants against best practices & Evan Schwartz tells us why he thinks binary vector embeddings are so cool.

Changelog Merch is now on sale, IronCalc sets out to democratize spreadsheets, Grant Slatton writes about algorithms we develop software by, Mark Rainey gives respect to the ultimate in debugging, Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes & Johannes Kaufmann’s html-to-markdown converts entire websites into Markdown.

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

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.

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.

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.

A bias against hyperlinking has developed on platforms, GitHub engineering continues to evolve Issues, Evan You announces VoidZero, some companies are only pretend hiring & Klaas van Schelven asks: does it scale (down)?

OpenFreeMap puts OpenStreetMap data on your website for free, Fatih Arslan builds a Dieter Rams inspired iPhone dock, Joseph Gentle thinks the Rust programming language feels like a first-gen product & the web dev community is debating the viability of Web Components once again.

Mahmoud Mousa releases Sidekick, a tool for hosting side projects on a cheap VPS, Ryan Dahl, has had enough of Oracle bogarting "JavaScript" but not even using it, Thomas Rampelberg's kty is a sweet terminal for Kubernetes, Redis users are considering alternatives after their relicense & a bunch of smart JS folks wrote up nine Node.js pillars.

Scott Chacon writes up his insider take on GitHub's success, Sentry wants other companies to take the Open Source Pledge, Benj Edwards used AI to reproduce his late father's handwriting, Dave Kiss explains the current hype that PHP is getting & Taylor Otwell raises $57 million series A from Accel.

A Rust for Linux developer resigns amidst rising tension in the Linux community, Bret Victor shows off what he's been working on for years, Rachel (by the bay) laments how useless "SRE" has become as a role, Doug Turnbull makes the case for hiring junior devs & Baldur Bjarnason says the LLM honeymoon phase is about to end.

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.

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.

Chris Stjernlöf got nerd-sniped and ended up writing down his practices of reliable software design, Ben Visness has had enough with the npm community's propensity to pull in micro-libraries to suit every need, "Stay SaaSy" makes three metaphors for problem solving categories, Troy Hunt takes us inside the "3 billion people" National Public Data breach & Dasel is one data tool to rule them all.

Jimmy Miller tells us about the best, worst codebase he's ever seen, The Phylum Research Team follows up on the great npm garbage patch, Zach Leatherman logs his findings on sneaky serverless costs, David Cain wants you to go on quests instead of goals & Ashley Janssen gives us szeven rules for effective meeting culture.

The latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey has some concerning results, Joeri Sebrechts helps you do plain vanilla web dev, MIT's "missing semester" course looks pretty amazing, a dive into the fascinating history of CSV & a tool to get request analytics from the nginx access logs.

The Switzerland federal government requires releasing its software as open source, Google decides not to deprecate third-party cookies, Mark Zuckerberg says "open source" AI is the path forward, GitHub allows anyone access to deleted / private repository data & Tailscale wants to build a New Internet.

Brendan Gregg details how eBPF can help us have no more blue Fridays, Misty De Meo thinks GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software, Gavin D. Howard does not want Rust to be used for everything, The Notion team published a deep dive into how they used the WASM version of SQLite to improve browser performance & Gregor Ojstersek writes up how to build good relationships inside and outside your engineering teams.

Marcus J. Ranum's 2005 post on dumb ideas in computer security still holds up, Barry Jones argues why story points are useless, Posting is an HTTP client as a TUI, Varnish ceator Poul-Henning Kamp (_phk_) reflects on ten years of working on the HTTP cache & es-tookit is a major upgrade to Lodash.

Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can't fund Firefox & Hyrum's Law.

Software developer jobs are trending down, the creator of dotenv creates a better dotenv, the Chrome team puts Gemini Nano AI model right inside your browser, a pollyfill.js supply chain attack hits 100k+ sites & Steph Ango asks, "What can we remove?"

Søren Fuglede Jørgensen builds a font thats also an LLM, Hugo Landau writes about the demise of the mildly dynamic website, SQL Studio is the simplest little database explorer ever, Mathew Duggan reviews GitHub Copilot Workspace & Stephan Schmidt lays out the case against mocking + what to do instead.

Luminousmen writes about Senior Engineer Fatigue, Microsoft rethinks its AI-based Recall feature, Mike Hoye gives a big shout out to the "diff" program, Thom Holwerda covers ChromeOS' quiet switch to Android Linux subsystems & Mihail Eric tells the inside story on how Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system on Earth.

Apple announces its "new" style of AI, piku gives you "git push" deployment on your own servers, Dabo Chen rebuilds nanoGPT in a spreadsheet, Mark Seemann thinks you'll regret using natural keys in your database design & Glyph Lefkowitz describes his grand unified theory of the AI hype cycle.

A popular open source iOS authenticator app goes rogue under new ownership, Andreas Kling steps back from SerenityOS & forks Ladybird, Vhyrro takes a thought-provoking try at a "static effect system", Matt Bessey is over GraphQL & Marc-Andre Giroux still likes GraphQL sometimes (in the right context).

Swizec's article on not using AI to writes tests, LlamaFs is a self-organizing file system with Llama 3, a Pew Research analysis confirmed that the internet is full of broken links, Sam Rose built a spectacular interactive study of queueing strategies & Jordan Cutler shares a real-life experience of him writing clear/readable code... and it backfiring.

Taylor Troesh writes Kyle explaining "Legacy Software" to the aliens, Vitaly Friedman addresses why so many designers feel misunderstood and under appreciated in business contexts, Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu & hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game.

Tim Fisken explains the problem with soft deletion, a simple measure of software dependency freshness is proposed, a deep-dive on sound design in software, a web app with over 80 handy developer tools built in & Luke Plant reminds us that programming mantras are proverbs, not laws.

Bahaa Zidan says your web framework doesn't matter, DHH writes about magic machines, Dylan Huang reviews thousands of opinions on HTMX, Tim Ottinger says programming is thinking & Tim Spann says small language models (SLM) for the win.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.