Changelog Master Feed

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

Jeremy Howard thinks Mojo might be the biggest programming language advance in decades, Amelia Wattenberger is not impressed by AI chatbots, a leaked Google memo admits big tech has no AI moats & Werner Vogels reminds us that monoliths are not dinosaurs.

This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.

Dax Raad joins KBall and Nick to chat about SST, a framework that makes it easier to build full-stack applications on AWS. We chat about how the project got started and its goals. Then we discuss OpenNext, an open source, framework-agnostic server less adapter for Next.js.

The DevCycle team joins Jon & Kris for a deep conversation on WebAssembly (Wasm) and Go! After a high-level discussion of what Wasm is all about, we learn how they’re using it in production in cool and interesting ways. We finish up with a spicy unpop segment featuring buzzwords like “ChatGPT”, “LLM”, “NFT” and “AGI”

José Valim joins Jerod to talk all about what’s new in Livebook – the Elixir-based interactive code notebook he’s been working on the last few years. José made a big bet when he decided to bring machine learning to Elixir. That bet is now paying off with amazing new capabilities such as building and deploying a Whisper-based chat app to Hugging Face in just 15 minutes. José demoed that and much more during Livebook’s first-ever launch week. Let’s get into it.

Model sizes are crazy these days with billions and billions of parameters. As Mark Kurtz explains in this episode, this makes inference slow and expensive despite the fact that up to 90%+ of the parameters don’t influence the outputs at all. Mark helps us understand all of the practicalities and progress that is being made in model optimization and CPU inference, including the increasing opportunities to run LLMs and other Generative AI models on commodity hardware.

Hyperswitch is like the adapter pattern for payments, Austin Henley writes about the future of programming by summarizing recent research papers, Thoughtworks published their 28th volume of their Tech Radar, the team at General Products reminds devs to scan our technical writing for words such as “easy”, “painless”, “straightforward”, “trivial”, “simple” and “just” & we finish with a lightning round of cool tools.

Adam Argyle joins Amelia and Nick to catch them up on all the goings on within the world of CSS colors. There are a lot more options than you’d expect if you haven’t been keeping up, and Adam’s here to help you avoid the “gray dead zone”!

Go conferences are not as diverse as we’d like them to be. There are initiatives in place to improve this situation. Among other roles, Ronna Steinberg is the Head of Diversity at GopherCon Europe. In this episode we’ll learn more about the goal, the process and the problems, and how can each one of us help make this better.

This week Adam talks with Andy Klein from Backblaze about hard drive reliability at scale.

With all the LLM hype, it’s worth remembering that enterprise stakeholders want answers to “why” questions. Enter causal inference. Paul Hünermund has been doing research and writing on this topic for some time and joins us to introduce the topic. He also shares some relevant trends and some tips for getting started with methods including double machine learning, experimentation, difference-in-difference, and more.

The dataset wars are heating up, Bark is a transformer-based text-to-audio model that can generate highly realistic, multilingual speech as well as other audio, Kent Beck needs to recalibrate after using ChatGPT, the team behind Stable Diffusion release a new open source language model & Mitchel Hashimoto weighs in on prompt engineering.

Feross and his team at Socket recently shipped a wrapper library for the ubiquitous npm package manager’s command-line interface that brings enhanced security when you need it most: before executing any code Bradly Farias lead this effort, so Jerod & Chris invited him on the show to learn all about it.

This week Adam is joined by Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO at Redpanda Data, to share his builder journey to create the Redpanda streaming data platform.

Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities have reached new heights and are nothing short of mind-blowing! However, with so many advancements happening at once, it can be overwhelming to keep up with all the latest developments. To help us navigate through this complex terrain, we’ve invited Raj - one of the most adept at explaining State-of-the-Art (SOTA) AI in practical terms - to join us on the podcast. Raj discusses several intriguing topics such as in-context learning, reasoning, LLM options, and related tooling. But that’s not all! We also hear from Raj about the rapidly growing data science and AI community on TikTok.

This week we’re joined by Zach Latta, the Founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club is the program Zach wished he had in high school.

Kara Deloss announces GitHub Accelerator’s 2023 cohort, Databricks releases the first open source, instruction-following LLM, fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use, Mihai Parparita writes how he improved Tailscale thanks to Apple’s open source & Neal Fennimore asks and answers the question: Passkeys: what the heck and why?!

The panel dives into a topic that makes most software developers cringe: Professional networking. Starting with a definition - what does it even mean? - they go into hacks they’ve found for getting more comfortable with networking, building your network in person or online, and then using your network to find new job opportunities or consulting work.

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”