The Changelog

This week Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph for a “2 years later” catch up from his last appearance on Founders Talk. This conversation is a real glimpse into what it takes to be CEO of Sourcegraph in an era when code intelligence is shifting more and more into the AI realm, how they’ve been driving towards this for years, the subtle human leveling up we’re all experiencing, the direction of Sourcegraph as a result — and Quinn also shares his order of operations when it comes to understanding the daily state of their growth.

Listen to our newest album called Dance Party as a podcast! This is an EPIC bundle of BMC bangers. We double dog dare you to listen and try NOT to dance

GPTScript is a new scripting language to automate your interactions with LLMs, Adam Wiggins conducts a retrospective on Muse, Nikita Prokopov surveyed a bunch of popular websites to see how much JS they loaded on their pages, Pages CMS is a no-hassle CMS for GitHub pages & Jim Nielsen writes about the subversive hyperlink.

Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew, and now CTO at Workbrew joins us to discuss open tabs, social media spam and distractions, TikTok’s addictive nature, Apple Vision Pro and its potential future, the maintenance of software, the swing back to old school web development, the value of telemetry in open source projects, Mike’s ongoing involvement in Homebrew and what they’re working on at Workbrew, Homebrew’s relationship with Apple, the importance of developer experience, and sooo much more.

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

Ship It is back! IEEE Spectrum writes about quantum computing’s reality check, Maxim Dounin announces freenginx, Nadia Asparouhova goes deep on AI & the “effective accelerationism” movement, Angie Byron helps first time open source contributors avoid common pitfalls & Miroslav Nikolov writes up his advice for high-risk refactoring.

Jamie Tanna (who has a website) joins us to discuss the indie web, living with ADHD, sharing his salary history with the world & building DMD – a dynamite open source tool to help you better understand the use of dependencies across your org.

This week we’re joined by Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). They are responsible for representing the idea and the definition of open source globally. Stefano shares the challenges they face as a US-based non-profit with a global impact. We discuss the work Stefano and the OSI are doing to define Open Source AI, and why we need an accepted and shared definition. Of course we also talk about the potential impact if a poorly defined Open Source AI emerges from all their efforts. Note: Stefano was under the weather for this conversation, but powered through because of how important this topic is.

Changelog Beats drops a new Dance Party album, Will McGugan’s new Toolong (tl) terminal app, Mitchell Baker is out as Mozilla CEO, Microsoft’s Jordi Adoumie announces sudo for Windows, Tatu Ylonen tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22 & Jack Lindamood gives an “Endorse” or “Regret” rating for ~50 different services, tools & processes he used over the 4 years he led infrastructure at a startup.

We’re taking you back to the hallway track at THAT Conference where we have 3 MORE fun conversations: one with Samuel Goff about the future of energy, one with YouTuber Jess Chan about the future of content creation & one with Vanessa Villa / Noah Jenkins about ag tech & the future of food.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she’s had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they’ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist’s world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.

We’re taking you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we’re in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Our old friend José Valim & his team have been hard at work adding gradual typing to Elixir. They’re only 1-3% of the way there, but a lot of progress has been made. So, we invited him back on the show for a deep-dive on why, how & when Elixir will be gradually typed.

This week we’re going deep on security and what it takes to shift left, seriously. Adam is joined by Justin Garrison (co-host of Ship It), plus two members of the BoxyHQ team — Deepak Prabhakara, Co-founder & CEO and Schalk Neethling, Community Manager and DevRel as well as fellow Changelog Slack member. We discuss how to shift left, the role of the developer and the burden of security, the importance of tooling, the difference between authentication and authorization, and a mindset change for when security takes place — it’s a matter of “when” not “who.”

Alex Ellis’ new actions-batch project uses GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer, DevDocs.io combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface, Jarred Sumner announces Bun’s very own JavaScript shell, Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components & Martin Heinz writes an awesome guide to building an indoor air quality monitoring system with Prometheus, Grafana & a CO2 sensor.

Techno Tim is back with Adam to discuss the state of homelab in 2024 and the trends happening within homelab tech. They discuss homelab environments providing a safe place for experimentation and learning, network improvement as a gateway to homelab, trends in network connection speeds, to Unifi or not, storage trends, ZFS configurations, TrueNAS, cameras, home automation, connectivity, routers, pfSense, and more. Umm, should we make these conversations between Adam and Tim more frequent?

This week we’re joined by FreeBSD & OpenZFS developer, Allan Jude, to learn all about FreeBSD. Allan gives us a brief history of BSD, tells us why it’s his operating system of choice, compares it to Linux, explains the various BSDs out there & answers every curious question we have about this powerful (yet underrepresented) Unix-based operating system.