The Changelog

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.

Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).

It’s our 13th Kaizen episode! We’re back from KubeCon, we’re making goals for the year, we’re migrating to Neon & we’re weighing the pros/cons of building our own custom CDN.

Justin Garrison joins us to talk about Amazon’s silent sacking from his perspective. He should know. He works there. Well, as of yesterday he quit. We discuss how the cloud and Kubernetes have transformed the way software is developed and deployed, the impact silent layoffs have on employees and their careers, speaking out about workplace issues (the right way), how changes in organizational structure can lead to gaps in expertise and responsibility which can lead to potential outages and slower response times. By the way, we officially let the cat off out of the bag in this episode. Justin has joined the ranks here at Changelog and is taking over as the host of Ship It. Expect new episodes soon.

Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes “all code is tech debt” is all wrong.

Hello 2024! We’re kicking off the year with Dan Moore, author of ‘Letters to a New Developer’ — a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. We discuss the value of online communities for new developers, the importance of communication skills, and the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Dan shares his best advice for new developers, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking. So much wisdom and advice in this episode!

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we’re featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening!

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!

What happens when you take four grizzled #define veterans and throw an Emma Bostian into the mix? Find out on this episode because our award-worthy game of fake definitions is back and this time it’s even better!

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

Jerod is back with another “It Depends” episode! This time he’s joined by Kris Brandow from Go Time and they’re talking all things API design. What makes a good API? Is GraphQL a solid choice? Why do we do REST wrong? And WTF does HATEOAS mean, anyway?

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said “[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist.” Wise words. We discuss Hare (of course), why he’s so passionate about all things open source, the state of the language, fostering a culture that values stability, and oddly enough — what it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

ChatGPT’s new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox’s share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can’t be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she’s ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the “code is read more than written” cliche with his own: “code is run more than read.”

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco? We also talk in-depth about Gergely’s self-published book, The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

This week we’re gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon…we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they’re working on at Sidero Labs.

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.