The Changelog

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ recommendations for remote vs colocated teams, Duarte Carmo created a neural search engine from Changelog transcripts, Tom Hacohen says strong static typing is a hill he’s willing to die on, Orhun Parmaksız created a CLI that makes your keyboard sound like a typewriter & Luke Plant spits hard truths about simplicity.

On September 29th, Netflix shipped its final DVDs, marking the end of an era in physical media. So, we invited our friend Christina Warren (aka film_girl) from GitHub to pour out a drink with us and lament the end of this golden age of access to the films we all love.

This week we’re joined by Daniel Thompson, Co-founder and Core Member of Tauri. It’s been a year since we last had Daniel on the show. He catches us up on all things Tauri, their continued efforts towards Tauri 1.5 (which just released), the launch of CrabNebula and how they’re the people pushing the Tauri ecosystem forward and building on top of it, the state of Electron vs Tauri, and UI with Tauri. He even surprises us with his idea of creating a web browser.

InfluxDB finishes a multi-year rewrite in Rust, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be on sale by the end of the month, the Bruno team builds an open source API explorer that’s local-first and will never have a cloud, Xe Iaso thinks gokrazy is really cool & Matt Rickard shares lessons from years of debugging.

Jerod gathers a group of friends for our first game show experiment here on Changelog & Friends! This is a game of obscure jargon, fake definitions & expert tomfoolery. Our contestants checked their imposter syndrome at the door, because they either know what these words mean or they fake it ’til they make their peers think they do.

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of the final Strange Loop conference. First up is AnnMarie Thomas — an engineering, business, and education professor. AnnMarie gave one of the opening keynotes titled “Playing with Engineering.” We also caught up with many first-time and multi-time attendees who shared their favorite moments from Strange Loop over the years. You’ll hear from Richard Feldman, Colin Dean, and Taylor Troesh. Last up we talk with Pokey Rule. He gave a talk about his project called Cursorless which is a spoken language for structural code editing. Changelog++ subscribers get a super extended version of this episode which includes everything we recorded at Strange Loop. Become a Changelog++ subscriber

ElectricSQL is a project that offers a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps, Ned Batchelder writes about the myth of the myth of “learning styles”, Carl Johnson thinks XML is better than YAML, Berkan Sasmaz defines and describes “idempotency” & HyperDX is an open source alternative Datadog or New Relic.

This week we’re joined by Steve O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. In Steve’s post Why Open Source Matters, he says “open source is at a crossroads” and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today’s conversation goes deep on this subject.

Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.

A hoy hoy! Our old friend Nick Nisi does his best to bring up TypeScript, Vim & Tmux as many times as possible while we discuss a new batch of web browsers, justify why we like the ones we do & try to figure out what it’d take to disrupt the status quo of Big Browser.

This week we’re joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.

Bun 1.0 is out of the oven, Mojo is now available for local download, Vince Lwt asked 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions & published the answers, Textual Web turns TUIs in to web applications & James Haydon dives deep to discover the bug that the UK air traffic control meltdown.

Author, journalist, travel writer & software engineer Jon Evans joins us to weigh in on the cultural history (and present-day sentiment) of AI doom. Along the way, we talk plausible Sci-Fi, ultrasound drug delivery, the maybe-evolving laws of physics & even weirder stuff.

This week we’re talking about the launch of OpenTF and what it’s going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp’s Terraform. We’re joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how HashiCorp’s license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it.

Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he’s worked with (who also is a heck of a programmer), Kevin Lin declares that OpenTelemetry delivers on its promise for open observability, Justin Garrison details Terraform vs GitOps vs System Initiative, Inc. writes how Apple beats burnout & Aline Lerner’s advice on how (not) to sabotage your salary negotiations before you even start.

Go Time panelist (and semi-professional unpopular opinion maker) Kris Brandow joins us to discuss his deep-dive on the waterfall paper, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system.

This week on The Changelog Adam is joined by Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO of Warp. We talked with Zach last year about what it takes to build the terminal of the future, and today Adam catches up with Zach to see where they are at on that mission. They talk about the business model of Warp, how they measure success, reaching product/market fit, building features developers love, integrating AI, and the pros and cons of going open source (again).

OpenTF announces they’re forking Terraform and joining the Linux Foundation, Meta gets in the LLM-for-codegen game with Code Llama, Matt Mullenweg announces WordPress.com’s new 100-year plan, Paul Gichuki from Thinkst learns that default behaviors stick (and so do examples) & Marco Otte-Witte makes his case for Rust on the web.

This week we’re talking to Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird. Andreas started SerenityOS as a means of therapy. It’s self-described as a love letter to “‘90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core.” Andreas previously worked at Nokia and later at Apple on the WebKit team, so he had an itch to do something along the lines of a browser, and that’s where Ladybird came from. We get into the details of compilers, OSs, browsers, web specifications, and the love of making software.

New research shows that CAPTCHAs are now utterly useless, hundreds of concerned technologists signed the OpenTF Manifesto to keep Terraform open source forever, Josh Collinsworth writes down all the things you forgot (or never knew) because of React, Mike Seidle shared some quick-but-powerful advice on building new software features & Erlend Sogge Heggen urges new open source projects to join the Fediverse (by way of Mastodon).