The Changelog

Our friend Justin Searls recently published a widely-read essay on enthusiast programmers, inter-generational conflict & what we do with this information. That seemed like a good conversation starter, so we grabbed Justin and Landon Gray to discuss. Let’s talk!

This week we’re talking with Jonathan Carter who’s on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we’re talking about 30 years of Debian!

HashiCorp adopts a Business Source license, Matt Rickard hypothesizes why Tailwind CSS won, WarpStream sets out to make a Kafka-compatible offering directly on S3, Vadim Kravcenko publishes an excellent guide for managing difficult software engineers & Russ Cox gives an update on Go 2.

Gerhard joins us for the 11th Kaizen and this one might contain the most improvements ever. We’re on Fly Apps V2, we’ve moved from S3 to R2 & we have a status page now, just to name a few.

Leslie Lamport is a computer scientist & mathematician who won ACM’s Turing Award in 2013 for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems. He also created LaTeX and TLA+, a high-level language for “writing down the ideas that go into the program before you do any coding.”

Matt Asay thinks the open source licensing war is over, LangUI is an open source Tailwind component library for your AI chat app, Ivan Kuleshov modded a Mac mini to run via PoE, Apple joins Pixar and others in the Alliance for OpenUSD & John D. Cook says sometimes you shouldn’t pick the best tool for the job.

This week Adam is joined by Abi Noda, founder and CEO of DX to talk about DX AKA DevEx (or the long-form Developer Experience). Since the dawn of software development there has been this push to understand what makes software teams efficient, but more importantly what does it take to understand developer productivity? That’s what Abi has been focused on for the better part of the last 8 years of his career. He started a company called Pull Panda that was acquired by GitHub, spent a few years there on this problem before going out on his own to start DX which helps startups to the fortune 500 companies gather real insights that leads to real improvement.

Something interesting is going on at Stack Overflow, researches dig up some new (and potentially unavoidable) LLM attacks, Google proposes a new API that Ron Amadeo calls a DRM gatekeeper for the web, the Python Steering Council affirms PEP 703 & Lucas McGregor writes why no one wants to talk to your chatbot.

Ok Homelabbers, it’s time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that’s what homelab is about. Let’s do this.

This week we’re joined by Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker. Now he’s back with his next big thing called Dagger — CI/CD as code that runs anywhere. We’re users of Dagger so check out our codebase if you want to see how it works. On today’s show Solomon takes us back to the days of Docker, what it was like on that 10 year journey, his transition from Docker to Dagger, Dagger’s community-led growth model, their focus on open source and community, how it works, and even a cameo from Kelsey Hightower to explain how Dagger works.

Our friends at Supabase quietly went public today, Redpoint’s InfraRed 100 report is out, Twitter is now X, GitHub’s Copilot Chat now in public preview (for businesses) & Oxide has homelab plans (in 2050).

Adam was out when Bryan made his podcast debut here on The Changelog, so we had to get him back on the show along with his co-founder and CEO Steve Tuck to discuss Silicon Valley (the TV show), all things Oxide, homelab possibilities, bringing the power of the cloud on prem, and more.

This week it’s storytime with Steve Yegge! Steve came out of retirement to join Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering. Their next frontier is Cody, their AI coding assistant that answers code questions and writes code for you by reading your entire codebase and the code graph. But, we really spent a lot of time talking with Steve about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. Ok, it’s storytime!

Ellie Huxtable’s Atuin makes your shell history magical, Dmitry Kudryavtsev writes why he thinks engineers should focus on writing, LazyVim promises to transform your Neovim setup into a full-fleged IDE, Geoff Graham shares with Smashing Magazine how he writes CSS in 2023 & Brad Fitzpatrick collects a public list of bad issue track behaviors.

Red Hat’s decision to lock down RHEL sources behind a subscription paywall was met with much ire and opened opportunity for Oracle to get a smack in and SUSE to announce a fork with $10 million behind it. Few RHEL community members have been as publicly irate as Jeff Geerling, so we invited him on the show to discuss.

This week we’re talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe’s entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe’s codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

Oracle smacks IBM for their handling of RHEL, the folks at The Dam share a Slack clone in 5 lines of Bash, Justin Jaffray writes up 13 ways to think about joins, llama.cpp learns web chat thanks to a contribution by Tobi Lütke & Meta is willing to pay 3 engineers to remove Python’s GIL.

This week we’re talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.

Lukas Mathis writes about streak redemption, Jonathan Katz thinks vectors are the new JSON, Andy Jiang says CommonJS is hurting JavaScript & Swyx on the rise of the AI Engineer.

On Monday, Kelsey Hightower announced his retirement from Google. On Tuesday, he sat down with us to discuss why, how & what’s next. Along the way, Kelsey teaches us how not to suck at work, analyzes his magical demos, fights off the haters (again) & opines on System Initiative, Dagger & 37Signals moving off the cloud.