The Changelog

Sahn Lam details Stack Overflow’s monolith/on-prem architecture, Hillel Wayne asks the Lobsters community for killer libraries, Linux 6.2 is ready to run on M1 Macs thanks to Asahi Linux, Johan Halse writes up what to expect from your web framework & Eli Bendersky on using GoatCounter for blog analytics.

This week Evan Prodromou is back to take us deeper into the Fediverse. As many of us reconsider our relationship with Twitter, Mastodon has been by-and-large the target of migration. They helped to popularize the idea of a federated universe of community-owned, decentralized, social networks. And, at the heart of it all is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol published by the W3C. It is co-authored by Evan as well as; Christine Lemmer-Webber, Jessica Tallon, Erin Shepherd, and Amy Guy. Today, Evan shares the details behind this protocol and where the Fediverse might be heading.

Simon Willison rounds up the goings on around Microsoft’s new GPT-powered Bing search, The Vue/Vite team build a nimble web client for Mastodon, Will Larson writes about writing an engineering strategy, Denis Pushkarev seeks support to maintain core-js & I share a lightning round of cool tools I’ve found and used recently. ⚡️

This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.

Alice Girard Guittard finds out how much she could you really get out of a $4 VPS, Brett Cannon wonders if using TOML for .env files is a good idea, Nic Mulvaney details how they count unique visitors to a website without using cookies, UIDS, or fingerprinting, after a few months, Chris Coyier is still using the Arc browser & Alex Kladov pens a love letter to Deno.

This week we invited our friend Mat Ryer to join us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that’s been on our radar. You may know Mat from Go Time and also Grafana’s Big Tent, which we help to produce. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It’s good fun.

OpenAI’s working on an AI classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text, Oz Nova and Myles Byrne created a guide to teach yourself computer science, Charles Genschwap recently realized that all the various programming philosophies can be boiled down into a simple statement about how to work with state, you probably don’t need Lodash or Underscore anymore & Waseem Daher thinks scalability is overrated.

Jeremia Kimelman takes stock of his “data tool belt”, Build Your Own Redis with C/C++ is ready to read, giscus is a comments system powered by GitHub Discussions, Matt Rickard says prompt engineering shouldn’t be a thing and won’t be a thing in the future & Kolja Lubitz’s ALPACA is engine for building adventure games and interactive comics.

This week we’re talking about mainframes with Cameron Seay, Adjunct Professor at East Carolina University and a member of the Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project. If you’ve been curious about mainframes, this show will be a great guide. Cameron explains exactly what a mainframe is and how it’s different from the cloud. We talk COBOL and the state of education and opportunities around that language. We cover the state-of-the-art in mainframe land, System Z, Linux on mainframes, and more.

Max Countryman wrote up a framework for prioritizing tech debt, shadcn builds a copy/paste-able UI component library in public, Justin Etheredge shares 20 things he’s learned in his 20 years as a software engineer, Jacob Stopak’s git-sim lets you easily visualize git operations without affecting your repo & Mattias Wadman implemented jq in jq.

This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.

WestArtFactory’s premium PCB cheat sheets, Maxime Topolov tells of a disappearing AWS dev, Juspay Technologies releases HyperSwitch for payment processing, Servo gets new funding for 2023 & Cloudflare’s open source Wildebeest.

Jerod is joined by Yehonathan Sharvit, author of Data-Oriented Programming, to discuss the virtues of treating data as a first-class citizen in our applications and the four principles that make it possible.

Brandur Leach’s easy, alternative soft deletion strategy, Lane Wagner’s zen of proverbs, Nicolas Carlo says fake it until you can automate it, Felix A. Crux thinks feeds are the only civilized way to read online & Ben Thompson analyzes AI and the big five tech companies.

Welcome to 2023 — we’re kicking off the year talking to Justin Searls about the state of web development and why he just might write a “You Might Not Need React” post. He’s been so productive using Turbo and Stimulus (and tailwind) in Rails 7 that we had to talk about the state of Rails development today and a bunch of other fun topics around building for the web in 2023.

Jackson Huff’s clipboard powertool for the command line, Fernando Borretti thinks tools for thought should be unbundled, Listen Notes helps you run a microfeed on Cloudflare, Martin Rue says to be productive, be prepared & Paul Sawers takes TechCrunch readers inside Matrix and features its recent adoption wins.

Our 5th annual year-end wrap-up episode! Sit back, relax, pour a glass of your favorite beverage and join us for listener voice mails, our favorite episodes, some must-listens, and of course the top 5 most listened to episodes of the year. Thanks for listening!

To wrap up the year we’re talking about what’s breaking the internet, again. Yes, we’re talking about ChatGPT and we’re joined by our good friend Shawn “swyx” Wang. Between his writings on L-Space Diaries and his AI notes repo on GitHub, we had a lot to cover around the world of AI and what might be coming in 2023. Also, we have one more show coming out before the end of the year — our 5th annual “State of the log” episode where Adam and Jerod look back at the year and talk through their favorite episodes of the year and feature voices from the community. So, stay tuned for that next week.

tRPC helps you move fast and break nothing, Michael Muré embeds a bug tracker in git, Fatih Kadir Akın curates some awesome ChatGPT prompts, Mike Nikles thinks dev environments in the cloud are a half-baked solution & Georgi Gerganov ports OpenAI’s Whisper model to a lightweight, portable C/C++ program.

This week we’re joined by Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub, and a true tech and pop culture connoisseur. From her days at Mashable covering the intersections of entertainment and technology, to Gizmodo, to Microsoft, and now her current role at GitHub we talk with Christina about her journey from journalist to developer, and the latest happenings coming out of GitHub Universe. BTW, we’re planning to get Christina on Backstage in the new year to talk about Plex, MakeMKV, and all things that go into hosting your own media server. Drop a commment on this episode with a +1 if you want to see that happen.