The Changelog

This week we’re talking about product development structures as systems with Lucas da Costa. The last time we had Lucas on the show he was living the text-mode only life, and now we’re more than 3 years later, Lucas has doubled down on all things text mode. Today’s conversation with Lucas maps several ideas he’s shared recently on his blog. We talk about deadlines being pointless, trajectory vs roadmap and the downfall of long-term planning, the practices of daily stand-ups and what to do instead, measuring queues not cycle time, and probably the most controversial of them all — actually talking to your customers. Have you heard? It’s this newly disruptive Agile framework that seems to be working well.

Andreas Kling’s new cross-platform browser project, Dan Hollick’s nerdy deep-dive on QR code tech, Stephan Dilly’s Rust-based terminal UI for Git, Miłosz Piechocki’s opinion on junior vs senior engineers & Divam Gupta’s Tensorflow port of Stable Diffusion.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.” You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?

Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes up a hot take on software quality, Wilfred Hughes creates the diff tool he’s always wanted, Josh Collinsworth thinks React is only great at being popular, Jetpack’s Devbox project looks pretty cool & James Williams sets out to find the shortest URLs on the internet. Oh, and chapters are here!

This week we’re joined by Jason Bosco, co-founder and CEO of Typesense — the open source Algolia alternative and the easier to use ElasticSearch alternative. For years we’ve used Algolia as our search engine, so we come to this conversation with skin in the game and the scars to prove it. Jason shared how he and his co-founder got started on Typesense, why and how they are “all in” on open source, the options and the paths developers can take to add search to their project, how Typesense compares to ElasticSearch and Algolia, he walks us through getting started, the story of Typesense Cloud, and why they have resisted Venture Capital.

Martin Heinz thinks you should be using Python’s walrus operator, you probably believe some falsehoods about email, Carlos Fenollosa threw in the towel after self-hosting his email for 23 years & Leon is an open source personal assistant that can live on your server.

This week we’re sharing the most popular episode of Go Time from last year — Go Time #196. We believe this episode was the most popular because it’s all about building actually maintainable software and what goes into that. Kris Brandow is joined by Johnny Boursiquot, Ian Lopshire, and Sam Boyer. There’s lots of hot takes, disagreements, and unpopular opinions. This is part two of a three part mini-series led by Kris on maintenance. Make sure you check out Go Time #195 and Go Time #202 to continue the series.

Qalculate has a command-line interface, Michael Eischer adds compression to Restic, Emery Berger warns his fellow CS professors about Copilot, and Heroku GM Bob Wise details Heroku’s next chapter (which excludes free accounts).

This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.” We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.

Carlos Alexandro Becker shared some SSH tips, Sakun Acharige (a Comp Sci student + visual design enthusiast) created System.css, Felix Krause built a browser app that shows the JavaScript commands being executed by iOS app in-app browers, Yan Zhulanow decided to create Marta, and Lőrik Levente did a comparrison between Tauri & Electron using a real world application he’s building called Authme.

This week we’re re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He’s a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what’s to come. He’s focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

Lucas F. Costa on why your daily stand-ups don’t work and host to fix them, Mahdi Yusuf deeply explains Redis, the Deno team announces some big changes coming, DevDash is a highly configurable terminal dashboard for developers and creators & Brett Cannon determines what is a Minimum Viable Python (MVPy).

eBPF is a revolutionary kernel technology that has lit the cloud native world on fire. If you’re going to have one person explain the excitement, that person would be Liz Rice. Liz is the COSO at Isovalent, creators of the open source Cilium project and pioneers of eBPF tech. On this episode Liz tells Jerod all about the power of eBPF, where it came from, what kind of new applications its enabling, and who is building the next generation of networking, security, and observability tools with it.

We add episode chapters to the website, KubeSail sells a PiBox, Nima Badizadegan wants you to use one big server, Gergeloy Orosz details oncall compensation across the software industry, Greg Kogan isn’t impressed with how swamped you are at work, a dashboard template built on Bootstrap & Charm releases a CLI tool for shell scripts.

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we’ve officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it’s also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

Oleksii Trekhleb has a new drawing app, Zach Leatherman did some markdown generator speed tests, Jorge Fioranelli built a framework for Engineering Managers, Crockford got interviewed on Evrone & Daniel Sieger wrote up his clean coding advice.

This week we’re joined again by Ben Ubois and we’re talking about RSS. Yes, RSS…the tech that never seems to die and yet so many of us rely on it daily. Ben is the creator of Feedbin, which is self-described as “a nice place to read on the web.” Ben is also the maker of a new app on iOS for people who like podcasts. It’s called Airshow and you can download it at airshow.fm. Ben catches us up on the state of Feedbin, we discuss the nine lives of RSS and its foundational utility for the indie web, the possibilities and short-comings of RSS, we get deep in the weeds on the Podcast 2.0 spec and the work being done on , and Ben also shares the details on his new app called Airshow.

Brandur thinks soft deletion probably isn’t worth it, the orange website delivers a high quality discussion on data structures, Podge O’Brien drops satirical management advice, team pico delivers prose.sh, Mat Ryer shares his thoughts on estimations & Matt Rickard’s thoughts on RSS have us thinking about it as well.

This week we’re joined by On Freund, former VP of Engineering at WeWork and now co-founder & CEO of Wilco. WeWork you may have heard of, but Wilco maybe not (yet). We get into the details behind the tech and scaling of WeWork, comparisons of the fictional series on Apple TV+ called WeCrashed and how much of that is true. Then we move on to Wilco which is what has On’s full attention right now. Wilco has the potential to be the next big thing for developers to acquire new skills. Wilco aims to be the ultimate simulator to gain new skills on a real-life tech stack. If you want to skip ahead, you can request access at trywilco.com/changelog — they are moving our listeners to the top of the waiting list.

Anthony Hobday has 37 ways to spice up your designs, James Bennett has opinions on open source and PyPi security, Alicia Sykes compiled some awesome security/privacy options, ContextKeeper layouts out the real price of context switching, and Nick Nisi tells us all about jqq. Bam! Bam! Bam!