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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week we’re back at All Things Open 2022 covering the hallway track. Up first is Shivay Lamba and he’s schooling us on all things server-side WASM. It’s the new hotness. After that, we talk with Yishai Beeri, CTO of LinearB about the world of code review, PR queues, AI developers, and making human developers more efficient, and happier. And last, we talk with Guy Martin from NVIDIA about what’s going on in the Industrial Metaverse. He shares details about an open source project developed by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (USD) and what they’re doing with NVIDIA Omniverse.

This week we’re back talking to Gergely Orosz — this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market, but more so the flip side, the 180, the not so good tech hiring market, the layoff market and what you can expect. There’s a lot of FUD out there, so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what’s really going on, and what to really expect. Maybe more so, how to keep your job or find a new job. We come to this topic with great compassion and great understanding, so please…there is a community here for you. There’s a lot of people in our Slack. Call it your home, it’s free to join and everyone is welcome.

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, NC. Let’s set the stage, here’s what we like do when we go to conferences — we setup our podcast studio at our booth where all the other vendors are and we talk to everyone we can. We give out t-shirts, stickers, pins, high fives…and it’s a blast.

Today’s anthology episode from ATO features: Arun Gupta (VP and GM of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel), long-time friend Chad Whitacre (Head of Open Source at Sentry), and Ricardo Sueiras (Principal Advocate in Open Source at AWS).

The common denominator for each of these conversations is advocating for and supporting open source. Special thanks to Todd Lewis and team for inviting us to come back to ATO. We enjoyed meeting long time fans and new ones too.

This week we’re back for part 2 with Adam Wiggins — going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse (listen to part 1). After a six-year adrenaline high on Heroku, Adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well. So, he moved to Berlin, did some gig work with companies…dabbled in investing and advising. But he wasn’t satisfied. Adam likes to build things.

Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry — the same fellas he created Heroku with. Eventually they founded Ink & Switch, an independent research lab which led to innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is a tool for deep work and thinking on iPad and Mac. Today’s show is all about that journey and the details in-between.

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production.

We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.

This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.

This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.

We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.

This week we’re talking fresh, faster, and new web frameworks by way of JS Party. Yes, today’s show is a web framework sampler because a new batch of web frameworks have emerged. There’s always something new happening in the front-end world and JS Party does an amazing job of keeping us up to date. So…what’s fresh, faster, and new?

The first segment of the show focuses on Deno’s Fresh new web framework. Luca Casonato joins Jerod & Feross to talk about Fresh – a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity.

In segment two, AngularJS creator Miško Hevery joins Jerod and KBall to talk about Qwik. He says Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he’s attempting to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG.

In the last segment, Amal talks with Fred Schott about Astro 1.0. They go deep on how Astro is built to pull content from anywhere and serve it fast with their next-gen island architecture.

Plus there’s an 8 minute bonus for our ++ subscribers (changelog.com/++). Fred Schott explains Astro Islands and how Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page, and the unused JavaScript gets replaced with lightweight HTML — leading to faster loads and time-to-interactive.

This week we turn the mics on ourselves, kind of. Lars Wikman joins the show to give us a guided tour through ID3 esoterica and the shiny new open source Elixir library he developed for us. We talk about what ID3 is, its many versions, what it aims to be and what it could have been, how our library project got started, all the unique features and failed dreams of the ID3v2 spec, how ID3v2 and Podcasting 2.0 are solving the problem differently, and how all of this maps back to us giving you (our listeners) a better experience while listening to our shows.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 <podcast:chapters>, and Ben also shares the details on his new app called Airshow.

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.