Welcome back to #define, our game of obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery. We’ve gathered some awesome friends, new and old, to see who has the best vocabulary and who can trick the everyone else into thinking that they do.

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.

Rasmus Holm takes a critical look at MCP, Stefan Judis shares a new term he learned from Scott Hanselman, Raf beautifully describes the curse of knowing how, Void is an open source Cursor alternative & React Jam is back for its 6th online game jam.

Kaizen 19 has arrived! Gerhard has been laser-focused on making Jerod’s pipe dream a reality by putting all of his efforts into Pipely. Has it been a big waste of time or has this epic side quest morphed into a main quest?!

Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.

The DOJ’s beef with Google might spell doom for Mozilla, Clayton Ramsey makes a plea for not using ChatGPT for writing, Tim Cook loses a big gamble, Brandon Reinhart migrates his game dev away from Rust and Bevy, and Ibrahim Diallo throws zip bombs at malicious bots.

Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

Drew Wilson is back! It’s been more than a decade since Adam and Drew have spoken and wow, Drew has been busy. He built Plasso and got acquired by GoDaddy. He built a bank called Letter which didn’t work out…and now he’s Head of Design at Clerk and back to chasing that next big thing.

Zach Bellay tells us about the devil and the angel on his shoulders, Pete Koomen thinks today’s AI apps are like horseless carriages, Hyperwood is an open source system for crafting furniture from simple wooden slats, Scott Antipa agrees with YAGNI but adds YAGRI & Antony Henao debunks three common myths that get engineers stuck.

Join us on a journey to make believe worlds with our good friend Mat Ryer. The assignment; we each get to make up a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule. This episode is sure to delight loyal fans and especially those who enjoy Mat Ryer on the show and a good/bad song or two.

Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he’s eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.

We drop our fourth Changelog Beats album, Dex Horthy proposes the 12-factor AI agent, Thorsten Ball takes us step-by-step through building a coding agent, Zachary Huang builds an LLM framework in 100 lines of code & Philip Laine’s Spegel project gets unknowingly forked by Microsoft.

Nick Nisi joins us to confess his AI subscription glut, drool over some cool new hardware gadgets, discuss why the TypeScript team chose Go for their new compiler, opine on the React team’s complicated relationship with Vercel, suggest people try Astro, update us on his browser habits, and more.

Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

Google announces an open protocol for AI agent collaboration, Datastar is an Alpine.js / htmx love child, Matthias Endler documents things he finds common in the best programmers, turns out Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days & Zev is a CLI that helps you remember (or discover) terminal commands using natural language.

Richard Moot joins us to discuss Changelog helping Square launch a developer pod and the excitement around MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. What might it foretell about the future of human/robot relations?

Stephan Ewen, Founder and CEO of Restate.dev joins the show to talk about the coming era of resilient apps, the meaning of and what it takes to achieve idempotency, this world of stateful durable execution functions, and when it makes sense to reach for this tech.

Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project lays out a potential scenario of superhuman AI’s impact, Liam ERD generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from your database, Mozilla takes on Gmail with “Thundermail”, algernon explains why grepping remains terrible & Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira rans on the insanity of being a software engineer.

Jerod turns Adam into Lego, a Walrus, and a Walrus in the style of Studio Ghibli…and so much more. This is a good one to watch on YouTube.

In July of 2020, Joran Dirk Greef stumbled into a fundamental limitation in the general-purpose database design for transaction processing. This sent him on a path that ended with TigerBeetle, a redesigned distributed database for financial transactions that yielded three orders of magnitude faster OLTP performance over the usual (general-purpose) suspects.

On this episode, Joran joins Jerod to explain how TigerBeetle got so fast, to defend its resilience and durability claims as a new market entrant, and to stake his claim at the intersection of open source and business. Oh, plus the age old question: Why Zig?

Theodore Morley wonders why tech workers so frequently point our wanderlust toward hands-on trades, Eduardo Bouças explains why he’s lost confidence in Vercel’s handling of Next.js, “xan” is a command line tool that can be used to process CSV files directly from the shell, Pawel Brodzinski takes us back to Kanban’s roots & Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on vibe coding.

Long-time JS Party panelist Amal Hussein joins Jerod to catch up on her career path, to opine on the viability agentic coding, to feel all the feelings that AI brings out of us as developers, and to share something new in her life that changes everything.

This week we’re bringing you a remaster of our epic 2021interview with Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach / trainer for the tech industry.

The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you’re ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.

Steve Yegge’s latest rant about the future of “coding”, Ethan McCue shares some life altering Postgres patterns, Hillel Wayne makes the case for Verification-First Development, Gerd Zellweger experienced lots of pain setting up GitHub Actions & Cascii is a web-based ASCII diagram builder.

Justin Searls from Breaking Change joins the show to discuss Apple’s Intelligence blunder, the end of the good times in the tech industry, and POSSE Party, his in-progress product that lets “any dummy with a website enjoy a life of algorithm-free luxury.”

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Shopify has been hard at work securing ecommerce checkouts from sophisticated news attacks (such as digital skimming) and he’s here to share all the technical intricacies and far-reaching implications of this work.

Amelia Wattenberger bemoans the computer’s great flattening, the Learnk8s team lets you manage your cluster from a spreadsheet, Jan Swist gets a surprising response from Cursor, the French and German governments team up for an open source Notion alternative & XPipe lets you access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop.

Adam’s friend on the frontend, John Long joins the show to explore his usage of AI, design tools and the stack he prefers. We talk Next.js vs Rails, maintaining open source, building websites with Framer, their mutual love for Figma, and more.

Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?