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?

Our award-winning JS Party game show is back with a new name, a new channel, and the same ol’ survey-response-guessing fun! The JS Party crew join us to see who knows y’all best. Survey says!

Antirez has returned to Redis! Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what’s going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good ’ol LLM inference discussions.

Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.

It’s Kaizen 18! Can you believe it? We discuss the recent Fly.io outage, some little features we’ve added since our last Kaizen, our new video-first production, and of course, catch up on all things Pipely! Oh, and Gerhard surprises us (once again). BAM!

Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they’re doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don’t even need and they’re poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era.

Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.

It seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you!

Jerod and Adam use Chris Kiehl’s post on development topics he’s changed his mind on (over the last 10 years) as a proxy for discussion on dev things they HAVE and HAVE NOT changed their minds on.

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!

Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she’s learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

Fire up a REPL, grab your favorite Stephen King novel, and hold on to the seat of your pants! Jimmy Miller returns to reveal why, at least for some of us, discovery coding is where it’s at.

It seems like everyone is uses the term “agent” differently these days. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details of tool calling and its connection to agents. They help clarify how LLMs can “talk to” and “interact with” other systems like databases, APIs, web apps, etc. Along the way they share related learning resources.

Jerod is joined by KBall, Nick & Amy to throw one last JS Party! We review last year’s predictions, discuss the state of the web dev world, opine on coding AIs (of course) & divulge what comes next for the JS Party crew. Thank you for partying with us all these years! 💚

Arun Gupta is back, this time with his latest book in hand titled “Fostering Open Source Culture” to share his wisdom and experiences of fostering open source culture. BTW you can use the code OSCULTURE20 to get 20% off (both print and e-book). Use this link and enjoy.

Bill Maher excoriates the software industry for making our lives more difficult, two professors from the University of Washington put together a curriculum to help us manage life in the ChatGPT world, Daniel Delaney thinks deeply on chat as a dev tool UI, Benedict Evans explores our assumptions that computers be ‘correct’ & the Thoughtbot team writes up six cases when not to refactor.

Techno Tim joins Adam to catch up on the state of Homelab for 2025, the state of AI at home and on-prem (AI Homelab) and where that’s heading, building a creator PC, choosing the parts for your build, GPU availability, Windows being user hostile, and why Tim is happy to be using Windows, Mac AND Linux.

After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface.

Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let’s dig in.

Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.

Dan Moore from FusionAuth joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about modern auth strategies. We talk magic links, OTP, MFA, passkeys, password managers & so much more.

There is crazy hype and a lot of confusion related to DeepSeek’s latest model DeepSeek R1. The products provided by DeepSeek (their version of a ChatGPT-like app) has exploded in popularity. However, ties to China have raised privacy and geopolitical concerns. In this episode, Chris and Daniel cut through the hype to talk about the model, privacy implications, running DeepSeek models securely, and what this signals for open models in 2025.

Glauber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Turso, joins us to discuss libSQL, Limbo, and how they’re rewriting SQLite in Rust. We discuss their efforts with libSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain but not being open for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Turso platform, how they test Limbo with Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), and their plan to replace SQLite.

Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a low-level code PR written 99% by DeepSeek-R1, Adam Wathan announces the release of Tailwind CSS 4.0, Matheus Lima opens up the Computer Science history books to create list of influential papers, Namanyay Goel thinks AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers & Russell Baylis shares what he’s learned about optimizing WFH lighting to reduce eye strain.