Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.

Daniel & Chris explore the advantages of vector databases with Roie Schwaber-Cohen of Pinecone. Roie starts with a very lucid explanation of why you need a vector database in your machine learning pipeline, and then goes on to discuss Pinecone’s vector database, designed to facilitate efficient storage, retrieval, and management of vector data.

Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.

Tracy Durnell thinks AI has already poisoned its own well, Adam Hill’s microsite catalogs everything you need to UnsuckJS, Lionel Dricot thinks we need more Richard Stallman, not less & the Vulcan team proves you can’t trust ChatGPT’s package recommendations.

Chris & Daniel explore AI in national security with Lt. General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.). The conversation reflects Jack’s unique background as the only senior U.S. military officer responsible for standing up and leading two organizations in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated to fielding artificial intelligence capabilities: Project Maven and the DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC).

Together, Jack, Daniel & Chris dive into the fascinating details of Jack’s recent written testimony to the U.S. Senate’s AI Insight Forum on National Security, in which he provides the U.S. government with thoughtful guidance on how to achieve the best path forward with artificial intelligence.

What do you do when you make a living typing on a keyboard, but you can no longer do that for more than a few minutes at a time? Switch careers?! Not Josh Comeau. He decided to learn from others who have come before him and develop his own solution for coding without his hands. Spoiler Alert: he uses weird noises and some fancy eye tracking tech.

On this episode Josh tells us all about the fascinating system he developed, how it changed his perspective on work & life, and where he’s going from here. Plus we mix in some CSS & JS chat along the way.

Earlier this year on February 2nd, 2020 Jon Evans and his team of archivists took a snapshot of all active public repositories on GitHub and sent it to a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago where it will be stored for the next 1,000 years.

On this episode, Jon chats with Jerod all about the GitHub Archive Program and how they’re preserving open source software for future generations.

What if your favorite conference’s hallway track continued year round? That’s the vibe we’re trying to capture with Changelog & Friends, a new Friday talk show from your friends at Changelog. In this intro episode, Adam & Jerod talk all about our new MWF plan for The Changelog , discuss what this Friends flavor is all about, and have a lot of fun along the way.

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

We’re talking with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, Warewulf, and most recently Singularity — an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for enterprise and high-performance computing workloads. What’s interesting is how Singularity allows untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. We cover the backstory, Singularity Pro and how they’re not holding the open source community version hostage, as well as how Singularity is being used to containerize and support workflows in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and more.

Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she’s seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack’s growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.

We’re talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident ops and infrastructure expert, about the setup we’ve rolled out for 2019. Late 2016 we relaunched Changelog.com as a new Phoenix/Elixir application and that included a brand new infrastructure and deployment process. 2019’s infrastructure update includes Linode, CoreOS, Docker, CircleCI, Rollbar, Fastly, Netdata, and more — and we talk through all the details on this show.

This show is also an open invite to you and the rest of the community to join us in Slack and learn and contribute to Changelog.com. Head to changelog.com/community to get started.

Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled “Does it spark joy?” In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding “What are you optimizing for?” and whether or not what you’re doing truly brings you joy.

What can art historians and computer scientists learn from one another? Actually, a lot! Amanda Wasielewski joins us to talk about how she discovered that computer scientists working on computer vision were actually acting like rogue art historians and how art historians have found machine learning to be a valuable tool for research, fraud detection, and cataloguing. We also discuss the rise of generative AI and how we this technology might cause us to ask new questions like: “What makes a photograph a photograph?”

Chris Stjernlöf got nerd-sniped and ended up writing down his practices of reliable software design, Ben Visness has had enough with the npm community’s propensity to pull in micro-libraries to suit every need, “Stay SaaSy” makes three metaphors for problem solving categories, Troy Hunt takes us inside the “3 billion people” National Public Data breach & Dasel is one data tool to rule them all.

This last week has been a big week for AI news. BigScience is training a huge language model (while the world watches), and NVIDIA announced their latest “Hopper” GPUs. Chris and Daniel discuss these and other topics on this fully connected episode!

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix…ok, we couldn’t help ourselves with that one. Today we’re joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up…back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. We talk through all the details in this episode with Matthew and Sid.

Adam caught up with Francesc Campoy at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA to talk about the work he’s doing at source{d} to apply Machine Learning to source code, and turn that codebase into actionable insights. It’s a movement they’re driving called Machine Learning on Code. They talked through their open source products, how they work, what types of insights can be gained, and they also talked through the code analysis Francesc did on the Kubernetes code base. This is as close as you get to the bleeding edge and we’re very interested to see where this goes.

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100’s of open source projects which have been downloaded 100’s of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability to contribute original value which is deeply rooted in the concept of aligned autonomy. We also covered the 6 core skills required for us to be empowered in our teams.

We’ve all heard about breaches of privacy and leaks of private health information (PHI). For healthcare providers and those storing this data, knowing where all the sensitive data is stored is non-trivial. Ramin, from Tausight, joins us to discuss how they have deploy edge AI models to help company search through billions of records for PHI.

According to Solana Larsen: “Too often, it feels like we have lost control of the internet to the interests of Big Tech, Big Data — and now Big AI.” In the latest season of Mozilla’s IRL podcast (edited by Solana), a number of stories are featured to highlight the trailblazers who are reclaiming power over AI to put people first. We discuss some of those stories along with the issues that they surface.

Computer Scientist Yaw Anokwa joins the show to tell us how Open Data Kit is enabling data collection efforts around the world. From monitoring rainforests to observing elections to tracking outbreaks, ODK has done it all. We hear its origin story, ruminate on why it’s been so successful, learn how the software works, and even answer the question, “are people really using it in space?!” All that and more…

Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you’ve never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you have to listen to this show!

The Gorilla team is building an API store for LLMs, DeviceScript is Microsoft’s new TypeScript programming environment for microcontrollers, Nyxt is a hackable browser written in Lisp, Morgan Housel writes about expectations debt & I issue a gentle reminder to my fellow software engineers: there’s still no silver bullet.

This week on The Changelog we’re continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly Twitter alternative, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why you would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

This week we’re talking about big security breaches with Neil Daswani, renowned security expert, best-selling author, and Co-Director of Stanford University’s Advanced CyberSecurity Program. His book, Big Breaches: Cybersecurity Lessons for Everyone helped to guide this conversation. We cover the six common key causes (aka vectors) that lead to breaches, which of these causes are exploited most often, recent breaches such as the Equifax breach (2017), the Capital One breach (2019), and the more recent Solarwinds breach (2020).