Nous Research has been pumping out some of the best open access LLMs using SOTA data synthesis techniques. Their Hermes family of models is incredibly popular! In this episode, Karan from Nous talks about the origins of Nous as a distributed collective of LLM researchers. We also get into fine-tuning strategies and why data synthesis works so well.

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist’s world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.

We’re taking you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we’re in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

KBall & Amal interview Alex & Pavel from the Angular Signals team. They cover the history, how the Angular team decided to move to signals, what the new mental model looks like, migration path & even dive into community integrations and future roadmap.

Angelica is joined by Neil S Primmer & Benji Vesterby to share their experience organizing “Capture the Flag” at GopherCon 2023. CTF events involve teams vying for supremacy as they strive to gather digital flags (presented as strings) and successfully submit them to the competition organizers. In essence, it’s a thrilling “scavenger hunt for nerds.” Join us as we unravel the intricacies and excitement of this unique gaming experience!

Recently the release of the rabbit r1 device resulted in huge interest in both the device and “Large Action Models” (or LAMs). What is an LAM? Is this something new? Did these models come out of nowhere, or are they related to other things we are already using? Chris and Daniel dig into LAMs in this episode and discuss neuro-symbolic AI, AI tool usage, multimodal models, and more.

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Our old friend José Valim & his team have been hard at work adding gradual typing to Elixir. They’re only 1-3% of the way there, but a lot of progress has been made. So, we invited him back on the show for a deep-dive on why, how & when Elixir will be gradually typed.

This week we’re going deep on security and what it takes to shift left, seriously. Adam is joined by Justin Garrison (co-host of Ship It), plus two members of the BoxyHQ team — Deepak Prabhakara, Co-founder & CEO and Schalk Neethling, Community Manager and DevRel as well as fellow Changelog Slack member.

We discuss how to shift left, the role of the developer and the burden of security, the importance of tooling, the difference between authentication and authorization, and a mindset change for when security takes place — it’s a matter of “when” not “who.”

Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who…

Small changes in prompts can create large changes in the output behavior of generative AI models. Add to that the confusion around proper evaluation of LLM applications, and you have a recipe for confusion and frustration. Raza and the Humanloop team have been diving into these problems, and, in this episode, Raza helps us understand how non-technical prompt engineers can productively collaborate with technical software engineers while building AI-driven apps.

Over the past 8 years, Go Time has published 300 episodes! In this episode, the panel discusses which ones they loved the most, some current stuff that’s in the works, what struggles the podcast has had & what we’re planning for the future.

Alex Ellis’ new actions-batch project uses GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer, DevDocs.io combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface, Jarred Sumner announces Bun’s very own JavaScript shell, Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components & Martin Heinz writes an awesome guide to building an indoor air quality monitoring system with Prometheus, Grafana & a CO2 sensor.

Jerod, Adam Argyle & the CompressedFM crew hang out prior to their Fronted Feud battle! They discuss CSS as a programming language, Apple’s walled garden, how nobody is on the same social media sites anymore, how to choose tech, the community’s sentiment shift on GraphQL & a whole bunch more. (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)

Techno Tim is back with Adam to discuss the state of homelab in 2024 and the trends happening within homelab tech. They discuss homelab environments providing a safe place for experimentation and learning, network improvement as a gateway to homelab, trends in network connection speeds, to Unifi or not, storage trends, ZFS configurations, TrueNAS, cameras, home automation, connectivity, routers, pfSense, and more.

Umm, should we make these conversations between Adam and Tim more frequent?

Una & Adam from The CSS Podcast defend their Frontend Feud title against challengers James & Brad from CompressedFM. Let’s get it on!

This week we’re joined by FreeBSD & OpenZFS developer, Allan Jude, to learn all about FreeBSD. Allan gives us a brief history of BSD, tells us why it’s his operating system of choice, compares it to Linux, explains the various BSDs out there & answers every curious question we have about this powerful (yet underrepresented) Unix-based operating system.

Recently, Intel’s Liftoff program for startups and Prediction Guard hosted the first ever “Advent of GenAI” hackathon. 2,000 people from all around the world participated in Generate AI related challenges over 7 days. In this episode, we discuss the hackathon, some of the creative solutions, the idea behind it, and more.

In this episode Matt joins Kris & Jon to discuss Kafka. During their discussion they cover topics like what problems Kafka helps solve, when a company should start considering Kafka, how throwing tech like Kafka at a problem won’t fix everything if there are underlying issues, complexities of using Kafka, managing payload schemas, and more.

Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).

It’s our 13th Kaizen episode! We’re back from KubeCon, we’re making goals for the year, we’re migrating to Neon & we’re weighing the pros/cons of building our own custom CDN.

Carson Gross (creator of htmx) & Alex Russell (Mr. Web Platform 3000) join Amal for an EPIC discussion on web architectures, the evolution of rendering patterns & the advantages of hypermedia and htmx. We dive deep on why modern web app best practices are falling short & explore how htmx gives devs an HTML-first approach to use tech that’s over 20 years old.

Tune in to learn a new way to do something old, so you can simplify your code & use JavaScript when/where it’s uniquely able to shine ✨

Justin Garrison joins us to talk about Amazon’s silent sacking, from his perspective. He should know. He works there. Well, as of yesterday he quit. We discuss how the cloud and Kubernetes have transformed the way software is developed and deployed, the impact silent layoffs have on employees and their careers, speaking out about workplace issues (the right way), how changes in organizational structure can lead to gaps in expertise and responsibility which can lead to potential outages and slower response times.

By the way, we officially let the cat off out of the bag in this episode. Justin has joined the ranks here at Changelog and is taking over as the host of Ship It! Expect new episodes soon.

We scoured the internet to find all the AI related predictions for 2024 (at least from people that might know what they are talking about), and, in this episode, we talk about some of the common themes. We also take a moment to look back at 2023 commenting with some distance on a crazy AI year.

Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes “all code is tech debt” is all wrong.

It’s our 5th annual New Year’s party! Jerod & the gang review our predictions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, make a few predictions for 2024 & even set some new resolutions for this year.

Hello 2024! We’re kicking off the year with Dan Moore, author of ‘Letters to a New Developer’ — a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. We discuss the value of online communities for new developers, the importance of communication skills, and the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Dan shares his best advice for new developers, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking. So much wisdom and advice in this episode!

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we’re featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening! 💚

Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what’s cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform.

We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg’s open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.