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.

Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk, embedded vector search offering. We talk about how their unique columnar database structure enables serverless deployments and drastic savings (without performance hits) at scale. This one is super practical, so don’t miss it!

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

What happens when you take four grizzled #define veterans and throw an Emma Bostian into the mix? Find out on this episode because our award-worthy game of fake definitions is back and this time it’s even better!

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

Filippo Valsorda & Roland Shoemaker from the Go Team return & bring Nicola Murino with them to continue catching us up on what’s new in Go’s crypto libraries.

This is everything we didn’t cover + deep dives from Part 1!

The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.” We couldn’t agree more, and we are so happy that this week’s guest Casper (among other contributors) have created this resource for practitioners.

During the episode, we cover the key categories to think about as you try to navigate the open source AI ecosystem, and Casper gives his thoughts on fine-tuning, vector DBs & more.

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

Jerod is back with another “It Depends” episode! This time he’s joined by Kris Brandow from Go Time and they’re talking all things API design. What makes a good API? Is GraphQL a solid choice? Why do we do REST wrong? And WTF does HATEOAS mean, anyway?

Gregg Tavares (author of WebGL/WebGPU Fundamentals) joins Jerod & Amal to give us a tour of these low-level technologies that are pushing the web forward into the world of video games, machine learning & other exciting rich applications.

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said “[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist.” Wise words.

We discuss Hare (of course), why he’s so passionate about all things open source, the state of the language, fostering a culture that values stability, and oddly enough — what it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

In this enlightening episode, we delve deeper than the usual buzz surrounding AI’s perils, focusing instead on the tangible problems emerging from the use of machine learning algorithms across Europe. We explore “suspicion machines” — systems that assign scores to welfare program participants, estimating their likelihood of committing fraud. Join us as Justin and Gabriel share insights from their thorough investigation, which involved gaining access to one of these models and meticulously analyzing its behavior.

ChatGPT’s new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox’s share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can’t be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she’s ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the “code is read more than written” cliche with his own: “code is run more than read.”

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco?

We also talk in-depth about Gergely’s self-published book, The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

This week we’re gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon…we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they’re working on at Sidero Labs.

Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.

Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry.

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.