Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

I’m back! 👋

Well, how did your 2024 exit? Did you close open file descriptors, delete temporary files & free allocated memory? Or was it more of a seg fault & core dump kinda finish? I’m still holding on to a couple of loose threads, but I managed to return 0 & I’m ready to execute again.

So, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 We ain’t afraid of no Ghostty!

Mitchell Hashimoto joins the show to discuss Ghostty, the newest terminal in town. Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp, took it all the way to IPO, exited in 2023—and now he’s working on a terminal emulator called Ghostty. Ghostty went 1.0 in December, so we sat down to talk through all the details.

🔮 10 big predictions for 2025

Tech journalist, M.G. Siegler, goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, one of which he believes has a chance… 😆

Here’s his list, with all reasoning removed (because why not, right?)

Apple buys an AI company
Someone buys Warner Bros Discovery
Intel gets bailed out
Elon Musk bails on the White House
Amazon’s Alexa overhaul proves less than “remarkable”
Microsoft and OpenAI kiss and make up, or break up
NVIDIA comes back to Earth, a bit
Threads passes Xitter in active users
Google starts to feel real pressure on search
Mark Zuckerberg unchained

Some of these sound not too outlandish to me. Specifically, I can see numbers 1, 4, 5, 7 & 9 happening. What do you think?

👨‍🏫 Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Simon Willison’s year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM. He also comments on much of the commentary around LLMs, which I whole-heartedly agree with:

I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here, but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.
Those of us who understand this stuff have a duty to help everyone else figure it out.

⌛️ An unreasonable amount of time

Allen Pike describes a method for magic:

The pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic: they’ve invested more time than you’d expect.
It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. Doing impossible things feels, well, impossible.

Allen also provides a formula for getting over the fear of commitment. I’ll give you a hint: it’s similar to the formula for eating an elephant…

💰 Mobile debugging hands-on workshop

Thanks to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News

Picture this scenario: You get a crash report “App crashed on checkout page.” But you can’t reproduce it on your Pixel. Maybe it’s only happening on a Samsung device? Maybe it’s a memory issue? Or maybe the user was on a bad network? Now you’re stuck digging through logs, guessing at settings, and running the same scenario over and over in your emulator.

If this sounds familiar to you, join Sentry’s Philipp Hoffmann and Simon Grimm for a demo-filled hands-on workshop aimed at helping you take the guesswork out of debugging on mobile.

They’ll show you real-world examples and how to solve common issues—like reproducing those elusive crashes and finding the root cause of performance issues. Whether you work with iOS, Android, or React Native, you’ll leave with practical strategies and tools you can use immediately.

🧞 The magic of small databases

Tom Critchlow:

We’ve built many tools for publishing to the web - but I want to make the claim that we have underdeveloped the tools and platforms for publishing collections, indexes and small databases. It’s too hard to build these kinds of experiences, too hard to maintain them and a lack of collaborative tools exist.

He goes on to think through what’s needed in this space, list existing tools / examples & make this overall point:

I want to empower more individuals to publish, maintain and collaborate on small indexes. To build a million tiny libraries, community databases, weird collections and indie indexes.

🏁 Parkinson’s Law: It’s real, so use it

Parkinson’s Law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion) is counter-intuitive, but that doesn’t make it wrong! This is why I’ve staked the claim that arbitrary deadlines are actually awesome & it’s why James Stanier agrees with me:

Projects that don’t have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.
By setting challenging deadlines you will actually get better results. It’s all about manipulating the Iron Triangle of scope, resources, and time.

I wish it weren’t true, but it is. Deadlines really help human beings get things done. Acknowledge it. Embrace it. Use it.

🎯 Hitting OKRs vs doing your job

Here’s Jessica Kerr doing one of the things she does so well: analyzing the business of software in terms that speak to engineers. This time, it’s about doing OKRs right. Do your OKRs effectively say, “Ship the Roadmap.”? If so, Jessica thinks you’re doing ’em wrong.

When a team’s OKRs duplicate the roadmap, I read that as “We aren’t trying to improve. This is a quarter for trudging along.” Not a good sign.
OKRs are for “What is special about this quarter? What is new? How do we want to be different? What do we want to figure out?”
Let OKRs highlight a special focus. Don’t try to cram everything you do into them.

🔥 Nobody gets fired for picking JSON, but maybe they should?

Miguel Young de la Sota goes after one of modern software’s sacred cows. His major beef:

the biggest problem with JSON isn’t any specific design decision but rather the incredible diversity of parser behavior and non-conformance across and within language ecosystems.

Miguel’s preferred cut? Protobuf:

Thankfully, you don’t have to use JSON. There are alternatives—BSON, UBJSON, MessagePack, and CBOR are just a few binary formats that try to replicate JSON’s data model. Unfortunately, many of them have their own problems.
Protobuf, however, has none of these problems, because it was designed to fulfill needs JSON couldn’t meet. Using a strongly-typed schema system, like Protobuf, makes all of these problems go away.

👻 The ghosts in Spotify’s machine

Liz Pelly reports on Spotify’s “ghost artists” plot against musicians:

Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.

Liz’s work confirms rumors of this happening that go back to 2017, way before the latest wave tools making sound & music generation easier. It can only get better/worse from here. The Dead Internet ~~Theory~~ is alive & well…

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

Remember when that scary lunch lady made the sloppy joes extra sloppy for Billy Madison and his schoolmates? I was thinking about that scene when I made this list for ya’s…

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week:

On Interviews: Rachel Plotnick joins us to talk buttons, knobs & switches
On Friends: It’s only Mat Ryer with his guitar & a list of ridiculous topics to discuss

Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod