Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

On one hand, there’s The Stargate Project: a joint venture by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, et al that’s aimed at investing $500 billion over four years to build out infrastructure that “will secure American leadership in AI.”

On the other hand, there’s DeepSeek-R1: a Chinese AI lab’s MIT-licensed reasoning model that matches OpenAI’s o1 at only $5.6 million to train.

It’s Big Money vs Big Brain. I’m jealous of both…

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 From open source to acquired

Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. VIDEO

🦾 DeepSeek-R1’s epic pull request

Speaking of Big Brain… Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a pull request to Georgi Gerganov’s llama.cpp repo that doubles the speed for WASM by optimizing SIMD instructions with the following PR comment:

Surprisingly, 99% of the code in this PR is written by DeepSeek-R1. The only thing I do is to develop tests and write prompts (with some trials and errors) ..
Indeed, this PR aims to prove that LLMs are now capable of writing good low-level code, to a point that it can optimize its own code.

I can’t judge whether this is good low-level code or not, because I don’t know what good low-level code looks like, but Georgi and Xuan-Son sure are impressed! Xuan-Son also shared the prompts they used to get the desired results.

This, of course, resulted in a long X thread where both humans & robots debate and meme whether or not “it’s over” for folks like us or not quite yet…

🚀 Tailwind CSS v4.0 is official

Adam Wathan:

Tailwind CSS v4.0 is an all-new version of the framework optimized for performance and flexibility, with a reimagined configuration and customization experience, and taking full advantage of the latest advancements the web platform has to offer.

This looks like it was a massive undertaking. It has a new high-performance build engine, simplified installation, automatic content detection, reimagined CSS-first configuration, and too much more to list here.

📚 The most influential papers in C.S. history

Matheus Lima opens up the history books to create this (admittedly subjective) list of influential papers, dating all the way back to 1936!

These seven papers (sorted by date) stand out to me mostly because of their impact in today’s world.

For each paper, Matheus provides the big idea and why he thinks it still matters to this day. Here’s the quick list:

“On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing, 1936)
“A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (Shannon, 1948)
“A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” (Codd, 1970)
“The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures” (Cook, 1971)
“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” (Cerf & Kahn, 1974)
“Information Management: A Proposal” (Berners-Lee, 1989)
“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (Brin & Page, 1998)

He also provides a bonus list of five papers that almost made his list, finishing with this:

These days, we’re flooded with new stuff: fresh languages, mind-blowing AI breakthroughs, quantum leaps, and the JavaScript framework of the week. It’s all super exciting, but here’s the thing: foundations matter. Without them, we’re just piling on new toys without fully understanding the ground we’re building on.

💰 Replay ’25 in London, March 3-5

Thanks to Temporal for sponsoring Changelog News

Our friends at Temporal invite you to Replay in London, March 3-5 to break free from the status quo.

Replay ’25 is an in-person conference focused on transitioning away from outdated, monolithic systems and methodologies to embrace cutting edge technologies.

Immerse yourself in two days of technical talks from backend software engineering leaders at top organizations, then enjoy connecting on day 3 at the afterparty — live it up, connect, and continue conversations with food, drinks, and fun alongside your Replay community.

Early bird tickets are on sale now! Early bird pricing ends January 31, so get your ticket soon if you plan to attend.

Learn more and register at replay.temporal.io

🫣 AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers

Namanyay Goel has a confession to make:

A couple of days ago, Cursor went down during the ChatGPT outage.
I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s help.
After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.

He doesn’t think he’s the only one who’s become a human clipboard, a mere intermediary between his code and an LLM.

We’re not becoming 10x developers with AI.
We’re becoming 10x dependent on AI. There’s a difference.
Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s commit at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.

Does this sentiment resonate with you? See also this recent paper on metacognitive laziness…

👀 How to improve WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

Russell Baylis is NOT an ergonomist or optometrist. He’s just a Worker-From-Home-er who is susceptible to eye strain, eye pain, and dizziness. In this post, Russell shares what he’s learned about optimizing home lighting to reduce eye strain. Here’s the quick list:

An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes
When it comes to light brightness, too much is just as problematic as too little
Use natural light wherever possible
Quality of artificial light matters
The best lighting for camera, is not necessarily the best lighting for ergonomics
Even the perfect lighting environment will fatigue you — take breaks, and take care of yourself

Click through to see renderings of the changes he made to his environment and steal some of these ideas to improve your WFH life too.

🎙️ Fallthrough & Friends

Kris & Matthew from Fallthrough.fm join me to discuss tools we’re switching to, whether or not Go is still a great systems programming language choice, user-centric documentation, the need for archivists & more. VIDEO

🚫 You probably don’t need query builders

Mattia Righetti believes “SQL is almost always the best way to not re-learn something new from the beginning that will inevitably end up slowing you down or simply not working at all in the long run.” He also believes you probably don’t need to write a query builder in the language du jour, but should rely on SQL instead. Examples abound.

👨‍🏫 A great primer on Kalman Filters

When Elecia White was on the show, she brought up Kalman Filters like we app developer plebs would have any idea what she was talking about. I stopped her in her tracks and she quickly brought us up to speed. If you want to go slightly deeper than she took us on the pod, this tutorial by Alex Becker is a great place to start. Here’s a primer primer:

The Kalman Filter is a widely used estimation algorithm that plays a critical role in many fields. It is designed to estimate the hidden states of the system, even when the measurements are imprecise and uncertain. Also, the Kalman Filter predicts the future system state based on past estimations.

💰 Tech Talks: Coding with AI

Thanks to Augment Code for sponsoring Changelog News

On January 30th, you can watch Augment Code in action during this live demo.

But what is Augment Code, anyway? It’s the developer AI for complex codebases, providing you with real-time, deep understanding of the code so you can be super productive right away:

Augment taps into your team’s collective knowledge — your codebase, documentation, and dependencies. It’s the most context-aware Developer AI, so you won’t just code faster, you’ll build smarter.

Join solutions architect, Anshuman Pandey, while he demos how it can help you:

Get up to speed on new projects
Write effective unit tests
Refactor legacy code

Don’t just code faster. Build smarter with Augment Code! Register here and they’ll send you a link to join the talk and an email reminder before the session.

🏷️ Build your own ‘AirTags’ with OpenHaystack

OpenHaystack is a framework for tracking personal Bluetooth devices via Apple’s massive Find My network. Use it to create your own tracking tags that you can append to physical objects (keyrings, backpacks, …) or integrate it into other Bluetooth-capable devices such as notebooks.

All you need is a Mac and a BBC micro:bit or any other Bluetooth-capable device.

📐 Don’t leave yet! Your (un)ordered list…

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

Wednesday: Glauber Costa on Limbo, a complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust
Friday: Dan Moore “It Depends” with us on modern auth strategies

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

–Jerod