Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

My fellow Severance fans must know that Apple TV has published eight hours of music for us to refine to. They call the ODESZA set, “perfect for your innie’s workday.” 🧑‍🍳😘

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Programming with LLMs

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too! VIDEO

😵 AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the (already-fraught) technical interview process. He says Hackerrank is pretty much broken, comp sci fundamentals and coding interviews are also out, but architectural interviews still work, at least for now:

From talking to people who have run these, it’s evident that someone is using AI. They often stop with long pauses, do not quite explain things succinctly, and do not understand the questions well enough to prompt the correct answer. As AI gets better (and faster), this will likely follow the same fate as the rest but I would give it some years yet.

Kane suggests five options of how we can adapt, some which are better than others:

Stop remote tech interviews
Require some Pearson Vue-type spyware
Bury our heads in the sand
Change our interviews to allow AI
Hybrid Approach

Something’s gotta give. In the meantime, Kane thinks we’ll see more people passing their interviews then being let go during their probation period. That sucks for everybody involved. What are you doing/seeing in this space? Hit reply, I’d love to hear about it.

🌱 An app to lock your apps until you touch grass

Rhys Kentish wanted to change the habit of reaching for his phone in the morning and doomscrolling away an hour, so he built an app to help him do just that. It’s built in SwiftUI and uses the Screen Time APIs provided by Apple plus Google Vision to recognize grass or not. Cool idea, but tough to live with for anybody living in deserts or tundras. Should he add an in-app purchase to change touch “grass” to touch “snow”, “dirt”, or “sand”? 😆

💰 Play with Retool’s guided tour

Thanks to Retool for sponsoring Changelog News

Now you can play with Retool, no account required—and you get a guided tour.

Retool recently launched a guided tour so you can see how easy it is to build internal tools based on data in their managed PostgreSQL database service (called Retool Database). The tour walks you through building an orders UI and connecting that interface to a real database with real data, complete with realtime search. You’ll get to see how simple they’ve made it to build tooling without any frontenders needed—allowing them focus on customer facing things.

If you haven’t yet, now’s a good time to play with Retool’s guided tour to see how simple it is to build apps on top of their managed PostgreSQL database or your own database.

🐿️ Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip

Microsoft tried really hard to make a big splash last week announcing their quantum computing efforts.

Quantum computers promise to transform science and society—but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction. Today, we’re announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing

Are you excited yet? No?! Well, then just read this copy!

Built with a breakthrough class of materials called a topoconductor, Majorana 1 marks a transformative leap toward practical quantum computing.

Their hype-inducing efforts kinda worked? People are excited about the progress despite the fact that quantum computing isn’t useful in any real way yet. But hopefully someday! Even if not, you have to admit the Majorana 1 looks really cool…

🫧 On washing machines & estimations

Chris Horsley recently had a saga installing a new washing machine that he thought would take 10 minutes. It ended up taking him four whole hours. Sound like anything we know? In this excellent, analogical post, Chris tells the tale of the six yaks he had to shave during his install process and what he learned from the whole ordeal.

What we fail to factor in is that while 90% of the project will be the same, there’s going to be one critical difference between the last 5 projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation but will throw off our whole schedule.

🧭 Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

Andreas Gohr built something cool! It’s like StumbleUpon (before capitalism got it) but for the IndieWeb. Why did Andreas build it?

I love reading text written by real people. Texts that don’t want to sell something. But how can you discover texts you can’t search for because you don’t know they exist?
That’s where this page comes in. Click a button, be surprised and maybe discover your new favorite thing.

You can suggest your own or a friend’s personal site as long as it has an RSS feed. Sweet!

🎙️ Change my mind

Adam and I use Chris Kiehl’s post on development topics he’s changed his mind on (over the last 10 years) as a proxy for discussion on dev things we HAVE and HAVE NOT changed our minds on. VIDEO

😱 Google served Go backdoor to devs for 3+ years

A mirror proxy Google runs on behalf of developers of the Go programming language pushed a backdoored package for more than three years until Monday, after researchers who spotted the malicious code petitioned for it to be taken down twice.

Yikes!

🦈 Wireshark for Docker containers

Subtrace is Wireshark for your Docker containers. It lets developers see all incoming and outgoing requests in their backend server so that they can resolve production issues faster.

💰 AI won’t fix your mess. It’ll just make it bigger.

Thanks to Test Double for sponsoring Changelog News

If your codebase is a dumpster fire, AI isn’t bringing a hose—it’s bringing gasoline.

Copilot, ChatGPT, all these tools can speed you up. But speed without direction? That’s just accelerating toward disaster. AI doesn’t know your system, your customers, or your business. It just confidently guesses.

Want AI to actually help? Get your house in order first.

😎 A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate

After one year of trying uv, the new Python project management tool by Astral, with many clients, I have seen what it’s good and bad for.
My conclusion is: if your situation allows it, always try uv first. Then fall back on something else if that doesn’t work out.

Lots of details to dig into here, for those interested.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

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

Wednesday: Anurag Goel from Render
Friday: Kaizen 18 with Gerhard Lazu

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

–Jerod