Changelog News

Developer news with all the right vibes

Hello, again! 👋

Vibe coding is the Valley’s buzzword de jour. For the uninitiated, it’s like pair programming with an AI where it writes all the code and your only job is to make sure it doesn’t “harsh your vibe, dude.” Then, when it’s finished, you post a demo to social media, declare software engineering dead, throw the barely-usable final product away, and code up some more vibes.

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Antirez returns to Redis!

Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what’s going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good ’ol LLM inference discussions. VIDEO

🗣️ Everyone is talking about MCP

Ok probably not everyone is talking about MCP, but it’s certainly a burgeoning topic amongst the “AI Engineer” crowd, so I figured it’s at least worth a primer. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, which was first announced by the Anthropic team last November. It’s an open protocol to standardize how applications provide context to LLMS:

Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.

The linked X thread lists out a bunch of things people are building/announcing around MCP, most of which look like “demo quality” wares, but there’s certainly potential here. IF we are going to have an agentic future, we need good ways to equip AI agents with the context they need to accomplish their tasks. MCP might become the way we achieve that. Or perhaps just a step along the way…

🛑 Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think

Tom Usher:

The creators of TikTok, Instagram etc. have gained control over exactly what we see. What we see strongly influences how we think. They know that their feeds make us angry, they know the negative effects on our mental health (particularly that of teens), and they know that they have an influence on our opinion.
With the power to shape what we see comes the power to shape what we believe. Whether through deliberate manipulation or the slow creep of algorithmic recommendations, engagement is fueled by outrage, and outrage breeds extremism. The result is a feedback loop that isolates users, reinforces beliefs, and deprioritises opposing viewpoints.

Being able to form our own opinions is more important than ever. Do you want to take the back control of how you think? At the end of this post, Tom gives you five thing you can do without going cold turkey off social media altogether…

🕵 Troubleshooting never goes obsolete

In an industry where it’s too easy to invest time in skills that don’t last, I love when people share their expertise on things that have stood the test of time. Here’s Curiositry, doing just that:

Realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing, and that the skill of troubleshooting can be honed separately from the domain it’s applied to, I decided to try to figure out how to improve my troubleshooting skills — and as a result, my effectiveness in multiple domains.
The way I do it, troubleshooting mostly boils down to scratching my head, Googling the error message, and thinking up and testing hypotheses to narrow the search space. But I frequently catch myself making errors I have made before. So here’s what I try to remember when I’m troubleshooting, to keep myself on track and avoid dead-ends.

That last paragraph is an extreme simplification. This essay is brimming with specific, high quality advice.

💰 New Temporal capabilities from Replay 2025

Thanks to Temporal for sponsoring Changelog News

The biggest event of the year for Temporal just wrapped up. Replay 2025 in London is where teams learned about evolving legacy systems, modernizing infrastructure, and building scalable, durable software to power today’s top businesses. Here’s what they announced…

Temporal is open source so you can easily self-host it, but many teams are operating at scale and they rely on Temporal Cloud to give them an easier, faster, more scalable way to run Temporal.

You can now automate migrations with zero downtime. The new tooling is in Pre-release. They’re seeking early users.
High Availability can now offer another “9” to Multi-region Replication and Same-region Replication allowing you to asynchronously replicate your Workflows to a Namespace in a secondary or same region and will automatically fail over if necessary, to keep your applications online with a 99.99 SLA.

They also released new and updated capabilities to improve your development experience with Temporal:

Temporal Ruby SDK is now available in Pre-release and it’s at full feature parity with the other Temporal SDKs. You can now use Ruby to write workflows and activities.
Temporal Nexus is now Generally Available. Nexus lets you connect Temporal Applications across (and within) isolated Namespaces.

🍍 Write blogs so LLMs have something to read

Why create content in the age of AI slop? Nikola Ðuza has a dystopian answer to that question:

LLMs are getting better and better, but they all need some kind of input to be trained on.
And that’s where WE (I hate to say it, the “content creators”) come in. The world needs human touch, for now. The AI needs some human touch. The LLMs need to be trained on the good stuff. That’s why we need to keep writing, recording, and creating.

This is giving me strong Matrix vibes. (SPOILER ALERT) You know, where the machines’ only reason to keep us alive is to harvest us for energy, so they create a digital world to keep our minds busy while they feed on our bodies. But maybe that’s just me… I do agree with Nikola on this point:

In the sea of generated content, the “custom” “hand-made” “locally produced” content will always stand out. It’s the human touch that will make the difference. Furthermore, blogs and writing will highly unlikely die. To write is a way of getting your thoughts calm, organized and composed. Certain humans will always need to write, no matter how easy it is to generate content with AI. In that sense, blogs with human touch will always have a place.

Always is a strong word, but I do believe there will be a market for “human-crafted” content for the foreseeable future, just like there’s still a market for “hand-crafted” goods hundreds of years after the industrial revolution.

🤨 Should managers still code?

James Stanier takes a crack at this age old question:

The short answer is that it depends exactly on what you mean by coding. I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code.

James spends some time digging into the nuances of the question and how exactly he wants his engineering managers to be in terms of their relationship with the codebase. Should they be able to write code? Should they be able to do code reviews? Should they be able to debug and triage production issues? Stuff like that…

🎙️ Friendly Feud: JS Party Edition

Our award-winning JS Party game show is back with a new name, a new channel, and the same ol’ survey-response-guessing fun! The JS Party crew join us to see who knows y’all best. Survey says! VIDEO

🧩 Building websites with lots of little HTML pages

Jim (dash) Nielsen:

With cross-document view transitions getting broader and broader support, I’m realizing that building in-page, progressively-enhanced interactions is more work than simply building two HTML pages and linking them.
I’m calling this approach “lots of little HTML pages” in my head. As I find myself trying to build progressively-enhanced features with JavaScript — like a fly-out navigation menu, or an on-page search, or filtering content — I stop and ask myself: “Can I build this as a separate HTML page triggered by a link, rather than JavaScript-injected content built from a button?”

🤳 It is as if you were on your phone

This is the weirdest thing I saw all week… a “game” designed to make it look like you’re on your phone:

Look at you! On your phone! But you’ve got a secret! And you won’t tell! You’re not on your phone! It is only as if you were on your phone! You’re just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!

🐱 PurrCrypt: fur-ociously secure, paw-sitively adorable!

This is the second weirdest thing I saw all week… an encryption tool that encodes your secrets as cat and dog sounds:

PurrCrypt is real cryptography in a fuzzy disguise! Your messages are protected by the same elliptic curve algorithms used by Bitcoin, just wrapped in adorable cat and dog sounds. Cuteness should never compromise security!

📅 Keep your calendar in a plain text file

Lovers of plain text, rejoice! Tero Karvinen invented a system for keeping your calendar in a text file. It looks like this:

2021-02-15 w07  Architecture week
2021-02-15 w07 Mon  9-12 project groups. 17 jogging. 
2021-02-16 w07 Tue  9-11 John 12-16 architecture meeting
2021-02-17 w07 Wed  8-14 +lp. 14:15-16 +mp
2021-02-18 w07 Thu  write out architecture
2021-02-19 w07 Fri  12-13 board
2021-02-20 w07 Sat  
2021-02-21 w07 Sun  10 ski with N
2021-04  Grand rollout
2022  The year of foobar

The advantages of doing this are all the same advantages of anything text-based: it’s simple, you can use any editor, it’s future proof, versionable, greppable, sortable, mobile friendly, and more.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

📚 The Developer’s Dictionary

Help us, Gordon Moore, you’re our only hope! 🙏

That’s the news for now, but this is issue #135, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Jarosław F, Felix KD, Alex G, Matt T & Scott S! We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash!

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get in on bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail & get shout outs like the ones above. 👆)

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

–Jerod