Changelog News
Developer news from the year that was
Hello, friends! 👋
Can you believe this is already our final newsletter of the year?!
Thanks for reading & listening along in 2023!
This issue diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite episode of The Changelog from each month.
Enjoy! (Audio Edition)
❄️ January
git commit -m "Twitter is still called Twitter. Threads? Never heard of it. People are joining the Fediverse in droves."
🆒 Coolest code: git-sim
Jacob Stopak’s Python-based CLI quickly generates a visual of how any Git command would impact your local repo without actually doing it and potentially interrupting your dev workflow.
✍️ Best prose: Learnings from 20 years in software
There’s no substitute for experience. BUT! You can take a sizable shortcut if you’re willing to learn from somebody else’s experience. Justin Etheredge wrote down 20 things he learned from his experience as a software engineer and there’s a bunch of shortcuts in there, yours for the taking.
🎧 Fav episode: Mainframes are still a big thing
Cameron Seay’s passion and enthusiasm for technology plus his keen ability to explain complex topics to plebs like Adam and myself make this a must-listen conversation for anyone who regularly touches a keyboard.
🥶 February
git commit -m "The AI gold rush is still on. Prompt engineering is losing its lustre. Microsoft's 'Sidney Bing' is propositioning journalists."
🆒 Coolest code: Elk for Mastodon
The open source, Vue-based web client for Mastodon is beautiful, full-featured & a shining example of a community that absolutely loves building cool software in public.
✍️ Best prose: Scalability is overrated
Waseem Daher’s counter startup culture take on scalability is focused on business tasks, but all the same principles apply to software engineering. Some things should be built to scale, other things shouldn’t. Deciding which is which is often the hard part.
🎧 Fav episode: What it takes to scale engineering
(Ironic juxtaposition acknowledged)
Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub, really knows her stuff! So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.
🤧 March
git commit -m "ChatGPT Plugins are about to 'change everything.' AI tech demos abound. Copilot X is gonna give it to ya."
🆒 Coolest code: Initial V
Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson took a BMW shifter and converted it into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim. Need I say more?
✍️ Best prose: The history and legacy of Visual Basic
Retool’s Ryan Lucas put together a gorgeous and comprehensive treatment of the history and legacy of Visual Basic. The lede: How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. This is a must-see, if not a must-read.
🎧 Fav episode: Bringing Whisper and LLaMA to the masses
The work Georgi Gerganov is doing with whisper.cpp and llama.cpp is so impressive and truly democratizing. These might be the most important software projects of the year and I’m tickled that we got to sit down and pick his brain about them.
☔️ April
git commit -m "Open source language models have started to fight back. Twitter's algorithm is kinda open source now? Passkeys were bubbling up in the zeitgeist."
🆒 Coolest code: Codeberg
A collaboration platform and Git hosting for open source software, content and projects. Codeberg is not run by a company, but a non-profit based in Berlin. The service boasts about its community roots and commitment to privacy. They say your data is not for sale. All services run on servers under our control. No dependencies on external services.
✍️ Best prose: 90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0, but the other 10% are worth 1000x
When Kent Beck writes a headline like that one, people stop and read. You probably already know/remember the context, but just in case, he writes: “My skills continue to improve, but ChatGPT’s are improving faster. It’s a matter of time.”
🎧 Fav episode: LLMs break the internet
There’s no better person to document, analyze, use & prognosticate about LLMs with than our friend Simon Willison. This one is just a hoot to listen to as Simon frequently oscillates from frenzied excitement to leery doomsaying.
💐 May
git commit -m "People are wondering if Big Tech really has an AI moat. People are wondering if Python will remain dominant. People are wondering... what's a vector databases?"
🆒 Coolest code: Mojo 🔥
A programming language for all AI developers? I thought Python was the programming language for all AI developers! It is, but maybe it won’t always be. But even then, it still would be. Sorta.
✍️ Best prose: Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
Amelia Wattenberger makes her case that our current primary form of interacting with LLMs “ain’t it.” I’m convinced, but what comes next?
🎧 Fav episode: Introducing Changelog & Friends
This one is a bit self-serving, but I love our new talk show format (and from the feedback we’re getting, so do most of you) and this is the inaugural episode were Adam and I lay out the idea, the plan & what to expect. Let’s talk!
😎 June
git commit -m "Apple unveils its new Vision. Reddit goes dark. AI _may have_ poisoned its own well."
🆒 Coolest code: Val Town
What if GitHub Gists could actually run and AWS Lambda were actually fun? Val Town is a social website to write and deploy TypeScript. Build APIs and schedule functions from your browser. Cool stuff!
✍️ Best prose: Some blogging myths
Julia Evans is one of the most successful developer bloggers out there, so when she decides to write up some myths about blogging… it’s worth paying attention to what she has to say.
myth: you need to be original, you need to be an expert, writing boring posts is bad, …
🎧 Fav episode: Don’t make things worse!
I will always love this episode for the simple reason that it was my first time meeting Taylor Troesh. You might love it because we dive deep on interesting topics like yak shaves, dependency selection, -10x engineers & IKEA-oriented development.
🐘 Neon is serverless, fault-tolerant, branchable Postgres
Thanks to Neon for sponsoring Changelog News 💰
Our friends at Neon have been taking the developer world by storm with their serverless Postgres offering.
What makes Neon’s Postgres different? They separate storage and compute to make on-demand scalability possible. Compute activates on an incoming connection and scales to zero when not in use. Their storage is different too. The fault-tolerant scale-out system integrates with cloud object stores like S3 to offload cold data for cost optimization. Cool stuff!
Oh, and did you know you can try serverless Postgres with a single command?!
Just psql -h pg.neon.tech and you’re up and running with a scalable, cost-efficient & easy to use database.
🏖️ July
git commit -m "Oracle smacks IBM (Red hat) over RHEL. Facebook launches Threads. Twitter is now called X."
🆒 Coolest code: Atuin
Ellie Huxtable’s Atuin is a command-line tool that helps you make better use of your shell, by giving ctrl-r superpowers. Every line you write is stored - ready to be queried and run again at any point, from any machine you wish. Never forget again!
✍️ Best prose: Streak Redemption
Lukas Mathis takes up one of the problems with using streaks as a motivator and how he suggests you can design your app to provide some way to recover from a streak loss after it has happened.
🎧 Fav episode: Storytime with Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge rants and raves about his time at Amazon, Google & Grab. I’m not sure who had more fun: us listening to his stories, or Steve telling them!
🗺️ August
git commit -m "HashiCorp adopts the Business Source License. Debian celebrates 30 years. CAPTCHAs are declared useless."
🆒 Coolest code: Mac mini with Power over Ethernet
Hardware hacker Ivan Kuleshov modded a Mac mini to run via PoE and documented the entire wild adventure. Don’t try this at home, but DO read this at home (with your favorite beverage)!
✍️ Best prose: Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React
Josh Collinsworth’s posts have contributed heavily to the pendulum starting to swing back away from React lately. You could also credit RSC and React’s ever-tighter association with Next.js as contributing factors. But Josh gets some credit too.
🎧 Fav episode: An aberrant generation of programmers
Justin Searls’ widely-read essay on enthusiast programmers & inter-generational conflict becomes our most-downloaded episode of the year. I guess everyone wants to hear about the looming demise of the 10x developer!
🛬 September
git commit -m "Bun 1.0 comes out of the oven. OpenTF forks Terraform. OpenTofu forks OpenTF's name."
🆒 Coolest code: Textual Web
Textual Web takes a Textual-powered TUI and turns it in to a web application. That means you can send your terminal app to your mom by pasting a link to it over iMessage! She’ll be so proud of her little baby!
✍️ Best prose: The Worst Programmer I Know
Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he’s ever worked with (who also happens to be “a heck of a programmer”). Tim scored zero points on the company’s productivity metric and almost got fired, but…
🎧 Fav episode: Open source is at a crossroads
Steve O’Grady from RedMonk joins us to discuss the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term & the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition.
🍂 October
git commit -m "InfluxDB drops Go for Rust. Changelog drops some Beats. Netflix drops dropping off DVDs in your mailbox."
🆒 Coolest code: Bruno API Explorer
Bruno is cool because it’s a lot like Postman (et al), but it stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem, using a plain text markup language called ‘Bru’. “You can use git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections. Bruno is offline-only. There are no plans to add cloud-sync to Bruno, ever.”
✍️ Best prose: You’re not lacking creativity, you’re overwhelmed
Jorge Medina hits close to home by describing decision fatigue: “It’s exhausting. It’s an epidemic. And it has turned us into digital hoarders.” His advice? Curate to create. And how do you go about that? By building a curation system, of course!
🎧 Fav episode: The beginning of the end of physical media
Christina Warren (aka film_girl) from GitHub pours out a drink with us and laments the end of the golden age of access to the films we all love. This episode is quintessential “Changelog & Friends”.
🦃 November
git commit -m "The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time. Then re-ravel. Then I don't know what."
🆒 Coolest code: sshx
sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone by link, on a multiplayer infinite canvas. It has real-time collaboration, with remote cursors and chat. It’s also fast and end-to-end encrypted, with a lightweight server written in Rust. (So you know it’s cool)
✍️ Best prose: The beauty of finished software
Jose M. Gilgado writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. “As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Jose goes on to praise the beauty of finished software. He says finished software is software that isn’t expected to change. And that’s a feature. Because you can rely on it to do some real work.
🎧 Fav episode: Backslashes are trash
We always force ask Mat Ryer to make up some songs for us when he comes on the show, but this particular episode he really delivers the goods with two “smash” hits: Automagically & the eponymous Backslashes Are Trash
☃️ December
git commit -m "I remember it like it was just yesterday. Also today. Tomorrow, too. What day is it?"
🆒 Coolest code: Hare
Drew DeVault and his friends have set out to build a programming language that will last 100 years. It doesn’t get much cooler than that…
✍️ Best prose: The Chimeralogists
Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name to describe people with a certain set of skills that no one can explain.
🎧 Fav episode: #define: game theory, dude
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!
Alternate episode title: “Your best excuse yet to stop procrastinating and use your employer’s Personal Development Fund to sign up for Changelog++ so you can listen to the two (!) bonus rounds in which we reveal the actual winner of the game.”
🎞️ Clip of the year!
With over 7.2 million views on Insta, another 1 million+ on TikTok & (a laughable) 5 thousand view on YT Shorts, this viral clip of Damien Riehl from Practical AI #232 is BY FAR the most popular clip we published this year. 📈
That’s the news for now, but it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!
SHOUT OUT to our newest members: James M, Eduardo M, Ярослав Б, Adam D, Joshua L, Felipe L, Nicholas W, Ricardo M, Jack O, Todd B, Louis p & Nicholas L! 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 closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝)
Have a great week, send this to your friends who might dig it, and I’ll talk to you again next year. 💚
–Jerod