IEEE Spectrum reports on the return to physical buttons and dials, Microsoft released GenAIScript, iFixit’s Elizabeth Chamberlain announces a big Right to Repair win, Daniela Baron reimagines technical interviews & John O’Nolan, shares some thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

Benj Edwards wants to put the “personal” back in “personal computer”, the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.

We’re making some big Changelog changes in 2025, the previously featured Stanford study on ghost engineers doesn’t live up to the hype, Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repository into a simple text ingest of its codebase, Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyrd / Eventbrite & Matheus Lima warns us about six mistakes that new managers make.

Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift’s original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly.

Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.

Mahmoud Mousa releases Sidekick, a tool for hosting side projects on a cheap VPS, Ryan Dahl, has had enough of Oracle bogarting “JavaScript” but not even using it, Thomas Rampelberg’s kty is a sweet terminal for Kubernetes, Redis users are considering alternatives after their relicense & a bunch of smart JS folks wrote up nine Node.js pillars.

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev’s fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto’s experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.

Evan Doyle says AI makes tech debt more expensive, Hunter Ng researches the ghost job ad phenomenon, Gavin Anderegg analyzes Bluesky in light of its recent success, Martin Tournoij rants against best practices & Evan Schwartz tells us why he thinks binary vector embeddings are so cool.

Changelog Merch is now on sale, IronCalc sets out to democratize spreadsheets, Grant Slatton writes about algorithms we develop software by, Mark Rainey gives respect to the ultimate in debugging, Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes & Johannes Kaufmann’s html-to-markdown converts entire websites into Markdown.

Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes “all code is tech debt” is all wrong.

Brendan Gregg details how eBPF can help us have no more blue Fridays, Misty De Meo thinks GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software, Gavin D. Howard does not want Rust to be used for everything, The Notion team published a deep dive into how they used the WASM version of SQLite to improve browser performance & Gregor Ojstersek writes up how to build good relationships inside and outside your engineering teams.

Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she’s learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

Bill Maher excoriates the software industry for making our lives more difficult, two professors from the University of Washington put together a curriculum to help us manage life in the ChatGPT world, Daniel Delaney thinks deeply on chat as a dev tool UI, Benedict Evans explores our assumptions that computers be ‘correct’ & the Thoughtbot team writes up six cases when not to refactor.

Ben Affleck’s take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram’s CodingFont.com is like Zoolander’s Walk Off but for coding fonts.

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?

Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.

Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).

A popular open source iOS authenticator app goes rogue under new ownership, Andreas Kling steps back from SerenityOS & forks Ladybird, Vhyrro takes a thought-provoking try at a “static effect system”, Matt Bessey is over GraphQL & Marc-Andre Giroux still likes GraphQL sometimes (in the right context).

Puter puts an entire operating system in your web browser, the kapa.ai team write down how to structure your docs for LLMs, Daytona is an open source Codespaces alternative, Gleam v1.0 has been released & Rolldown is a JavaScript bundler written in Rust.

The big story right now is the recently uncovered backdoor in liblzma (aka XZ) – a relatively obscure compression library that happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH.

This incident is noteworthy for so many reasons: the exploit itself, how it was deployed, how it was found, what it says about our industry & how the community reacted. Let’s dig in!

HashiCorp sends OpenTofu a nasty-gram in the wake of Matt Asay’s infringement claims, Polar is like Patreon but for software creators, a Common Corpus of LLM data is released on HuggingFace & Loki is an open source tool for fact verification.

A new badge for open source projects that won’t be getting any maintenance, everything Chip Huyen learned from looking at 900 open source AI tools, CNBC writes up tech’s renewed layoff trend, Teable is a Postgres-Airtable fusion & Target announces an open source fund.

Luminousmen writes about Senior Engineer Fatigue, Microsoft rethinks its AI-based Recall feature, Mike Hoye gives a big shout out to the “diff” program, Thom Holwerda covers ChromeOS’ quiet switch to Android Linux subsystems & Mihail Eric tells the inside story on how Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system on Earth.

Marcus J. Ranum’s 2005 post on dumb ideas in computer security still holds up, Barry Jones argues why story points are useless, Posting is an HTTP client as a TUI, Varnish ceator Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) reflects on ten years of working on the HTTP cache & es-tookit is a major upgrade to Lodash.

Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Apple backs off killing web apps (but the fight continues), Luka Kladaric writes about how to ship quality software in hostile environments, Deno’s new package registry is an npm superset, Martin Fowler on the value of periodic face-to-face & Eugene Ghanizadeh wants us to get more decentralized than the Fediverse. Leave us nice words!

Alex Ellis’ new actions-batch project uses GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer, DevDocs.io combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface, Jarred Sumner announces Bun’s very own JavaScript shell, Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components & Martin Heinz writes an awesome guide to building an indoor air quality monitoring system with Prometheus, Grafana & a CO2 sensor.