This week we’re talking about product development structures as systems with Lucas da Costa. The last time we had Lucas on the show he was living the text-mode only life, and now we’re more than 3 years later, Lucas has doubled down on all things text mode. Today’s conversation with Lucas maps several ideas he’s shared recently on his blog. We talk about deadlines being pointless, trajectory vs roadmap and the downfall of long-term planning, the practices of daily stand-ups and what to do instead, measuring queues not cycle time, and probably the most controversial of them all — actually talking to your customers. Have you heard? It’s this newly disruptive Agile framework that seems to be working well.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.”

You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?

In today’s Kaizen episode, we talk about shipping Adam’s Christmas present: chapter support for all Changelog episodes that we now publish. This feature was hard because there are many subtle differences in how the ID3 spec is implemented. Of course, once the PR shipped, there were other issues to solve, including an upgrade the world kind of scenario. Since Lars Wikman did all the heavy ID3 lifting, he is here with us too.

This week we’re joined by Jason Bosco, co-founder and CEO of Typesense — the open source Algolia alternative and the easier to use ElasticSearch alternative. For years we’ve used Algolia as our search engine, so we come to this conversation with skin in the game and the scars to prove it. Jason shared how he and his co-founder got started on Typesense, why and how they are “all in” on open source, the options and the paths developers can take to add search to their project, how Typesense compares to ElasticSearch and Algolia, he walks us through getting started, the story of Typesense Cloud, and why they have resisted Venture Capital.

This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.”

We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.

Carlos Alexandro Becker shared some SSH tips, Sakun Acharige (a Comp Sci student + visual design enthusiast) created System.css, Felix Krause built a browser app that shows the JavaScript commands being executed by iOS app in-app browers, Yan Zhulanow decided to create Marta, and Lőrik Levente did a comparrison between Tauri & Electron using a real world application he’s building called Authme.

This week we’re re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He’s a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what’s to come. He’s focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we’ve officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it’s also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

This is Adam and Jerod’s pre-show call before hooking up with Chris Coyier to record episode 500 of The Changelog. We’ve been doing these off and on for awhile now. We hang out for 30ish minutes before the show begins and ship that conversation as a bonus for our Changelog++ members.

We’re doing this one different. You don’t hit a round number like this very often. So, here it is. A standalone Backstage episode. Thanks for listening and here’s to the next 500! 🥂

This week we’re joined again by Ben Ubois and we’re talking about RSS. Yes, RSS…the tech that never seems to die and yet so many of us rely on it daily. Ben is the creator of Feedbin, which is self-described as “a nice place to read on the web.” Ben is also the maker of a new app on iOS for people who like podcasts. It’s called Airshow and you can download it at airshow.fm. Ben catches us up on the state of Feedbin, we discuss the nine lives of RSS and its foundational utility for the indie web, the possibilities and short-comings of RSS, we get deep in the weeds on the Podcast 2.0 spec and the work being done on <podcast:chapters>, and Ben also shares the details on his new app called Airshow.

This week we’re joined by On Freund, former VP of Engineering at WeWork and now co-founder & CEO of Wilco. WeWork you may have heard of, but Wilco maybe not (yet).

We get into the details behind the tech and scaling of WeWork, comparisons of the fictional series on Apple TV+ called WeCrashed and how much of that is true. Then we move on to Wilco which is what has On’s full attention right now. Wilco has the potential to be the next big thing for developers to acquire new skills. Wilco aims to be the ultimate simulator to gain new skills on a real-life tech stack. If you want to skip ahead, you can request access at trywilco.com/changelog — they are moving our listeners to the top of the waiting list.

This week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that’s right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand.

Adam Miller’s journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a strong team that’s been with him every step of the way (many of which are as close as family), and truly some of the best premium bikes available on the market today.

BTW, Adam (host) is an owner of a Revel bike — he has a T1000 colorway Rascal that he’s ridden on downhill trails, all-day epics, and everything in-between. If you enjoy this episode, please us know in the comments.

This week we’re talking with Daniel Thompson about Tauri and their journey to their recent 1.0 release. Tauri is often compared to Electron - it’s a toolkit that lets you build software for all major desktop operating systems using web technologies. It was built for the security-focused, privacy-respecting, and environmentally-conscious software engineering community. The core libraries are written in Rust and the UI layer can be written using virtually any frontend framework. We get into all the details, why Rust, how the project was formed, their resistance (thus far) to venture capital, their full commitment to the freedom virtues of open source, and all the technical bits you need to know to consider it for your next multi-platform project.

This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale.

Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world’s software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you’ll have a great company.”

Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that’s still in use to this day. This time around we’re going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free.

Has James given up on the business? Or will this move Actual(ly) breathe new life into a piece of software that’s used and beloved by many? Tune in to find out.

Adam and Jerod are joined by Ken Kantzer, co-founder of PKC Security. Ken and his team performed upwards of 20 code audits on well-funded startups. Now that it’s 7 or 8 years later, he wrote up 16 surprising observations and things he learned looking back at the experience. We gotta discuss ’em all!

This week Lee Robinson joins us to talk about his journey as a DevRel. We talk about what it means to be a DevRel, what orgs they fall under, how he runs his team at Vercel, Lee’s three pillars of DevRel: education, community, and product, we compare the old days of DevRel vs now, and of course what makes a DevRel a good DevRel.

This week Jesse Grosjean joins us to talk about his career as a solo indie Mac dev. Since 2004 Jesse has been building Mac apps under the company name Hog Bay Software producing hits such as WriteRoom, Taskpaper, and now Bike. We talk through the evolution of his apps, how he considers new features and improvements, why he chose and continues to choose the Mac platform, his business model and pricing for his apps, and what it takes to build his business around macOS and the driving force of the App Store.

Adam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he’s a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what’s to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he’s considered an innovator by many. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

What you’re about to hear is the fireside chat Adam had with Jack at Square Unboxed 2022. Jack and Adam discuss the vision Square has for the developer platform and why it’s so central to the company’s strategy.

This week we’re peeking into the future again — this time we’re looking at the future of modern code review and workflows around pull requests. Jerod and Adam were joined by two of the co-founders of Graphite — Tomas Reimers and Greg Foster.

Graphite is an open-source CLI and code review dashboard built for engineers who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. We cover all the details – how they got started, how this product emerged from another idea they were working on, the state of adoption, why stacking changes is the way of the future, how it’s just Git under the hood, and what they’re doing with the $20M in funding they just got from a16z.