Welcome back to #define, our game of obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery. We’ve gathered some awesome friends, new and old, to see who has the best vocabulary and who can trick the everyone else into thinking that they do.

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.

Rasmus Holm takes a critical look at MCP, Stefan Judis shares a new term he learned from Scott Hanselman, Raf beautifully describes the curse of knowing how, Void is an open source Cursor alternative & React Jam is back for its 6th online game jam.

Kaizen 19 has arrived! Gerhard has been laser-focused on making Jerod’s pipe dream a reality by putting all of his efforts into Pipely. Has it been a big waste of time or has this epic side quest morphed into a main quest?!

Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.

The DOJ’s beef with Google might spell doom for Mozilla, Clayton Ramsey makes a plea for not using ChatGPT for writing, Tim Cook loses a big gamble, Brandon Reinhart migrates his game dev away from Rust and Bevy, and Ibrahim Diallo throws zip bombs at malicious bots.

Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

Zach Bellay tells us about the devil and the angel on his shoulders, Pete Koomen thinks today’s AI apps are like horseless carriages, Hyperwood is an open source system for crafting furniture from simple wooden slats, Scott Antipa agrees with YAGNI but adds YAGRI & Antony Henao debunks three common myths that get engineers stuck.

Join us on a journey to make believe worlds with our good friend Mat Ryer. The assignment; we each get to make up a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule. This episode is sure to delight loyal fans and especially those who enjoy Mat Ryer on the show and a good/bad song or two.

Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he’s eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.

We drop our fourth Changelog Beats album, Dex Horthy proposes the 12-factor AI agent, Thorsten Ball takes us step-by-step through building a coding agent, Zachary Huang builds an LLM framework in 100 lines of code & Philip Laine’s Spegel project gets unknowingly forked by Microsoft.

Nick Nisi joins us to confess his AI subscription glut, drool over some cool new hardware gadgets, discuss why the TypeScript team chose Go for their new compiler, opine on the React team’s complicated relationship with Vercel, suggest people try Astro, update us on his browser habits, and more.

Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

Google announces an open protocol for AI agent collaboration, Datastar is an Alpine.js / htmx love child, Matthias Endler documents things he finds common in the best programmers, turns out Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days & Zev is a CLI that helps you remember (or discover) terminal commands using natural language.

Richard Moot joins us to discuss Changelog helping Square launch a developer pod and the excitement around MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. What might it foretell about the future of human/robot relations?

Stephan Ewen, Founder and CEO of Restate.dev joins the show to talk about the coming era of resilient apps, the meaning of and what it takes to achieve idempotency, this world of stateful durable execution functions, and when it makes sense to reach for this tech.

Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project lays out a potential scenario of superhuman AI’s impact, Liam ERD generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from your database, Mozilla takes on Gmail with “Thundermail”, algernon explains why grepping remains terrible & Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira rans on the insanity of being a software engineer.

Jerod turns Adam into Lego, a Walrus, and a Walrus in the style of Studio Ghibli…and so much more. This is a good one to watch on YouTube.

In July of 2020, Joran Dirk Greef stumbled into a fundamental limitation in the general-purpose database design for transaction processing. This sent him on a path that ended with TigerBeetle, a redesigned distributed database for financial transactions that yielded three orders of magnitude faster OLTP performance over the usual (general-purpose) suspects.

On this episode, Joran joins Jerod to explain how TigerBeetle got so fast, to defend its resilience and durability claims as a new market entrant, and to stake his claim at the intersection of open source and business. Oh, plus the age old question: Why Zig?

Theodore Morley wonders why tech workers so frequently point our wanderlust toward hands-on trades, Eduardo Bouças explains why he’s lost confidence in Vercel’s handling of Next.js, “xan” is a command line tool that can be used to process CSV files directly from the shell, Pawel Brodzinski takes us back to Kanban’s roots & Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on vibe coding.