The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing.

What happens when you take two #define champs (Taylor Troesh, Thomas Eckert), a grizzled veteran (Adam Stacoviak), a british bard (Mat Ryer), a PhD (Carol Lee) & you pit them against each other in a game of fake tech definitions?! There’s only one way to find out…

Ryan Worl, Co-founder and CTO at WarpStream, joins us to talk about the world of Kafka and data streaming and how WarpStream redesigned the idea of Kafka to run in modern cloud environments directly on top of object storage. Last year they posted a blog titled, “Kafka is dead, long live Kafka” that hit the top of Hacker News to put WarpStream on the map. We get the backstory on Kafka and why it’s so widely used, who created it and for what purpose, and the behind the scenes on all things WarpStream.

Simon Wijckmans from c/side joins Jerod & Nick to discuss the Pollyfill attack in detail. What does it mean for web developers & client-side security going forward?

Waymo cars make bad neighbors, Leonardo Creed pulls together wisdom from Linus Torvalds & the Art of Unix Programming to conclude what good programmers worry about, Max Schmitt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience, ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor, Simon Tatham makes a list of code review anti-patterns & scientists confirm that ‘flow state’ is very much a thing.

Adam & Jerod catch up with our ol’ friend, Suz Hinton! It’s been a couple years since Suz was a regular on JS Party. Since then, she moved back to Australia, earned a degree in cyber security & won a fidget spinner from the NSA… but that’s not all!

Eric Bailey joins Jerod to discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons taught him about writing alt text, building accessible websites, Primer, the problem with a11y overlays & more.

Chris Stjernlöf got nerd-sniped and ended up writing down his practices of reliable software design, Ben Visness has had enough with the npm community’s propensity to pull in micro-libraries to suit every need, “Stay SaaSy” makes three metaphors for problem solving categories, Troy Hunt takes us inside the “3 billion people” National Public Data breach & Dasel is one data tool to rule them all.

You won’t believe the bizarre secrets Jordan Eldredge found investigating corrupt Winamp skins (#7 will shock you)! You also won’t believe how long we can wax nostalgic about the era of Napster, Aladdin & Pearl Jam.

Raphael Landaverde & Jake Shirley work on Minecraft full-time. How cool is that?! On this episode, they join Jerod to tell us all about the web tech that drives Minecraft’s scripting infrastructure, how they incrementally change a massive / always-moving target, the best / worst parts of the job & much more.

Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath have joined forces to form a non-profit called Ladybird Browser Initiative to manage the newly forked Ladybird browser. We discuss what it’s going to take to get to alpha, the why behind Ladybird, avoiding incentives other than those of the users, their plans for incremental adoption of Swift as the successor language over C++, and of course what they hope Ladybird can achieve as a truly independent open source browser that’s for the people.

Jimmy Miller tells us about the best, worst codebase he’s ever seen, The Phylum Research Team follows up on the great npm garbage patch, Zach Leatherman logs his findings on sneaky serverless costs, David Cain wants you to go on quests instead of goals & Ashley Janssen gives us szeven rules for effective meeting culture.

Database aficionado, Ben Johnson, joins Jerod to answer the age ol’ question: which database should you use? Answering that isn’t always easy, which means it’s time to play the “It Depends” jingle & weigh (some of) the options.

The latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey has some concerning results, Joeri Sebrechts helps you do plain vanilla web dev, MIT’s “missing semester” course looks pretty amazing, a dive into the fascinating history of CSV & a tool to get request analytics from the nginx access logs.

Node.js makes big TypeScript & SQLite moves, ECMAScript 2024 adds some niceties to the language (but not the ones you’re probably excited for) & we review the State of React 2023 results. Emergency?! Nick!

Joseph Jacks (JJ) is back! We discuss the latest in COSS funding, his thesis for investing in commercial open source companies, the various rug pulls happening out there in open source licensing, and Zuck/Meta’s generosity releasing Llama 3.1 as “open source.”

The Switzerland federal government requires releasing its software as open source, Google decides not to deprecate third-party cookies, Mark Zuckerberg says “open source” AI is the path forward, GitHub allows anyone access to deleted / private repository data & Tailscale wants to build a New Internet.

Robert Ross joins us in CrowdStrike’s wake to dissect the largest outage in the history of information technology… and what it means for the future of the (software) world.

Adam Lisagor (Sandwich Video founder) takes us behind the Sandwich to share his insights into the importance of storytelling in the tech industry, the value of helping Founders communicate their stories effectively, the details behind his new AI company, and the apps he’s making for Apple Vision Pro at Sandwich Vision.

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.