Changelog Interviews – Episode #642

Refactored in prison

with Preston Thorpe

All Episodes

Preston Thorpe joins us from inside prison, where he awaits a hopeful release within the next 12 months. His journey has been anything but easy—marked by hardship and uncertainty. But over the past few years, Preston has undergone a profound transformation. He’s refactored not just his skills, but his identity. Today, he proudly calls himself a software engineer and an open source contributor. In this episode, Preston shares his story of redemption, resilience, and what comes next.

Featuring

Sponsors

RetoolThe low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog

Depot10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.

Outshift by Cisco – AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It’s a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

Notes & Links

📝 Edit Notes

Chapters

1 00:00 This week on The Changelog 01:07
2 01:07 Sponsor: Retool 02:45
3 03:57 Start the show! 03:07
4 07:04 How did you end up here? 03:24
5 10:28 Access and distrobution 03:35
6 14:02 Dr*g flow 06:12
7 20:14 Multiple offenses 15:39
8 35:53 Sponsor: Depot 02:20
9 38:14 First steps to writing software 05:19
10 43:33 Your choice is your superpower 02:16
11 45:49 The best life hack? 01:56
12 47:45 You've made a choice. They can make a choice. 03:32
13 51:17 Getting into open source 08:48
14 1:00:05 Contributing to `exa` 04:28
15 1:04:33 Sponsor: Outshift by Cisco 01:03
16 1:05:37 Applying new skills 08:26
17 1:14:02 You seem to be on the tip 03:02
18 1:17:04 Plans for next? 01:15
19 1:18:19 Scared of what's next? 01:35
20 1:19:55 Thanks to Prime and others 03:08
21 1:23:02 The humans in our loop 02:15
22 1:25:17 Thoughts on prison reform 04:32
23 1:29:49 The Stanford Prison Experiment 09:21
24 1:39:11 Wrapping up 01:24
25 1:40:35 Closing thoughts and stuff 01:38

Transcript

⏰ Coming Soon

Changelog

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