Harry Stevens is a Graphics Reporter at The Washington Post and the author of “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to ‘flatten the curve’” — the most popular post in The Washington Post’s online history.

We cover the necessary details of this global pandemic, the journalist, coding, and design skills required to be a graphics reporter, the backstory on visualizing this outbreak, why Harry chooses R over Python, advice for aspiring graphics reporters, and how all of this came together at the perfect time in history to give Harry a chance to catch lightning in a bottle.

Rico Sta. Cruz joined us to talk about his project Devhints (cheatsheets for developers). There are more than 365 cheatsheets you can contribute to and it’s open source. We talked about the design, technical implementation, community, alternate interfaces like the command line. We also talked about RSJS, RSCSS, and Docpress.

Todd Gamblin, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, joined us to talk about Moore’s Law, his work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the components of a micro-chip, and High Performance Computing.

The hubbub of the web dev world right now is Next.js’ integration of React Server Components, Kent C. Dodds writes up why he doesn’t use Next, Lee Robinson responds with why he does, the NixOS team hits a milestone in their reproducible builds effort & OpenSign is an open source alternative to DocuSign.

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the “open core” model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.

Glauber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Turso, joins us to discuss libSQL, Limbo, and how they’re rewriting SQLite in Rust. We discuss their efforts with libSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain but not being open for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Turso platform, how they test Limbo with Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), and their plan to replace SQLite.

We’re so excited to see Chris and Daniel take this show to 100 episodes, and that’s exactly why we’re rebroadcasting Practical AI #100 here on The Changelog. They’ve had so many great guests and discussions about everything from AGI to GPUs to AI for good. In this episode, we circle back to the beginning when Jerod and I joined the first episode to help kick off the podcast. We discuss how our perspectives have changed over time, what it has been like to host an AI podcast, and what the future of AI might look like. (GIVEAWAY!)

This week on we’re joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that’s designed to bring developers and design to the same tool.

The question they’re trying to answer is “How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?” We go way back to Emil’s startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to here from 20 years ago (think PSD > HTML days), what they did to build Dev Mode, what they’re doing around codegen, the popularity of design systems, and what it takes to go from zero to Dev Mode.

Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a low-level code PR written 99% by DeepSeek-R1, Adam Wathan announces the release of Tailwind CSS 4.0, Matheus Lima opens up the Computer Science history books to create list of influential papers, Namanyay Goel thinks AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers & Russell Baylis shares what he’s learned about optimizing WFH lighting to reduce eye strain.

Nick Janetakis is back and this time we’re talking about TUIs (text-based user interfaces) — some we’ve tried and some we plan to try. All are collected from Justin Garrison’s Awesome TUIs repo on GitHub. This episode is “AI free.”

Kurt Mackey is back for a deep dive into what it takes to build the developer cloud. Kurt joins Adam to discuss the alliance between companies and cloud, something Kurt refers to as the “Rebel Alliance,” cloud complexity vs usability, Fly’s future with Postgres and why they’ve waited, thoughts on Neon and Supabase (Kurt shares a hot take), and our CDN saga and plan to build a simple CDN on Fly called Pipely (still a Pipedream).

Will Crichton wishes some naming conventions would die already, GitHub user brjsp noticed that Bitwarden’s new SDK dependency isn’t open source, Joaquim Rocha details his forking best practices, Sophie Koonin explains why you should go to conferences & Mike Hoye puts WordPress on SQLite.

Fire up a REPL, grab your favorite Stephen King novel, and hold on to the seat of your pants! Jimmy Miller returns to reveal why, at least for some of us, discovery coding is where it’s at.

Dan Moore from FusionAuth joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about modern auth strategies. We talk magic links, OTP, MFA, passkeys, password managers & so much more.

We talk with Nader Dabit, Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services, about the role of DevRel and what’s involved in this “dream job”, frontend and mobile developers using AWS Amplify to build cloud-enabled applications, how GraphQL, React, and others fit in, and the direction of React Native.

Hello 2024! We’re kicking off the year with Dan Moore, author of ‘Letters to a New Developer’ — a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. We discuss the value of online communities for new developers, the importance of communication skills, and the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Dan shares his best advice for new developers, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking. So much wisdom and advice in this episode!

We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.

Chris Lamb joined the show to talk about his project Reproducible Builds — which is funded by The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. We talked about the importance of having a verifiable path from source code to compiled binary, what this set of software development practices is all about, what it means to have Reproducible Builds, the challenges faced when implementing these development practices, and the inherent security you gain from them.

Alex Russell answers the question, “If not React, then what?” Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch’s Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple’s latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon’s O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare’s R2 competitor.

Jerod and Adam use Chris Kiehl’s post on development topics he’s changed his mind on (over the last 10 years) as a proxy for discussion on dev things they HAVE and HAVE NOT changed their minds on.

This episode features conversations from Sustain 2017 at GitHub HQ with Richard Littauer, Karthik Ram, Andrea Goulet, and Scott Ford. Sustain was a one day conversation for open source software sustainers to share stories, resources, and ways forward to sustain open source.

We’re helping Atlassian to promote Season 2 of Teamistry. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways, to achieve remarkable things. Today, we’re sharing a full-length episode from Season 1 which tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 spacesuits.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time, we don’t actually see his face. We see his moonsuit. That moonsuit — in effect — is Neil Armstrong; an inseparable part of this historic moment. While the spacesuit kept him alive to tell that story in his own words, what went unnoticed is the extraordinary team that stitched it together.

Jerod goes one-on-one with our old friend Justin Searls! We talk build vs buy decisions, dependency selection & how Justin has implemented POSSE (Post On Site Syndicate Elsewhere) in response to the stratification of social networks.

We talked with Dustin Kirkland (Head of Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical) at OSCON about 12.04’s end of life, the death of the Ubuntu phone, Snaps and snapd, and Bash on Ubuntu on Windows Server. This is the second installment of our mini-series from the expo hall floor of OSCON 2017. Special thanks to our friends at O’Reilly for inviting us to OSCON.

Techno Tim is back with Adam to discuss the state of homelab in 2024 and the trends happening within homelab tech. They discuss homelab environments providing a safe place for experimentation and learning, network improvement as a gateway to homelab, trends in network connection speeds, to Unifi or not, storage trends, ZFS configurations, TrueNAS, cameras, home automation, connectivity, routers, pfSense, and more.

Umm, should we make these conversations between Adam and Tim more frequent?

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert join Adam and Jerod for a ShopTalk & Friends conversation on the viability of the web, making content, ads to support that content, Codepen’s future plans, books, side quests, and social networks devaluing links.

Elecia White, host of Embedded.fm and author of Making Embedded Systems, joins us to discuss all things embedded systems. We discuss programming non-computers, open source resources for embedded, self-driving cars, embedded system like the GoPro, Traeger smokers, and even birthday cards. According to Elecia, embedded is going everywhere.

Justin Garrison joins us to talk about Amazon’s silent sacking, from his perspective. He should know. He works there. Well, as of yesterday he quit. We discuss how the cloud and Kubernetes have transformed the way software is developed and deployed, the impact silent layoffs have on employees and their careers, speaking out about workplace issues (the right way), how changes in organizational structure can lead to gaps in expertise and responsibility which can lead to potential outages and slower response times.

By the way, we officially let the cat off out of the bag in this episode. Justin has joined the ranks here at Changelog and is taking over as the host of Ship It! Expect new episodes soon.

This week we’re joined by Daniel Thompson, Co-founder and Core Member of Tauri. It’s been a year since we last had Daniel on the show. He catches us up on all things Tauri, their continued efforts towards Tauri 1.5 (which just released), the launch of CrabNebula and how they’re the people pushing the Tauri ecosystem forward and building on top of it, the state of Electron vs Tauri, and UI with Tauri. He even surprises us with his idea of creating a web browser.