Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source.
Bill Maher excoriates the software industry for making our lives more difficult, two professors from the University of Washington put together a curriculum to help us manage life in the ChatGPT world, Daniel Delaney thinks deeply on chat as a dev tool UI, Benedict Evans explores our assumptions that computers be ‘correct’ & the Thoughtbot team writes up six cases when not to refactor.
Bertrand Le Roy joined the show to talk about all things .NET Core, their recent 1.0 release, where it’s going, the open source around it, and Microsoft’s shift towards more open source.
Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes “all code is tech debt” is all wrong.
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.
Adam’s friend on the frontend, John Long joins the show to explore his usage of AI, design tools and the stack he prefers. We talk Next.js vs Rails, maintaining open source, building websites with Framer, their mutual love for Figma, and more.
Arun Gupta is back, this time with his latest book in hand titled “Fostering Open Source Culture” to share his wisdom and experiences of fostering open source culture. BTW you can use the code OSCULTURE20 to get 20% off (both print and e-book). Use this link and enjoy.
Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?
Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past … and it’s certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it’s what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide.
We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify – which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.
Adam and Jerod are on location at OSCON and talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he’s doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software, and Abby Cobunoc Mayes about the work she’s doing at Mozilla for open science.
James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, “Why I’m Frequently Absent from Open Source”. He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.
On this special bonus episode of The Changelog, we’re playing the latest episode of Away from Keyboard with Jeff Robbins. While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to Tim about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.
This week we take you behind the scenes of the new infrastructure for Changelog.com and talk with Gerhard Lazu. We relaunched the new brand and site for Changelog on Phoenix/Elixir in October of 2016 and we needed a better way to reliably host and deploy the site. That’s where Gerhard came in. We cover all the details and decisions in this show.
Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to the acquisition. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it’s like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what’s next for Benthos, and what it takes to enjoy the journey.
Max Coutté joined the show to share his journey of learning the math and programming required to build an open source Oculus headset for $100. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day he and his friends decided to built an Oculus headset because they couldn’t afford one. This show takes you through Max’s journey, how his teacher (aka Sensei) made all the difference, and how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source.
Tim Coulter joined the show to talk about Truffle — a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. We talked with Tim about how he got into Ethereum and dapp development, Solidity vs JavaScript, smart contract testing, EthPM which is like npm but for Ethereum, Why decentralization? Why dapps? Basically, why rebuild the internet? And last but not least - who’s using Truffle and what have they built with it?
We talked with Tim Mecklem about building an artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves to help those with Type 1 Diabetes who want to “loop” — a process which involves monitoring glucose levels, predicting where a person’s glucose levels are heading, then delivering insulin based on that prediction. Tim is a Developer at Gaslight in Cincinnati where he builds software solutions with Ruby and Elixir, and he’s a member of the Nerves Core team.
Benn Stancil’s weekly Substack on data and technology provides a fascinating perspective on the modern data stack & the industry building it. On this episode, Benn joins Jerod to dissect a few of his essays, discuss opportunities he sees during this slowdown & explain why he thinks maybe we should disband the analytics team.
Bryan Cantrill, Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Adam to share his journey from Sun to Oxide – from Sun and Fishworks, to DTrace, to ZFS, to Joyent and Node.js, and now working to build on-prem cloud servers as they should be at Oxide.
Ben Affleck’s take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram’s CodingFont.com is like Zoolander’s Walk Off but for coding fonts.
Feross Aboukhadijeh joined the show this week to talk with us about his backstory, passive income, WebTorrent, WebRTC, Electron and the ins and outs of packaging apps for all platforms.
On Friday, June 2, 2017 – GitHub announced the details of their Open Source Survey – an open data set on the open source community for researchers and the curious. Frannie Zlotnick, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers joined the show to talk through the backstory and key insights of this open data project which sheds light on the broader open source community’s attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software.
We went back into the archives to conversations we had around data science at OSCON 2017. We talked with Vida Williams (Data Scientist) and Michelle Casbon (Director of Data Science at Qordoba) about the social impact of open data, personal data and transparency, privacy, the big data problem of public surveillance, electronic fingerprinting, the rift between data scientists and computer scientists, natural language processing, machine learning, and more.
We’re joined this week by the beat freak in residence himself, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Listen along as we talk about how we make our beats, what inspires us for our music, and some behind the scenes on our latest albums.
This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!
Karolina Szczur joined the show to talk about community building, building remote-first teams, the hiring process in tech, product development, and the inclusivity factor of web performance.
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?
Matt Biilman and Chris Bach joined the show to talk about JAMstack, Netlify CMS, how open source drives standards, and 10x-ing the speed of Smashing Magazine.
Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.
Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.
