The Changelog

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Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show

Changelog News Changelog News #26

A simpler alternative to deleted_at, rules of thumb for better software, faking it until you automate it, the only civilized way to read online & AI and the big five

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2023-01-09T21:45:00Z 🎧 31,812

Brandur Leach’s easy, alternative soft deletion strategy, Lane Wagner’s zen of proverbs, Nicolas Carlo says fake it until you can automate it, Felix A. Crux thinks feeds are the only civilized way to read online & Ben Thompson analyzes AI and the big five tech companies.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #503

Building Reflect at sea

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2022-08-27T23:00:00Z #startups 🎧 31,772

This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.”

We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.

Changelog News Changelog News #28

Prioritizing tech debt, UI components to copy/paste, learnings from 20 years in software, git-sim & jqjq

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2023-01-23T19:50:00Z 🎧 31,636

Max Countryman wrote up a framework for prioritizing tech debt, shadcn builds a copy/paste-able UI component library in public, Justin Etheredge shares 20 things he’s learned in his 20 years as a software engineer, Jacob Stopak’s git-sim lets you easily visualize git operations without affecting your repo & Mattias Wadman implemented jq in jq.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #443

Exploring Deno Land 🦕

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2021-06-08T12:00:00Z #deno +3 🎧 31,544

This week we’re joined by Ryan Dahl, Node.js creator, and now the creator of Deno - a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that uses V8 and is built in Rust.

We talk with Ryan about the massive success of Node and how it impacted his life, and how he eventually created Deno and what he’s doing differently this time around. We also talk about The Deno Company and what’s in store for Deno Deploy.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #352

The Pragmatic Programmers

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2019-07-11T11:00:00Z #learn +2 🎧 31,493

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software.

Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #535

Examining capitalism's chokepoints

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2023-04-14T17:00:00Z #culture 🎧 31,469

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”

Changelog News Changelog News #30

OpenAI's new text classifier, teach yourself CS, programming philosophies are about state, you might not need Lodash & overrated scalability

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2023-02-06T21:40:00Z 🎧 31,414

OpenAI’s working on an AI classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text, Oz Nova and Myles Byrne created a guide to teach yourself computer science, Charles Genschwap recently realized that all the various programming philosophies can be boiled down into a simple statement about how to work with state, you probably don’t need Lodash or Underscore anymore & Waseem Daher thinks scalability is overrated.

Changelog News Changelog News #56

The open source licensing war is over?

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2023-08-07T20:30:00Z 🎧 31,338

Matt Asay thinks the open source licensing war is over, LangUI is an open source Tailwind component library for your AI chat app, Ivan Kuleshov modded a Mac mini to run via PoE, Apple joins Pixar and others in the Alliance for OpenUSD & John D. Cook says sometimes you shouldn’t pick the best tool for the job.

Changelog News Changelog News #29

Data tool belts, Build Your Own Redis, the giscus comments system, prompt engineering shouldn't exist & ALPACA

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2023-01-30T20:30:00Z 🎧 31,284

Jeremia Kimelman takes stock of his “data tool belt”, Build Your Own Redis with C/C++ is ready to read, giscus is a comments system powered by GitHub Discussions, Matt Rickard says prompt engineering shouldn’t be a thing and won’t be a thing in the future & Kolja Lubitz’s ALPACA is engine for building adventure games and interactive comics.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #528

Into the Fediverse

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2023-02-24T22:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 31,237

This week Evan Prodromou is back to take us deeper into the Fediverse. As many of us reconsider our relationship with Twitter, Mastodon has been by-and-large the target of migration. They helped to popularize the idea of a federated universe of community-owned, decentralized, social networks. And, at the heart of it all is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol published by the W3C. It is co-authored by Evan as well as; Christine Lemmer-Webber, Jessica Tallon, Erin Shepherd, and Amy Guy. Today, Evan shares the details behind this protocol and where the Fediverse might be heading.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #354

Go is eating the world of software

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2019-07-25T17:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 31,230

We’re joined by Ron Evans at OSCON on the expo hall floor talking about Go and how it’s eating the world of software. Specifically we’re talking about TinyGo and what they’re doing to bring the Go programming language to micro-controllers and modern web browsers. According to Ron Evans, “embedded systems and Go are the most exciting things happening right now.”

Changelog News Changelog News #22

Free Heroku EOL, Stable Diffusion 2.0, Twitter SRE explains why it stays up, Git Notes & Joel Lord

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2022-11-28T20:30:00Z 🎧 31,216

Heroku’s free plans officially reach EOL, Swyx explains the mixed reaction to Stable Diffusion 2.0, a real Twitter SRE explains how it continues to stay up even with ~80% gone, Tyler Cipriani tells us about one of Git’s coolest, most unloved features & we chat with Joel Lord about brewing beer with IoT & JavaSCript at All Things Open 2022.

Oh, and help make this year’s state of the “log” episode awesome by lending your voice!

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #360

Modern software is built on APIs

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2019-09-06T11:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 31,024

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they created one of the most popular API platforms and community.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #421

The future of Mac

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2020-11-20T22:45:00Z #macos +1 🎧 30,763

We have a BIG show for you today. We’re talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple’s “One more thing.” event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on the future of the Mac.

Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple. Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools.

Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #435

The future of the web is HTML over the wire

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2021-04-05T21:00:00Z #rails +2 🎧 30,691

This week we’re joined by long-time web developer Matt Patterson. Earlier this year Matt wrote an evocative article for A List Apart called The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. In this episode Matt sits down with Jerod to discuss, in-detail, why he believes the future of the web is server-rendered (again) and how Ruby on Rails is well positioned to bring that future to us today.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #515

ANTHOLOGY — Advocating for and supporting open source

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2022-11-18T21:00:00Z #oss 🎧 30,492

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, NC. Let’s set the stage, here’s what we like do when we go to conferences — we setup our podcast studio at our booth where all the other vendors are and we talk to everyone we can. We give out t-shirts, stickers, pins, high fives…and it’s a blast.

Today’s anthology episode from ATO features: Arun Gupta (VP and GM of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel), long-time friend Chad Whitacre (Head of Open Source at Sentry), and Ricardo Sueiras (Principal Advocate in Open Source at AWS).

The common denominator for each of these conversations is advocating for and supporting open source. Special thanks to Todd Lewis and team for inviting us to come back to ATO. We enjoyed meeting long time fans and new ones too.

Changelog News Changelog News #37

GitHub Copilot X, Chatbot UI, ChatGPT plugins, defining juice for software dev, Logto, Basaran & llama-cli

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2023-03-27T18:45:00Z 🎧 30,264

GitHub announces Copilot X, Mckay Wrigley created an open source ChatGPT UI buit with Next.js, TypeScripe & Tailwind CSS, OpenAI is also launching a ChatGPT plugin initiative, Brad Woods writes about juice in software development, Logto is an open source alternative to Auth0, Basaran is an open source alternative to the OpenAI text completion API & llama-cli is a straightforward Go CLI interface for llama.cpp.

Changelog News Changelog News #36

Self-hosting in 2023, no more Alpine Linux, type constraints in 65 lines of SQL, Initial V, Minimal Gallery, the legacy of Visual Basic, tracking fake GitHub stars & Mastodon's 10M

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2023-03-20T18:00:00Z 🎧 30,258

Michal Warda on self-hosting in 2023, Martin Heinz will never use Alpine Linux again, Oliver Rice at Supabase creates type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL, Aaron Patterson converted a BMW shifter into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim, Piet Terheyden has been curating beautiful & functional websites daily since 2013, Ryan Lucas put together a history of Visual Basic, turns out it’s easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars & Mastodon hit 10 million accounts.

Changelog News Changelog News #32

Sidney Bing, Elk for Mastodon, writing an engineering strategy, what's next for core-js & cool tool lightning round

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2023-02-20T20:50:00Z 🎧 30,163

Simon Willison rounds up the goings on around Microsoft’s new GPT-powered Bing search, The Vue/Vite team build a nimble web client for Mastodon, Will Larson writes about writing an engineering strategy, Denis Pushkarev seeks support to maintain core-js & I share a lightning round of cool tools I’ve found and used recently. ⚡️

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #332

A UI framework without the framework

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2019-01-30T21:25:14Z #javascript +3 🎧 30,073

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #365

Let's talk Elixir!

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2019-10-09T19:00:00Z #elixir +2 🎧 29,993

Jerod is joined by Chris and Desmond (co-hosts of the ElixirTalk podcast) to catch up on what’s moving and shaking in the Elixir and Phoenix communities. We discuss what’s attractive about Elixir, what it means to have the language finalized, why folks are so excited by Phoenix LiveView, the ambitious new Lumen project that’s bringing Elixir to WebAssembly, and more.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #547

Efficient Linux at the CLI

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2023-07-06T13:00:00Z #linux +1 🎧 29,951

This week we’re talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.

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