Jimmy Miller talks to us about his experience with a legacy codebase at his first job as a programmer. The codebase was massive, with hundreds of thousands of lines of C# and Visual Basic, and a database with over 1,000 columns. Let’s just say Jimmy got into some stuff. There’s even a Gilfoyle involved. This episode is all about his adventures while working there.

Emily Freeman joins the show alongside our Ship It co-host, Justin Garrison! We hear Emily’s burnout story & learn how she and Forrest Brazeal are putting tech-focused influencers on tap. But first: area code turf wars, bad movie reboots & buying used DVDs… at Starbucks?!

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.

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.

Carol Lee (Clinical Scientist) shares her research on code review anxiety. We dive deep into her recent research paper “Understanding and Effectively Mitigating Code Review Anxiety”. We get into all the nooks and crannies of this topic — common code review myths, strategies for coping, the need for awareness and self-reflection, the value of exposure and practice to build confidence, the importance of team dynamics, respect, empathy, and connection, and more. This show is jam-packed with goodies for everyone…and we even give a nod to the work we did on our podcast Brain Science.

Jacob DePriest, VP and Deputy Chief Security Officer at GitHub, joins the show this week to talk about securing GitHub. From Artifact Attestations, profile hardening, preventing XZ-like attacks, GitHub Advanced Security, code scanning, improving Dependabot, and more.

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.

Paul Orlando is back to talk about his book titled “Why Now?” You may remember Paul from his last appearance (a fan favorite) talking with Jerod about complex systems & second-order effects. Paul’s book, “Why Now?” explores the concept of timing and the importance of understanding the ‘why now’ in business and product development. We discuss timing examples from the book that were either too early or too late (such as the first video phone and car phones), the need to consider both technological advancements and user demand when assessing timing, the significance of timing in the success of companies like Apple and the launch of the iPhone, Uber and Heroku, and more. Also, join our Slack community for a chance to get a signed copy of Paul’s book.

Our friend Ron Evans is a technologist for hire, an open source developer, an author, a speaker, an iconoclast, and one of our favorite people in tech. This conversation with Ron goes everywhere: from high-altitude weather balloons, to life on Mars, to Zeno’s paradox applied to ML, to what open source devs should learn from the Wu-Tang Clan & more.

This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.

THE Cameron Seay joins us once again! This time we learn more about his life/history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI / quantum computing and how they might affect the tech labor market & more!

This week Adam talks with Kris Moore, Senior Vice President of Engineering at iXsystems, about all things TrueNAS. They discuss the history of TrueNAS starting from its origins as a FreeBSD project, TrueNAS Core being in maintenance mode, the momentum and innovation happening in TrueNAS Scale, the evolution of the TrueNAS user interface, managing ZFS compatibility in TrueNAS, the business model of iXsystems and their commitment to the open-source community, and of course what’s to come in the upcoming Dragonfish release of TrueNAS Scale.

Listen to our newest album called Dance Party as a podcast! This is an EPIC bundle of BMC bangers. We double dog dare you to listen and try NOT to dance 🕺

This week we’re joined by Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). They are responsible for representing the idea and the definition of open source globally. Stefano shares the challenges they face as a US-based non-profit with a global impact. We discuss the work Stefano and the OSI are doing to define Open Source AI, and why we need an accepted and shared definition. Of course we also talk about the potential impact if a poorly defined Open Source AI emerges from all their efforts.

Note: Stefano was under the weather for this conversation, but powered through because of how important this topic is.

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?

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we’re featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening! 💚

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.

Mat Ryer returns with his guitar, an unpopular opinion & his favorite internet virus.

Listen to our Next Level album as a podcast! We grew up in the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. It’s no surprise that so many of our tracks are inspired by the 8-bit and 16-bit music of our youth. From Castlevania to Contra, Sonic the Hedgehog, and many more — we were inspired by all the nostalgic soundtracks from the games that got us here, to give our pods one-of-a-kind vibes. If you’ve been head nodding to our beats during our shows and you’ve been wishing for a way to listen outside of our pods, then this release will be an absolute delight.

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this on your next coding adventure or deep work session…

On September 29th, Netflix shipped its final DVDs, marking the end of an era in physical media. So, we invited our friend Christina Warren (aka film_girl) from GitHub to pour out a drink with us and lament the end of this golden age of access to the films we all love.

Jerod gathers a group of friends for our first game show experiment here on Changelog & Friends! This is a game of obscure jargon, fake definitions & expert tomfoolery. Our contestants checked their imposter syndrome at the door, because they either know what these words mean or they fake it ’til they make their peers think they do.

This week we’re joined by Steve O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. In Steve’s post Why Open Source Matters, he says “open source is at a crossroads” and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today’s conversation goes deep on this subject.

Leslie Lamport is a computer scientist & mathematician who won ACM’s Turing Award in 2013 for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems. He also created LaTeX and TLA+, a high-level language for “writing down the ideas that go into the program before you do any coding.”

Ok Homelabbers, it’s time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that’s what homelab is about. Let’s do this.

This week it’s storytime with Steve Yegge! Steve came out of retirement to join Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering. Their next frontier is Cody, their AI coding assistant that answers code questions and writes code for you by reading your entire codebase and the code graph. But, we really spent a lot of time talking with Steve about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. Ok, it’s storytime!

On Monday, Kelsey Hightower announced his retirement from Google. On Tuesday, he sat down with us to discuss why, how & what’s next.

Along the way, Kelsey teaches us how not to suck at work, analyzes his magical demos, fights off the haters (again) & opines on System Initiative, Dagger & 37Signals moving off the cloud.

Mat Ryer is back and he’s brought with him 10 tips to be a 10x developer (like he is). After that, we try a new segment we’re calling “Tool Time” (and try out a few jingles for it along the way). Finally, it’s time to review our previous unpopular opinions and put some new ones into the world for your (dis)agreeing pleasure. Join us for an automagical time!

This week we’re talking about Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, Head of Passwordless, at 1Password. Will Passkeys enable a passwordless future? Time will tell. Anna shares the what, the why, how, and the when on Passkeys.

Homebrew project leader Mike McQuaid joins us to weigh in on Apple’s big Vision Pro announcement. We also hit on our favorite (and least favorite) non-AR things from the WWDC 2023 keynote.