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.
It’s Kaizen 18! Can you believe it? We discuss the recent Fly.io outage, some little features we’ve added since our last Kaizen, our new video-first production, and of course, catch up on all things Pipely! Oh, and Gerhard surprises us (once again). BAM!
Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they’re doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don’t even need and they’re poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era.
Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.
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.
For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!
Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she’s learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.
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.
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.
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.
Techno Tim joins Adam to catch up on the state of Homelab for 2025, the state of AI at home and on-prem (AI Homelab) and where that’s heading, building a creator PC, choosing the parts for your build, GPU availability, Windows being user hostile, and why Tim is happy to be using Windows, Mac AND Linux.
After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface.
Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let’s dig in.
Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.
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.
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.
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.
Kris Brandow & Matthew Sanabria from Fallthrough.fm join Jerod to discuss tools we’re switching to, whether or not Go is still a great systems programming language choice, user-centric documentation, the need for archivists & more.
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.
Benj Edwards wants to put the “personal” back in “personal computer”, the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.
Jerod & Adam discuss Nvidia’s recently announced personal AI supercomputer, Waymo’s latest infinite loop, what’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup, and whether or not AI has gone mainstream… warts & all!
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.
Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift’s original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly.
Mat Ryer is back! He plays the piano, we tell each other truths/lies, we pay homage to the 8” floppy disk, Mat accepts an open source medal, and so much more. It’s a real circus. MatGPT!
Rachel Plotnick joins us for the first show of 2025 to discuss her book “Power Button” and the research she did, and why we love/hate buttons so much. We also discuss her upcoming book “License to Spill” as well as the research she’s doing on energy drinks.
M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, Simon Willison’s year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM, Allen Pike describes a method for magic, Tom Critchlow thinks small databases are magic & James Stanier agrees with me about Parkinson’s Law and the usefulness of deadlines.
Our 7th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 12 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚
Mitchell Hashimoto joins the show to discuss Ghostty, the newest terminal in town. Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp, took it all the way to IPO, exited in 2023—and now he’s working on a terminal emulator called Ghostty. Ghostty is set to 1.0 this month, so we sat down to talk through all the details.
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!
Gerhard is back for Kaizen 17! We discuss our CPU.fm changes in-depth, detail new Zulip / Neon integrations & put our Pipedream to the test. Oh, and a Gerhard surprise (of course)!
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).
