Welcome to Kaizen 15! We go deep on the big Changelog News redesign, give shout outs to folks who’ve helped us along the way & Gerhard takes us on his journey to turn Jerod’s pipe dream into a reality!

Predrag Gruevski and Chris Krycho joined the show to talk about SemVer. We explore the challenges and the advantages of semantic versioning (aka SemVer), the need for improving the tooling around SemVer, where semantic versioning really shines and where it’s needed, Types and SemVer, whether or not there’s a better way, and why it’s not as simple as just opting out.

Søren Fuglede Jørgensen builds a font thats also an LLM, Hugo Landau writes about the demise of the mildly dynamic website, SQL Studio is the simplest little database explorer ever, Mathew Duggan reviews GitHub Copilot Workspace & Stephan Schmidt lays out the case against mocking + what to do instead.

Daniel Stenberg shares his guiding principles for BDFL’ing curl, gives us his perspective on the state of the internet, talks financial independence, ensuring curl won’t be the next XZ & more!

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.

Luminousmen writes about Senior Engineer Fatigue, Microsoft rethinks its AI-based Recall feature, Mike Hoye gives a big shout out to the “diff” program, Thom Holwerda covers ChromeOS’ quiet switch to Android Linux subsystems & Mihail Eric tells the inside story on how Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system on Earth.

Justin Searls joins us for hot takes on Apple’s 2024 WWDC keynote. Apple Intelligence stole the show, but did it steal our hearts? Oh, and we learn all about Justin’s Vision Pro Life and how he hopes/expects Apple’s latest device to improve in future iterations.

Adam & Jerod hallway-track-it between Microsoft Build interviews. Was 1999 the best year in film history? Was 2004 the worst? Have you heard the full story behind Blues Traveler’s “Hook”? Are you still reading this? Go listen! (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)

Kelsey Hightower is back to share more of his wisdom. This time it’s one year after his retirement from Google. But guess what? He might be “retired,” but he’s not tired. In this episode Kelsey shares what drives him, what he fears, and how he thinks through his life choices and parenting. This is a good one.

Apple announces its “new” style of AI, piku gives you “git push” deployment on your own servers, Dabo Chen rebuilds nanoGPT in a spreadsheet, Mark Seemann thinks you’ll regret using natural keys in your database design & Glyph Lefkowitz describes his grand unified theory of the AI hype cycle.

What happens when you take three #define newbs (Thomas Eckert, Nick Nisi, Mat Ryer) & pit them against the grizzled vet, Adam? Find out on this episode because our award-worthy game of fake definitions is back & this time it’s even more legendary!

Mark Russinovich, Eric Boyd & Neha Batra join us to discuss the state of AI for Microsoft and OpenAI at Microsoft Build 2024. It’s safe to say that Microsoft is all-in on AI.

A popular open source iOS authenticator app goes rogue under new ownership, Andreas Kling steps back from SerenityOS & forks Ladybird, Vhyrro takes a thought-provoking try at a “static effect system”, Matt Bessey is over GraphQL & Marc-Andre Giroux still likes GraphQL sometimes (in the right context).

Tech lawyer Luis Villa returns to answer our most pressing questions: what’s up with all these new content deals? How did Google think it was a good idea to ship AI Summaries in its current state? Is it too late to opt out of AI? We also discuss AI in Hollywood (spoilers!), positive things we’re seeing (or hoping for) & Upstream 2024 (June 5th)!

Scott Guthrie joins the show this week from Microsoft Build 2024 to discuss Microsoft being all-in on AI. From Copilot, to Azure AI and Prompty, to their developer first focus, leading GitHub, VS Code being the long bet that paid off, to the future of a doctor’s bedside manner assisted with AI. Microsoft is all-in on AI and Build 2024’s discussions and announcements proves it.

Swizec’s article on not using AI to writes tests, LlamaFs is a self-organizing file system with Llama 3, a Pew Research analysis confirmed that the internet is full of broken links, Sam Rose built a spectacular interactive study of queueing strategies & Jordan Cutler shares a real-life experience of him writing clear/readable code… and it backfiring.

We kick off our Microsoft Build 2024 “coverage” in this free-wheelin’ conversation with our friend, Shaundai Person! We’re talking Netflix infra, we’re talking sales, we’re talking real-world AI usage, we’re talking career choices…. What’s a good next step? Listen in!

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.

Taylor Troesh writes Kyle explaining “Legacy Software” to the aliens, Vitaly Friedman addresses why so many designers feel misunderstood and under appreciated in business contexts, Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu & hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game.

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam to discuss their experiences with building the “perfect media server” and all the hardware and software involved to make it happen — LinuxServer.io, PerfectMediaServer.com, Plex, Jellyfin, ZFS, mergerfs, TrueNAS, Docker Compose and so much more in this episode.

Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what’s in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.

Tim Fisken explains the problem with soft deletion, a simple measure of software dependency freshness is proposed, a deep-dive on sound design in software, a web app with over 80 handy developer tools built in & Luke Plant reminds us that programming mantras are proverbs, not laws.

Annie Sexton has been on quite a journey since she was last on the show back in early ‘22. On this episode, Annie takes us on that journey, shares her new-found perspective & tells us about how she’s approaching her side project this time around.

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.

Bahaa Zidan says your web framework doesn’t matter, DHH writes about magic machines, Dylan Huang reviews thousands of opinions on HTMX, Tim Ottinger says programming is thinking & Tim Spann says small language models (SLM) for the win.

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 we’re joined by Dustin Bluck to discuss his acquisition of the well known (and beloved) Castro podcast app to take it indie-focused once again. As previous users of Castro, we were excited to dig into the details behind this popular podcast client to see what’s next, how the deal was done, a peek into the code, and where exactly this indie and creator focused podcast app can go.

Daniel Hooper lists out all the good ideas in computer science, Jeff Geerling declares 2024 the year corporate open source dies, Jared Turner says all kinds of works-in-progress are waste, Daroc Alden covers the leadership crisis in the Nix community & John Hawthorn explains why Ruby may be faster than you think.

Frequent guest (and almost real-life-friend) Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent “open source meets business” drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative.

This week we’re joined by Louis Pilfold, the creator of the Gleam programming language. For the uninitiated, Gleam is a functional programming language for building type-safe systems that compiles to Erlang and JavaScript and it’s written in Rust. We discuss the inspiration and development of Gleam, how it compares to other languages, where it shines, the overwhelming amount of support Louis is getting through GitHub sponsors, what’s next for Gleam and their near-term plans for a language server.