The Changelog

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

Changelog News Changelog News #31

Load testing a $4 VPS, TOML for .env files, counting unique visitors sans cookies, the Arc browser & a love letter to Deno

Alice Girard Guittard finds out how much she could you really get out of a $4 VPS, Brett Cannon wonders if using TOML for .env files is a good idea, Nic Mulvaney details how they count unique visitors to a website without using cookies, UIDS, or fingerprinting, after a few months, Chris Coyier is still using the Arc browser & Alex Kladov pens a love letter to Deno.

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

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 #29

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

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 #524

Mainframes are still a big thing

This week we’re talking about mainframes with Cameron Seay, Adjunct Professor at East Carolina University and a member of the Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project. If you’ve been curious about mainframes, this show will be a great guide.

Cameron explains exactly what a mainframe is and how it’s different from the cloud. We talk COBOL and the state of education and opportunities around that language. We cover the state-of-the-art in mainframe land, System Z, Linux on mainframes, and more.

Changelog News Changelog News #28

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

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 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

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 #521

Don't sleep on Ruby & Rails

Welcome to 2023 — we’re kicking off the year talking to Justin Searls about the state of web development and why he just might write a “You Might Not Need React” post. He’s been so productive using Turbo and Stimulus (and tailwind) in Rails 7 that we had to talk about the state of Rails development today and a bunch of other fun topics around building for the web in 2023.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #519

GPT has entered the chat

To wrap up the year we’re talking about what’s breaking the internet, again. Yes, we’re talking about ChatGPT and we’re joined by our good friend Shawn “swyx” Wang. Between his writings on L-Space Diaries and his AI notes repo on GitHub, we had a lot to cover around the world of AI and what might be coming in 2023.

Also, we have one more show coming out before the end of the year — our 5th annual “State of the log” episode where Adam and Jerod look back at the year and talk through their favorite episodes of the year and feature voices from the community. So, stay tuned for that next week.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #518

Coming home to GitHub

This week we’re joined by Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub, and a true tech and pop culture connoisseur. From her days at Mashable covering the intersections of entertainment and technology, to Gizmodo, to Microsoft, and now her current role at GitHub we talk with Christina about her journey from journalist to developer, and the latest happenings coming out of GitHub Universe.

BTW, we’re planning to get Christina on Backstage in the new year to talk about Plex, MakeMKV, and all things that go into hosting your own media server. Drop a commment on this episode with a +1 if you want to see that happen.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #517

ANTHOLOGY - Wasm, efficient code review & the industrial metaverse

This week we’re back at All Things Open 2022 covering the hallway track. Up first is Shivay Lamba and he’s schooling us on all things server-side WASM. It’s the new hotness. After that, we talk with Yishai Beeri, CTO of LinearB about the world of code review, PR queues, AI developers, and making human developers more efficient, and happier. And last, we talk with Guy Martin from NVIDIA about what’s going on in the Industrial Metaverse. He shares details about an open source project developed by Pixar called Universal Scene Description (USD) and what they’re doing with NVIDIA Omniverse.

Changelog News Changelog News #22

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

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 #516

This !insane tech hiring market

This week we’re back talking to Gergely Orosz — this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market, but more so the flip side, the 180, the not so good tech hiring market, the layoff market and what you can expect. There’s a lot of FUD out there, so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what’s really going on, and what to really expect. Maybe more so, how to keep your job or find a new job. We come to this topic with great compassion and great understanding, so please…there is a community here for you. There’s a lot of people in our Slack. Call it your home, it’s free to join and everyone is welcome.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #515

ANTHOLOGY — Advocating for and supporting open source

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 #20

Tracking layoffs, tech worker demand still high, ntfy, devenv, Markdoc & Mike Bifulco

Roger Lee has been tracking all tech layoffs since COVID-19, Amanda Hoover says tech worker demand is still high, ntfy helps you send push notifications for free, devenv lets you share development environments without containers, Markdoc scales from personal blogs to massive documentation sites & we talk with Mike Bifulco at All Things Open 2022.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #514

Beyond Heroku to Muse

This week we’re back for part 2 with Adam Wiggins — going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse (listen to part 1). After a six-year adrenaline high on Heroku, Adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well. So, he moved to Berlin, did some gig work with companies…dabbled in investing and advising. But he wasn’t satisfied. Adam likes to build things.

Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry — the same fellas he created Heroku with. Eventually they founded Ink & Switch, an independent research lab which led to innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is a tool for deep work and thinking on iPad and Mac. Today’s show is all about that journey and the details in-between.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #513

The story of Heroku

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production.

We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #512

Linux mythbusting & retro gaming

This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #511

The terminal as a platform

This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.

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