This week we’re joined by Zach Latta, the Founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club is the program Zach wished he had in high school.

Kara Deloss announces GitHub Accelerator’s 2023 cohort, Databricks releases the first open source, instruction-following LLM, fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use, Mihai Parparita writes how he improved Tailscale thanks to Apple’s open source & Neal Fennimore asks and answers the question: Passkeys: what the heck and why?!

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.”

Ken Thompson’s 75-year-project is a jukebox for the ages, Tabby is a self-hosted AI coding assistant, Codeberg is a collaboration platform and Git hosting for open source software, content and projects, TheSequence explains The LLama Effect & Paul Orlando writes about Ghosts, Guilds and Generative AI.

This week we’re talking about LLMs with Simon Willison. We can not avoid this topic. Last time it was Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. This time it’s LLMs breaking the internet. Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, Bing, GitHub Copilot X, Cody…we cover it all.

Twitter publishes (some of) its recommendation algorithm, Toran Bruce Richards puts GPT-4 on autopilot, Simon Willison shares a good way for us to think about LLMs, Eric Elliot creates a powerful pseudocode programming language for LLMs & I define and demystify the term “stochastic parrot”.

After years of working for Google on the Go Team, Filippo Valsorda quit last year to experiment with more sustainable paths for open source maintainers. Good news, it worked! Filippo is now a full-time open source maintainer and he joins Jerod on this episode to tell everyone exactly how he’s making the equivalent to his total compensation package at Google in open source.

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.

This week we’re talking with Georgi Gerganov about his work on Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp. Georgi first crossed our radar with whisper.cpp, his port of OpenAI’s Whisper model in C and C++. Whisper is a speech recognition model enabling audio transcription and translation. Something we’re paying close attention to here at Changelog, for obvious reasons. Between the invite and the show’s recording, he had a new hit project on his hands: llama.cpp. This is a port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C and C++. Whisper.cpp made a splash, but llama.cpp is growing in GitHub stars faster than Stable Diffusion did, which was a rocket ship itself.

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.

This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

Dalai is the simplest way to run LLaMA on your local machine, simple web tools that just work without annoying you, Wik is a tool to view wikipedia pages from your terminal, Rspack is a fast, Rust-based web bundler, Doodle is a pure Kotlin UI framework, Marqo is tensor search for humans & iLLA is an open source alternative to Retool.

This week Adam talks with Marcin Kurc about chasing the 9s. Marcin is the Co-founder and CEO of Nobl9 where they build tools for managing service level objectives, aka SLOs. We also talk about service level agreements (SLAs), service level indicators (SLIs), error budgets, and monitoring, and how it all comes together to help teams align on goals, improve customer satisfaction, manage risks, increase transparency, and of course, a favorite around here…continuous improvement. Kaizen! This is an awesome deep dive into the world of chasing those 9s, and how teams are levering SLOs to earn the trust of their customers as well showcase transparency.

Reorx lists awesome apps & tools using the new ChatGPT API, Ernie Smith ranks self-hosted app alternatives, Very Good Ventures brings Dart to the server, Daniel Stenberg tells curl’s NuGet story & Hacker Stations showcases tech workspace setups from all over the world.

This week we’re joined by Brigit Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and we’re talking about Development Containers and the Dev Container spec. Ever since we talked with Cory Wilkerson about Coding in the cloud with Codespaces we’ve wanted to get the Changelog.com codebase setup with a dev environment in the cloud to more easily support contributions. After getting a drive-by contribution from Chris Eggert to add a Dev Container spec to our codebase, we got curious and reached out to Brigit and asked her to come on the show to give us all the details.

Sahn Lam details Stack Overflow’s monolith/on-prem architecture, Hillel Wayne asks the Lobsters community for killer libraries, Linux 6.2 is ready to run on M1 Macs thanks to Asahi Linux, Johan Halse writes up what to expect from your web framework & Eli Bendersky on using GoatCounter for blog analytics.

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.

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. ⚡️

This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.

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.

This week we invited our friend Mat Ryer to join us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that’s been on our radar. You may know Mat from Go Time and also Grafana’s Big Tent, which we help to produce. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It’s good fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.

WestArtFactory’s premium PCB cheat sheets, Maxime Topolov tells of a disappearing AWS dev, Juspay Technologies releases HyperSwitch for payment processing, Servo gets new funding for 2023 & Cloudflare’s open source Wildebeest.

Jerod is joined by Yehonathan Sharvit, author of Data-Oriented Programming, to discuss the virtues of treating data as a first-class citizen in our applications and the four principles that make it possible.

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.

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.