Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.

This week on we’re joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that’s designed to bring developers and design to the same tool.

The question they’re trying to answer is “How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?” We go way back to Emil’s startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to here from 20 years ago (think PSD > HTML days), what they did to build Dev Mode, what they’re doing around codegen, the popularity of design systems, and what it takes to go from zero to Dev Mode.

The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a “eulogy” to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.

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.

This week we’re talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company’s Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows.

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev’s fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto’s experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.

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

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that “new good internet.” Cory’s new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares his experience recording his own audio book under the direction of Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media, and what’s to come from his next Science Fiction book The Lost Cause.

David Hugh-Jones has a lot to say about what makes a good comment, Hugging Face released a distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition, The New Stack reports on C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup’s plan for bringing safety to the language, Jeff Sandberg declares that CSS is fun again & Jose M. Gilgado praises the beauty of finished software.

We’re joined this week by the beat freak in residence himself, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Listen along as we talk about how we make our beats, what inspires us for our music, and some behind the scenes on our latest albums.

Jean Yang’s research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are the layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs.

That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led her to join us on this very podcast. We think you’re going to enjoy this interview, we sure did.

The hubbub of the web dev world right now is Next.js’ integration of React Server Components, Kent C. Dodds writes up why he doesn’t use Next, Lee Robinson responds with why he does, the NixOS team hits a milestone in their reproducible builds effort & OpenSign is an open source alternative to DocuSign.

Jared Henderson joins us to discuss the state of the art in software parental controls and how we protect our children and lock down our home networks from the constant onslaught of malicious and unwanted content.

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Matthew Sanabria (former Engineer at HashiCorp working on Terraform Enterprise), Nithya Ruff (Chief Open Source Officer and Head of the Open Source Program Office at Amazon) & Jordan Harband (Open Source Maintainer-at-large with dependencies in most JavaScript apps out there.

There has been many changes this year in open source, and each of these perspectives lends insight into challenging and changing waters happening right now in open source.

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…

Changelog drops full-length musical albums in collaboration with Breakmaster Cylinder, Justin Searls on why the right tools fail for the wrong reasons, The Unix Sheikh says we have too many level of abstractions, Adam at PiCockpit compares the newly-announced Raspberry Pi 5 to the competition & Jorge Medina assures us that we’re not lacking creativity, we’re just overwhelmed by content.

Long time friend KBall makes his “first” appearance on The Changelog by way of Changelog & Friends. You likely know Kevin from his panelist position on JS Party. Today he’s sharing his passion for coaching and developing human skills.

This week Jerod goes solo with Philipp Heckel, creator of ntfy, to discuss this simple HTTP-based service that lets you send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer. They discuss why he built it, how he built it, and what his plans are for the future of this beloved side hustle.

Chip Huyen documents the shifting sand of large data models, Herman Õunapuu reviews the Zimaboard, Bryan Braun shares 4 of his most recent VSCode configuration discoveries & Swizec Teller wrote a great summary of the inaugural AI Engineer Summit.

Gerhard joins us for the 12th Kaizen and this time talk about what we DIDN’T do. We were holding S3 wrong, we put some cash back in our pockets, we enabled HTTP/3, Brotli compression, and Fastly websockets, we improved our SLOs, we improved Changelog Nightly, and we’re going to KubeCon 2023 in Chicago.

This week we’re joined by Marcin Kulik to talk about his project asciinema. You’ve likely seen this out there in the wild — asciinema lets you record and share your terminal sessions in full fidelity. Forget screen recording apps that offer blurry video. asciinema provides a lightweight, text-based approach to terminal recording with lots of possibilities. Marcin shares the backstory on this project, where he’d like to take it, who’s supporting him along the way, and we even included 11 minutes of bonus content for Changelog ++ subscribers.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ recommendations for remote vs colocated teams, Duarte Carmo created a neural search engine from Changelog transcripts, Tom Hacohen says strong static typing is a hill he’s willing to die on, Orhun Parmaksız created a CLI that makes your keyboard sound like a typewriter & Luke Plant spits hard truths about simplicity.

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.

This week we’re joined by Daniel Thompson, Co-founder and Core Member of Tauri. It’s been a year since we last had Daniel on the show. He catches us up on all things Tauri, their continued efforts towards Tauri 1.5 (which just released), the launch of CrabNebula and how they’re the people pushing the Tauri ecosystem forward and building on top of it, the state of Electron vs Tauri, and UI with Tauri. He even surprises us with his idea of creating a web browser.

InfluxDB finishes a multi-year rewrite in Rust, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be on sale by the end of the month, the Bruno team builds an open source API explorer that’s local-first and will never have a cloud, Xe Iaso thinks gokrazy is really cool & Matt Rickard shares lessons from years of debugging.

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 taking you to the hallway track of the final Strange Loop conference. First up is AnnMarie Thomas — an engineering, business, and education professor. AnnMarie gave one of the opening keynotes titled “Playing with Engineering.” We also caught up with many first-time and multi-time attendees who shared their favorite moments from Strange Loop over the years. You’ll hear from Richard Feldman, Colin Dean, and Taylor Troesh. Last up we talk with Pokey Rule. He gave a talk about his project called Cursorless which is a spoken language for structural code editing.

Changelog++ subscribers get a super extended version of this episode which includes everything we recorded at Strange Loop. Become a Changelog++ subscriber

ElectricSQL is a project that offers a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps, Ned Batchelder writes about the myth of the myth of “learning styles”, Carl Johnson thinks XML is better than YAML, Berkan Sasmaz defines and describes “idempotency” & HyperDX is an open source alternative Datadog or New Relic.

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.

Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.