The Changelog

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

Changelog News Changelog News #74

Open source LLMs are catching up

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2023-12-11T20:00:00Z 🎧 22,699

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #569

Hare aims to be a 100 year language

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2023-12-06T22:00:00Z #oss 🎧 21,492

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said “[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist.” Wise words.

We discuss Hare (of course), why he’s so passionate about all things open source, the state of the language, fostering a culture that values stability, and oddly enough — what it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Changelog News Changelog News #73

Leaked GPT prompts & Firefox on the brink

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2023-12-04T21:15:00Z 🎧 23,545

ChatGPT’s new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox’s share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can’t be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she’s ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the “code is read more than written” cliche with his own: “code is run more than read.”

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #568

Gleaming the KubeCon

This week we’re gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon…we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they’re working on at Sidero Labs.

Changelog News Changelog News #72

Was Jamstack a zero interest rate phenomenon?

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2023-11-27T20:00:00Z 🎧 21,913

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #567

Bringing Dev Mode to Figma

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2023-11-22T16:50:00Z #design +2 🎧 22,677

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #71

Watching OpenAI unravel in real-time

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2023-11-20T20:20:00Z 🎧 22,071

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #566

All the places Swift will go

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2023-11-16T21:00:00Z #swift 🎧 24,088

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #70

Share your terminal with anyone on the web

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2023-11-13T19:45:00Z 🎧 21,271

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #565

Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism

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2023-11-10T22:00:00Z #culture 🎧 22,036

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #69

How to write a good comment

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2023-11-06T19:15:00Z 🎧 22,808

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #564

Observing the power of APIs

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2023-11-02T14:45:00Z #api +1 🎧 19,277

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #68

What will React come up with Next?

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2023-10-30T19:00:00Z 🎧 22,677

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #563

ANTHOLOGY — The way of open source

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2023-10-27T13:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 19,783

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Next Level

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2023-10-23T19:30:00Z #music +2 🎧 21,447

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 News Changelog News #67

Introducing Changelog Beats

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2023-10-23T19:15:00Z 🎧 19,143

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #66

LMMS are the new LLMs

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2023-10-16T16:15:00Z 🎧 23,300

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #561

Coming to asciinema near you

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2023-10-11T20:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 21,732

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.

Changelog News Changelog News #65

RTO vs WFH & the case for strong static typing

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2023-10-09T19:30:00Z 🎧 23,314

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #560

Tauri’s next big move

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2023-10-05T20:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 22,031

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.

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