Welcome Adam Jahnke!
Things have been moving fast around here at The Changelog!
Our editorial staff is growing and we’ve been hard at work covering what’s fresh and new in open source. I know you’ve seen this fella around over the past few weeks, but we haven’t properly introduced him yet. That’s my fault.
I’m proud to introduce Adam Jahnke as the latest member of the team.
By day Adam works as a Programmer with me at Pure Charity. He’s a lover of minimalism, and he’s super passionate about writing code, especially CoffeeScript, Ruby and Sass. His Front-end Fu is good. Adam is also the co-founder (along side Wynn) of the popular dotfiles project on GitHub – unapologetically dubbed “Your unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub.”
Adam topped the charts, hitting #1, on Hacker News with his Opinion post Use long flags when scripting.
Adam shares is thoughts on OSS and software development here at The Changelog, social codes at GitHub, tweets on Twitter and chooses hope at Pure Charity. Follow him.
Making DNSimple
Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.
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Jerod Santo: It’s like Neo and the Matrix. I know Kung Fu.
Two tickets for Departure, please
Today we’re joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe… that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.
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Tobias Fried: I wanted to talk about – I mean, when you ask “Do you have any ideas of where to steer the conversation?” I wanted to bring up like open source compensation, and an alternative to the business model you’re discussing, where we go into client work, or operate as a two-person agency, or contract to contract… I think there’s some alternatives on the horizon that might allow people like us in the near future to operate in full creative control, get some compensation and make it worth their while, but not have to run your operation as an explicit business. There’s a lot of movement lately that I’ve seen from individuals and from companies to compensate open source projects better.
In terms of individuals, there’s people out there like Anthony Fu, who if you do any web work, you’ve probably seen his name, and on Twitter, on GitHub… But he’s very involved in like the Vite bundler, and Vue ecosystem, and a whole bunch of things. He’s got his fingers in a lot of pies, but he’s very vocal about contributing and giving back to the kind of corner, linchpin open source projects that like keep the world running. And he’s aware of the fact that he’s a very visible public figure, but as part of his responsibility is that he actually distributes some of the money that he receives via donations and public support and GitHub sponsors to projects that he knows are deserving of it.
And he sponsors us, or he sponsored me or something like that, among many, many other people, because he uses Phosphor icons in something. So there’s talking about it more, but there’s also products that are supposed to help with this… There’s one called Tea, which is – I don’t know too much about it, but I know it’s basically a… It’s a blockchain-based thing, which - set that fact aside, but the whole idea is coming up with a quantitative measure of how critical and how important libraries are.
For example, there might be like a – somebody is thanklessly maintaining this compression library, which is used in every single piece of infrastructure software around the world. And they live in Boise, Idaho…
Create interactive tutorials the easy way
Tomek Sułkowski from TutorialKit joins Jerod to tell him all about the open source toolkit for creating awesome, interactive tutorials without having to code up the hard parts.
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Tomek Sułkowski: Yeah. So basically, that was our design partner for creating a web containers API. And now you can use this technology, this engine on your website, building whatever you want to build, if you imagine if you had an OS on your website.
People started building very interesting projects on top of it, like their own code editors and playgrounds… And there’s a project that provides you details on any package, something like Bundlephobia, but it’s using web containers to actually download the package in the browser, and provide you with the proper information about the structure and what it downloaded.
So the direct inspiration for the web containers API were the tutorials built by Rich Harris, but then it became a very universal tool. And since SvelteKit tutorial was such a big success, people from other teams, from other frameworks, were also inspired by it. And there is now – I think since the beginning of this year, there is an interactive Angular tutorial. If you go to angular.dev, they have a cool, new documentation and an interactive tutorial, that looks very similar in structure and functionality to SvelteKit. And there’s also a very cool tutorial in progress built by Anthony Fu from the Nuxt team… You can see in his stream - I think there was like 10 video series; you can find it on YouTube - where he actually built the tutorial app from scratch.
[00:12:16.11] And again, if you look at it, it takes him a lot of time, a lot of hours, and it’s not a trivial app… But you end up with something similar to SvelteKit tutorial, similar to Angular tutorial… So we took a look at this and - it’s kind of not something that we usually do anymore as developers, building this same structure from scratch. Usually, we have a framework for everything right now.
There’s a TUI for that
Nick Janetakis is back and this time we’re talking about TUIs (text-based user interfaces) — some we’ve tried and some we plan to try. All are collected from Justin Garrison’s Awesome TUIs repo on GitHub. This episode is “AI free.”
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Jerod Santo: So you might have to like up-arrow, select it, and then you can hit Tab or whatever, and then you can like delete back, and stuff like that. You can probably do a quick shell expansion thing with the exclamation mark, and that kind of stuff, which is obviously more Kung Fu, and things that I can’t remember how they work all the time… But yeah, it’s not smart enough to know “I just want the flags.” I liked that version of ls, but now I’m doing it in different contexts. I want to change the path, or use no path. I think you can have it to just do that stuff manually.
3D web game dev jam!
Two-time React Jammer, Brian Breiholz, joins Jerod & Nick to discuss building 3D games in the browser! We hear of his game jam trials & tribulations, the in-progress game engine he’s building, the dream game he’s been building for a long time & more
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Nick Nisi: It just said, “Surely not everyone was kung fu fighting.” [laughter]
The ol' hot & juicy
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.
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Adam Jacob: Definitely. I mean, accused? There’s no accusing. He 100% has this slant. And I’ve always believed, I still believe that he genuinely believes that he’s right. I think he genuinely believes that the relicensing is necessary, that these companies have to do it, that if they don’t, they’re going to be eaten; that they’re preserving the shape of their fu[ture]… I think he genuinely believes that. And that’s okay. I can respect it. I see how you get to that thing.
More BMC goodness
Our beat freak in residence returns, this time to discuss the shiny new Dance Party album! We deconstruct its nostalgic mix, break down some of our favorite tracks & even learn that BMC is writing a mysterious book…
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Jerod Santo: In fact, when I first listened to it, I thought “He’s doing the Kung Fu noises because of the song title, but I wonder if he doesn’t even need them, and maybe they’re distracting.” But then I got used to them and I like them now, so I got over it… But I wonder what other people think about that.
From sales to engineering
Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who…
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Jerod Santo: Yes. And of course, Tejas also sung their praises when he was on the pod last year… So if you want to see Shaundai in Paris, if you want to see Tejas Kumar, if you like such names as Josh Comeau, Una Kravets, Anthony Fu, lots of interesting speakers - check out React Paris. The website, react.paris.
[10:18]
The OpenAI debacle (a retrospective)
Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry.
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Chris Benson: And I forget the name of the one that came after Mira. It’s escaping me right now while we’re talking. But the OpenAI employees, on their internal Slack, were using - “I’ll gently say FU, and showing the middle finger on their Slack. Apparently, the employees had enough. By the time we got to mid-weekend, and going on Saturday into Sunday, the employees started finding their voice, as we’ll hear about next.
Backslashes are trash
Mat Ryer returns with his guitar, an unpopular opinion & his favorite internet virus.
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Adam Stacoviak: I was really into ninjas. This is the age of life Kung Fu happening, Bruce Lee was popular…
Beat freak in residence
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.
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Breakmaster Cylinder: Yeah, like Kung Fu.
Attack of the Canaries!
This week we’re joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.
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Jerod Santo: And that seemed like – I don’t know the history of that, did they buy that back from him, or it’s just the case, but it seems like you could have done that, had your FU money and then just continued along your way.
Sidney Bing, Elk for Mastodon, writing an engineering strategy, what's next for core-js & cool tool lightning round
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. ⚡️
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Jerod Santo: Elk is a nimble Mastodon web client by Kevin Deng, Anthony Fu, Patak, Daniel Roe and other members of the Vue and Vite team. You can find it in early alpha at elk.zone. It’s already quite usable, supports multiple account switching, and is generally a great example of how much Mastodon and the Fediverse are capturing the hacker spirit that was once focused on Twitter.
We discuss the phenomenon on this upcoming Friday’s episode of The Changelog with Evan Prodromou. He kind of predicted it back in 2017 when we had him on the show for the first time:
Forking SQLite, generative AI for music, saying no to sprints, awesome diagramming tools & state machine facts
The libSQL community is forking SQLite, StabilityAI announces Haromai and Dance Diffusion, Robin Rendle doesn’t believe in sprints, Shubham Garg curates some awesome diagramming tools & Chris Pressey writes up some must-read facts about state machines.
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Neo: I know kung fu.
From WeWork to upskilling at Wilco
This week we’re joined by On Freund, former VP of Engineering at WeWork and now co-founder & CEO of Wilco. WeWork you may have heard of, but Wilco maybe not (yet).
We get into the details behind the tech and scaling of WeWork, comparisons of the fictional series on Apple TV+ called WeCrashed and how much of that is true. Then we move on to Wilco which is what has On’s full attention right now. Wilco has the potential to be the next big thing for developers to acquire new skills. Wilco aims to be the ultimate simulator to gain new skills on a real-life tech stack. If you want to skip ahead, you can request access at trywilco.com/changelog — they are moving our listeners to the top of the waiting list.
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On Freund: Yeah. And you can also throw in some Kung Fu, and that would be really amazing.
Hacking with Go: Part 1
Natalie and Mat explore hacking in Go from the eyes of 2 security researchers. Joakim Kennedy and JAGS have both used Go for hacking: writing malware, hardware hacking, reverse engineering Go code, and more.
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Joakim Kennedy: But it does teach you Kung Fu pretty quickly though…
Juju, Jujucharms, and Gorram with Nate Finch
Nate Finch joined the show this week to talk about Juju, Charms, maturing a project along side Go, Gorram, finding your happy path, and more.
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Nate Finch: Yeah, I’ve been following that… So it has been implemented, but there’s still time to roll it back if it’s decided that we should. What aliases are is you can put a definition in your package that is, for example, “type Fu => some other package’s type”. The => looks like a right-facing big arrow.
11ty goes fully independent
11ty creator Zach Leatherman is taking the open source site generator fully independent in 2024 and he’s back on the pod to tell us why, how & what we all can do to help.
Full-stack approach for effective AI agents
There’s a lot of hype about AI agents right now, but developing robust agents isn’t yet a reality in general. Imbue is leading the way towards more robust agents by taking a full-stack approach; from hardware innovations through to user interface. In this episode, Josh, Imbue’s CTO, tell us more about their approach and some of what they have learned along the way.
Generating the future of art & entertainment
Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.
Future of [energy, content, food]
We’re taking you back to the hallway track at THAT Conference where we have 3 MORE fun conversations: one with Samuel Goff about the future of energy, one with YouTuber Jess Chan about the future of content creation & one with Vanessa Villa / Noah Jenkins about ag tech & the future of food.
Back to the terminal of the future
This week on The Changelog Adam is joined by Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO of Warp. We talked with Zach last year about what it takes to build the terminal of the future, and today Adam catches up with Zach to see where they are at on that mission. They talk about the business model of Warp, how they measure success, reaching product/market fit, building features developers love, integrating AI, and the pros and cons of going open source (again).
Fundamentals all the way down
Austin Gil returns to JS Party, bringing a fresh perspective on the fundamentals of file uploads. Brace for an insightful session as we navigate the complexities of this key JavaScript topic together, much like a dedicated coach drilling the fundamentals into his team!
Passkeys for a passwordless future
This week we’re talking about Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, Head of Passwordless, at 1Password. Will Passkeys enable a passwordless future? Time will tell. Anna shares the what, the why, how, and the when on Passkeys.
Hyperswitch, the future of programming, Thoughtworks' latest tech radar & your docs aren't "simple"
Hyperswitch is like the adapter pattern for payments, Austin Henley writes about the future of programming by summarizing recent research papers, Thoughtworks published their 28th volume of their Tech Radar, the team at General Products reminds devs to scan our technical writing for words such as “easy”, “painless”, “straightforward”, “trivial”, “simple” and “just” & we finish with a lightning round of cool tools.
A new path to full-time open source
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.
The future of React
Dan Abramov & Joe Savona from the React Team join Jerod & Nick for a wide-ranging discussion about React’s place in the frontend ecosystem. We cover everything from React competing with React, their responses to SPA fatigue and recent criticisms, to Server Components and the future of the framework.
I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer
Filippo Valsorda:
Last May I left my job on the Go team at Google to experiment with more sustainable paths for open-source maintainers. I held on to my various maintainer hats (Go cryptography, transparency tooling, age, mkcert, yubikey-agent…), iterated on the model since September, and I’m happy to report that I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer.
People like Filippo are still (unfortunately) the exception, not the rule. BUT! I’ll celebrate every time an open source maintainer makes it to the promised land, hopefully paving the way for others to follow after.
I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet.