Ashley Jeffs: But the problem then is I had so many different things going on. Like, there’s all these different contracts, and now I’ve got all these different like bosses of various types… Some of them doomed to never earn me any income. There was like procurement processes, and because I’m not in the US, I don’t know how any of this stuff works. I’m not a diplomat. I would have to be jumping through these procurement hoops to prove that I’m a person, and I can sell you support, and I’m not going to run away… And it was just a nightmare trying to juggle all of these contracts.

And I had some great sponsors. That was working really well… But I felt like the popularity of Benthos at about the 2022 era was getting to the point where I couldn’t cope anymore with just myself on it full-time. And then a few – we had quite a few contributors at the time that are like the core blobs. The real ones. And they were around a lot to help in like the support channels and stuff, but it wasn’t going to be enough long-term. We were going to end up like getting to the point where we’re all burned out, and I could kind of see that coming. So that was about the era where I kind of realized I need to stop being the dumb, immature kid on the internet, and actually think about what’s the actual sustainable model that would keep all of this going, that’s not just me clumsily bobbing from like one support contract to the next. I did make a good go of that, which we can go into if you want… But then ultimately, it wasn’t particularly successful.

Jerod Santo: Rug pulls aren’t cool, but are they worth it?

RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens decided to “examine if changing an underlying open source project’s license from an OSI-approved license to a proprietary license has a measurable impact on financial outcomes for the commercial entity backing the project.”

That’s not an easy question to answer, but that didn’t stop her. She looked at MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp & Confluent’s revenue, market cap & net income over time. Click through for the charts. For the conclusion:

While in our sample we see revenue grow post-license change, we don’t see a notable change in the rate of growth. We also see very mixed results in company valuation, and there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company’s value.

Alex Russell: [10:24] I’m apparently a product manager on the Edge team at Microsoft. But I still work on making web pages faster. And that work started when I was on the Chrome team at Google for a long time… Because we started to see that folks who were trying to build these kinds of richer experiences that we were just talking about were getting beached pretty frequently. Folks would start with high ambitions for the end user, and then because of the tools and techniques and cultural assumptions that they had brought with them from what was in circa 2015-2016 the dominant ideology about how you built nice things on the web, we ended up with teams who had built themselves into a corner with extremely tall piles of JavaScript, in a moment when the market was changing dramatically.

So since 2015 or 2016, we’ve seen just the continued explosion of what happened in 2007 with the iPhone moment. But from – I want to say 2013, 2014, it was pretty clear that diffusion was going to take hold worldwide, not just in wealthy Western markets, and that meant that we were going to see this extreme profusion of cheap devices, where every year, to the extent that Moore’s Law continued to play out, it meant that you could get more transistors per year, per dollar. But that didn’t translate into faster phones for most people; that translated into their first smartphone. And that meant that every year, the same capability got cheaper. And that just grew the market.

And so it’s only now, 2023-2024, that we’re starting to see full saturation, or let’s say replacement of what used to be the market for dumb phones being replaced by smartphones. Feature phone handsets were as late as 2019 half of the entire market in India, and that has finally rounded the bend. And so now we’re in a place where folks are starting to get maybe their second phones based on replacement rates and income worldwide. That’s not what it is maybe where we live, but the global reality is continuing to change… But that change, for most of the last decade, has meant that computers didn’t get any faster. They stopped getting faster. And so our patterns and practices as a culture for people who are building on the web had been set; they sort of cemented in 2013 on this idea of “CPUs get faster, networks always get faster, and that means we can afford more JavaScript every year.” And that has created one gigantic branch mispredict. And that great branch mispredict in the sky has caused us, sort of at a cultural level, to make choices that are not compatible with actually delivering good experiences for most people, including people who are wealthy, but just don’t happen to be at the right time in place right now… And so it’s been fascinating to see this turn to access, and then hopefully away… But I’m excited about HTMX and some of the patterns around it in that context.

Daniel Vassallo: I used to. So I did this for a couple of years. And this was another thing, actually, related to what I’ve been talking about. So long story short, I was using Gumroad to sell my own products for a while. I got to know the CEO of Gumroad, Sahil, over Twitter, just because - you know, business relationship; he used to ping me with new features, ask my feedback, so on and so forth… So it was a bit of a warm lead there.

[50:04] One fine day, random day, it was August 2020, pandemic period, I remember I was just scrolling Twitter… And I saw Sahil posted a “We’re hiring” tweet. And it was mostly programming jobs in areas that I had no knowledge in; sort of Android development, and some other things… But I clicked out of curiosity, because it was part-time work, high hourly rate, and I was curious at Sahil was doing.

At the very, very bottom of the page - it was a long page, with lots of technical job openings - there was an asterisk, and Sahil said, “Eventually, I’m looking for somebody to help me with product management at Gumroad.” And I thought - again, I never had a product management role in my life, specifically it was never my title, my job description. Nevertheless, for my last two years at AWS I was almost hybrid software engineer/product manager/team lead; sort of I was doing a bit of jack of all trades. I was [unintelligible 00:50:57.18] team. Our real manager had left, and we couldn’t fill the vacancy, so I was sort of doing lots of different things. And I enjoyed it, I thought I was reasonably good at it, and Gumroad happened to be a product I was using every day; I was recommending it to people, because I enjoyed the tool, very simple to use… And I got to know Sahil a little bit… And I sent him, an email; and I wasn’t looking for a full-time job or anything. And I told him – and again, this was literally a couple of hours later. Slack in the system; I didn’t just say “Eventually.” I reached out immediately. I said to him “Look, I don’t know what you’re looking for; I don’t know if you’re looking for something part-time or whatever for this, but I was wondering if you’d consider not even part-time, but a quarter time though… I could maybe do (I said) like 10 hours a week on average.” And I told him, “As you know, I use Gumroad every day, I have some good ideas. I worked as a de facto PM for a little bit, even though it was never my official job title. I love Gumroad”, so on and so forth.

We jumped on the phone the next day< and I started doing it. So I did it for a couple of years, until May of last year, I think. I was doing this on a very – it was a freelancing gig, essentially. It was a contract type job, helping the Gumroad engineering teams sort of prioritize things, prioritize features, scope features, talk to customers and figure things out, things like that.

One thing in my portfolio - again, in the meantime I was doing several, four or five other things… But this was a nice income stream; eventually Gumroad grew so much that it sort of became almost impossible to keep up with everything happening. That’s why primarily I stopped, because it was quite a nice arrangement, but it sort of became too difficult. And again, I wasn’t looking for a full-time job. That was very important for me. 10 hours a week was the most I could dedicate, I wanted to dedicate to a single activity like this. Once I started thinking about 20 hours or more, it started to feel “I don’t want it to be that big.” So yeah.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but go and subscribe to the Changelog Newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as:

• Decomplexification
• The case for using a web browser as your terminal
• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news

Have a great week!

Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Jerod Santo: MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0

Anil Dash is as excited about MCP as almost everyone else is:

The interesting thing about the rapid adoption of MCP isn’t the specification itself. Honestly, the spec is… kinda mid. Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled in the first place, they would be scratched out in “plain text”, with the occasional shouting in ALL CAPS about what we SHOULD and MUST do. MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A – vibe protocol –. But MCP works! And it’s open — and that’s what counts.

He thinks the rapid adoption of MCP represents a second coming of the entire ethos of Web 2.0. Remember Web 2.0?!

The Web 2.0 community was a bunch of folks building lots of different sites that were meant to have open APIs that let developers (and even users!) explore and connect people and data together in interesting and unexpected and useful and even weird ways. The standard-bearers of the era were sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us and Upcoming, which pioneered things like tags and social sharing.

I made the same connection when discussing MCP with Richard Moot from Square, but I’m not as optimistic as Anil is (currently) this time around:

The rise of MCP gives hope that the popularity of AI amongst coders might pry open all these other platforms to make them programmable for any purpose, not just so that LLMs can control them.

I shouldn’t complain too much about Web 2.0. At least it gave us podcasting. But what else do we still have from that era? And what is stopping the tech giants this time from changing their open tune as soon as it’s no longer expedient for their bottom line?

Angelica Hill: When does the Minecraft movie come out? And then when does the time change? And then when does the time change 2025. My three options.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but go and subscribe to the Changelog Newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as:

• Our Slack is dead. Long live Zulip!
• The Open Source Maintenance Fee
• The magic of software

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com/news

This week on the pod:

Wednesday: Derek Collison from Synadia talking NATS vs the CNCF
Friday: Our award-worthy #define game show returns with mystery guests

Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but go and subscribe to the Changelog Newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as:

• Redis is open source again
• The enshittification of tech jobs
• A Rust web framework that does not use async

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com/news

Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Jerod Santo: What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, April 28th, 2025.

It has come to my attention (thanks, Camilo!) that this newsletter has been “redesigned” in Gmail. I have changed nothing. Google has announced nothing. But the exact same email I sent a couple weeks ago looks radically different now.

Just another day in the world of distributed systems, where a complete stranger pees into the wind and you get the privilege of washing urine off your clothes…

Oh well, let’s get into this week’s news.

Kendall Miller: Number two, one of the most interesting things is every company needs to know – where do I start? Founders always underprice their product. I do this myself. You weren’t willing to pay 1,400 bucks, but 125 seemed cheap to you once I got back to it. I probably could have sold the bottle for 200 bucks and Jerod might’ve bought it. I don’t know, I’m probably handwavy. But founders always underprice their product. And one of the most important things for fixing that is finding out what are people’s budgets. So how much am I saving you - those kinds of conversations, but they’re really hard to have. So there’s this tactic called the bucketing method. And so what I say is “Jerod, I’ve got a nice bottle of whiskey here I want to put you into. It’s a 2025, you’re going to like the way that it drives and feels.”

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on. Such as:

• Exmerelda is an AI chatbot just for Elixir
• Pipelining might be my favorite language feature
• Awesome collection of GPT-4o images & prompts

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com/news

Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Jerod Santo: Maybe recently, 2025, or late 2024.

Jerod Santo: It’s now time for sponsored news!

Retool’s Q1 2025 release

The latest release from Retool includes over 100 improvements. If you’re on-prem, upgrade to 3.148. For everyone else, create a free account or login.

Here are 5 standout features that directly address frequent requests from customers deploying Retool.

1. Multipage apps are now the default building experience, giving you a better foundation for complex applications. Multipage apps are apps that consolidate several separate apps into a single, more maintainable application. Defaulting to this architecture delivers 27% faster load times on average.
2. Confirming production-readiness gets easier thanks to enterprise deployment controls that enable structured governance, collaboration, and testing for secure, reliable app releases.
3. Multi-instance releases is now in private beta. A simple manifest file designates consistent app version releases across multiple environments, enabling structured promotion from dev to production.
4. Usage Analytics has beeb enhanced. A redesigned dashboard provides tab-based views and granular insights into user engagement across your entire deployment.
5. Workflows are the next big thing. They let you create multistep functions with execution control and AI logic that can connect to dozens of databases, third-party services and APIs – and ship it all in a single click.

Check out the detailed release notes to learn more and thank you to Retool for sponsoring this week’s Changelog News.

Adam Stacoviak: …and I’m going to say that this is the year - 2025 is the year where durable execution of things is more important than it ever has been.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on. Such as:

• Self-hosting like it’s 2025
• A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code
• The blissful zen of a good side project

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com/news

Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and review if you dig the show, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Copyright’s there, 2025.

Jerod Santo: What we can learn from Milk Kanban

Pawel Brodzinski takes us back to Kanban’s roots and original purpose:

In its original meaning, Kanban represented a visual signal. The thing that communicated, well, something. It might have been a need, option, availability, capacity, request, etc.

In our Kanban systems, the actual Kanban is a sticky note…

It represents work, and given its closest environment (board, columns, other stickies, visual decorators), it communicates what needs, or needs not, to be done.

A visual signal all the way.

He then tells a story of how his office mate, Kasia, designed a perfectly simple Kanban system for milk inventory. It’s a good example with an even better lesson.

Amal Hussein: Yeah. 10 times faster – like, a bajillion times faster than you. So we have to relearn some things in terms of the way we work… But I think this is all part of the next phase of what it means to be a senior software engineer in 2025.

Jerod Santo: What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, March 24th, 2025.

IKEA is tapping in to our collective enjoyment of all things Severance with a new ad campaign highlighting their minimalist desks, acoustic screens, and moody lighting that they say is perfect ‘for work that is mysterious and important.’ Well played, IKEA. Well played. Meanwhile, I’m still working my way through Severance season 2. Slowly, surely, mysteriously and importantly.

Ok, let’s get into the news.