The hallway track at All Things Open 2024 — features Carl George, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat for a discussion on the state of open source enterprise linux and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Max Howell, creator of Homebrew and tea.xyz which offers rewards and recognition to open source maintainers, and Chad Whitacre, Head of Open Source at Sentry about the launch of Open Source Pledge and their plans to helps businesses and orgs to do the right thing and support open source.

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If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp’s Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics’ scary cool new robot, Justin Searls’ extensive use of the Apple Vision Pro, Thorston Ball moving from Vim to Zed, Firefox becoming hard to use, Beeper joining Automattic & more.

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We’re taking you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

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This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we’re in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

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Our old friend José Valim & his team have been hard at work adding gradual typing to Elixir. They’re only 1-3% of the way there, but a lot of progress has been made. So, we invited him back on the show for a deep-dive on why, how & when Elixir will be gradually typed.

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In this episode, we will talk about building for Blockchain in Go. We are joined by two of the co-founders of Prysmatic Labs (a company behind the upgrades to the Ethereum network). Raul Jordan and Preston Van Loon tell Angelica how they started the company, as well as what it’s like to build technical infrastructure for the Ethereum blockchain using Go.

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This week Jerod is joined by Paul Biggar the creator of Dark, a new way to build serverless backends. Paul shares all the details about this all-in-one language, editor, and infrastructure, why he decided to make Dark in the first place, his view on programming language design, the advantages Dark has as an integrated solution, and also why it’s source available, but NOT open source.

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Craig Wiley, from Google Cloud, joins us to discuss various pieces of the TensorFlow ecosystem along with TensorFlow Enterprise. He sheds light on how enterprises are utilizing AI and supporting AI-driven applications in the Cloud. He also clarifies Google’s relationship to TensorFlow and explains how TensorFlow development is impacting Google Cloud Platform.

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It’s a new year which means companies are hiring and developers are interviewing. So we thought it would be fun to host a fun game of technical Jeopardy.

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We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS.

We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.

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In this post, I will show you some advanced usage patterns for working with Playwright in order to take a screenshot of a specific element and modify the contents of the image, either before taking the screenshot or after, using image preprocessing tools.

The Squeaky team goes from dev straight to prod (same here), but many people advocate for (and use) staging or other “pre-live” environments instead.

While there are obvious benefits to deploying to different environments, at Squeaky we’ve decided to take a different approach. We only have two environments: our laptops, and production. Once we merge into the main branch, it will be immediately deployed to production.

Perhaps that sounds unusual, but so far it’s outweighed the benefits of pre-live environments, and we believe it’s helping us to ship faster, and lower the number of issues on production. So, I thought I’d write this post to share why we think it works, and why you should consider it too.

whereas most tools (try to make it) easy to get notes in, they tend to make it hard to get them back out later, and it only gets worse as you add more notes. Dendron helps you get notes back out and works better the more notes you have.

There are a zillion and one note taking apps out there, but I like how Dendron positions itself here. I’ve never had a note-taking system that I stuck with, mostly because I rarely go back and find things in my notes that are useful. Most of that’s on me, but I wonder if some of it is on my tools not making retrieval a priority…

We’re talking with Syrus Akbary about WebAssembly and Wasmer — a standalone just in time WebAssembly runtime aiming to be fully compatible with Emscripten, Rust, and Go. We talked about taking WebAssembly beyond the browser, universal binaries, what’s an ABI?, running WebAssembly from any language, and what a world might look like with platform independent universal binaries powered by WebAssembly.

The thing about taking notes apps is everyone likes ‘em a bit different. Here’s what the author of Notable was after:

Notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn’t bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that’s what I was using before).

If that resonates with you, click through. 😄

As many of you know, and hopefully are ready for, we will be recording LIVE today at 6PM EST, which is a little more than an hour away! We are very excited, and you can keep up with us at any of the following:

• https://changelog.com/live
• https://changelog.com/irc
• #thechangelog on freenode

The show will be myself, Adam Stacoviak, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz and Jerod Santo. We will be discussing the relaunch, news and much more as it relates to Open Source!

That’s enough advertising, now on to the real purpose of the post!

While preparing for the new Podcast, I decided to dig around and look for the best (open source) note taking application I could find. I have heard about Notational Velocity, by Zachary Schneirov.
Obviously, by the looks of it, development has ceased on the project   the code hasn’t been updated in 2 years.

However, a fork of the project, which I heard Merlin Mann discuss on another podcast I listen to, has continued to improve. The fork is nvALT by Brett Terpstra and it is what I will be using today while recording the new podcast!

Brett has written a great summary of what Notational Velocity is, what nvALT is, and the features that this application has. If you are interested in contributing to a growing, fun Mac App, this is a great place to start!

As usual, you can view the source on GitHub or visit the project’s homepage.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she’s had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads.

We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they’ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.

We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.

Yes, to all of this! Dave Bailey, author of The Founder Coach, shared ten useful patterns to help nurture more generous interpretations of others’ behaviors.

Reading this makes me really miss producing Brain Science.

When we encounter emotions and behaviours that don’t make sense to us, it’s often because we don’t have all the information. And in the absence of information, we tend to assume the worst.

‘Emotional generosity’ is the ability to see past behaviours that we don’t understand and proactively look for compassionate ways to explain them. It’s easy to do this for young children. If they start crying or throwing a tantrum, we wonder whether they are hungry, or tired, or hurt. Sadly, it’s harder to do this for adults — and especially our co-workers. And yet a more generous interpretation of their difficult behaviour often ends up being right.

It’ll take some time to plumb the depths of this list, but if you’re desperate searching for a good idea, it might just be worth your while. 🤞

It maybe is even the listing of approximately all startup ideas

Liran Tal:

How do you cope with the issues of libraries having security vulnerabilities but there’s no fix yet? With open source packages this might even be more apparent than ever. Maintainers are rightfully not in any contract to provide you support, yet you rely on third-party software by volunteers.

In this piece I want to show you how we’ve adopted surgical patches to help remove this burden and risk from users.

While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conversation on the dark side of artificial intelligence.

Build yourself a personal wiki for 2019 and beyond.

David Cramer dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.

Static site JAMStack generators are on the come-up and Gatsby looks super cool.

This post is a bit heavy on the hype-side, but a good intro nonetheless if you want to check it out without, you know, checking it out.

When you think about it, how many of the open source projects that you use all
the time are not heavily funded operations?

Medium.js is a very minimal and straightforward approach to rich text editing in the browser that’s based on the awesome editor powering Medium.

From the docs:

Medium.js overrides many default keyboard events and substitutes a more cross-browser compliant way to interact with contenteditable elements. This means that you can use contenteditable without fearing your user is going to enter poor or invalid HTML. It keeps things tight, organized, and semantic.

MIT Licensed. Source code on GitHub.

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?

We are on the other side of “big data” hype, but what is the future of analytics and how does AI fit in? Till and Adithya from MotherDuck join us to discuss why DuckDB is taking the analytics and AI world by storm. We dive into what makes DuckDB, a free, in-process SQL OLAP database management system, unique including its ability to execute lighting fast analytics queries against a variety of data sources, even on your laptop! Along the way we dig into the intersections with AI, such as text-to-sql, vector search, and AI-driven SQL query correction.

We’re back with another spicy YepNope debate! This time, Nick & regular guest Eric Clemmons are arguing that web development should need a build step, while KBall & special guest Amy Dutton argue that we really shouldn’t. Of course, the stance each panelist is taking is assigned ahead of time. Is that how they really feel? Tune in to find out!