Mike McQuaid, maintainer of Homebrew, and now CTO at Workbrew joins us to discuss open tabs, social media spam and distractions, TikTok’s addictive nature, Apple Vision Pro and its potential future, the maintenance of software, the swing back to old school web development, the value of telemetry in open source projects, Mike’s ongoing involvement in Homebrew and what they’re working on at Workbrew, Homebrew’s relationship with Apple, the importance of developer experience, and sooo much more.

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

This week we’re joined by Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). They are responsible for representing the idea and the definition of open source globally. Stefano shares the challenges they face as a US-based non-profit with a global impact. We discuss the work Stefano and the OSI are doing to define Open Source AI, and why we need an accepted and shared definition. Of course we also talk about the potential impact if a poorly defined Open Source AI emerges from all their efforts.

Note: Stefano was under the weather for this conversation, but powered through because of how important this topic is.

Daniel Ehrenberg (software engineer at Bloomberg, web standards author / champion & VP of ECMA International) joins us to discuss new features that have landed in JavaScript and to preview what’s cooking in various standards bodies across the web platform.

We cover a wide array (get it?) of topics from improvements to built-ins such as Promises, Maps & Sets, as well as new primitives like Records, Tuples & Temporal. We round out this epic discussion with a look at cross-project standardization efforts like WinterCG, open source sustainability & how Bloomberg’s open source program gives back in important projects in the web ecosystem.

Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk, embedded vector search offering. We talk about how their unique columnar database structure enables serverless deployments and drastic savings (without performance hits) at scale. This one is super practical, so don’t miss it!

The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.” We couldn’t agree more, and we are so happy that this week’s guest Casper (among other contributors) have created this resource for practitioners.

During the episode, we cover the key categories to think about as you try to navigate the open source AI ecosystem, and Casper gives his thoughts on fine-tuning, vector DBs & more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week we’re talking about the launch of OpenTF and what it’s going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp’s Terraform. We’re joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how HashiCorp’s license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it.

This week we’re talking to Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird. Andreas started SerenityOS as a means of therapy. It’s self-described as a love letter to “‘90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core.” Andreas previously worked at Nokia and later at Apple on the WebKit team, so he had an itch to do something along the lines of a browser, and that’s where Ladybird came from. We get into the details of compilers, OSs, browsers, web specifications, and the love of making software.

This week we’re talking with Jonathan Carter who’s on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we’re talking about 30 years of Debian!

Ok Homelabbers, it’s time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that’s what homelab is about. Let’s do this.

Red Hat’s decision to lock down RHEL sources behind a subscription paywall was met with much ire and opened opportunity for Oracle to get a smack in and SUSE to announce a fork with $10 million behind it.

Few RHEL community members have been as publicly irate as Jeff Geerling, so we invited him on the show to discuss.

This week we’re talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe’s entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe’s codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob and we’re talking about his mission at System Initiative to rebuild DevOps. They are out of stealth mode and ready to show off their transformative new power tool that reimagines what’s possible from DevOps. It’s an intelligent automation platform that allows DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure and use them to rapidly update their production environments.

This is our last week of hallway track coverage at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Jeffrey Sica (Developer Experience & Programs @ CNCF), Eddie Zaneski (Kubernetes SIG CLI), Yaron Schneider (Co-creator of Dapr and Founder and CTO at Diagrid).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week on The Changelog we’re continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week on The Changelog we’re taking you to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Beyang Liu (Co-founder and CTO at Sourcegraph), Denny Lee (Developer Advocate at Databricks), and Stella Biderman (Executive Director and Head of Research at EleutherAI).

Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

This week we’re talking about LLMs with Simon Willison. We can not avoid this topic. Last time it was Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. This time it’s LLMs breaking the internet. Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, Bing, GitHub Copilot X, Cody…we cover it all.

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.

This week Evan Prodromou is back to take us deeper into the Fediverse. As many of us reconsider our relationship with Twitter, Mastodon has been by-and-large the target of migration. They helped to popularize the idea of a federated universe of community-owned, decentralized, social networks. And, at the heart of it all is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol published by the W3C. It is co-authored by Evan as well as; Christine Lemmer-Webber, Jessica Tallon, Erin Shepherd, and Amy Guy. Today, Evan shares the details behind this protocol and where the Fediverse might be heading.