Tech twitter (“tech X”?) is abuzz with Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay. How does that affect you or come into play when you’re not a founder? Does it matter at all to you, your projects & your code?
Erez Zukerman shares the story of launching the ErgoDox EZ on Indiegogo (May 2015), what it takes to create customizable ergonomic keyboards, the benefits of split keyboards and custom key layouts, repairability and longevity, community engagement, and the attention to detail required in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and keyboard…we cover it all.
We’re joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip’s origins, how it’s open source, the way it’s led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community…all the things.
Adam Jacob goes solo with Adam for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up. This is a different flavor of “Friends” for you. Enjoy.
Joseph Jacks (JJ) is back! We discuss the latest in COSS funding, his thesis for investing in commercial open source companies, the various rug pulls happening out there in open source licensing, and Zuck/Meta’s generosity releasing Llama 3.1 as “open source.”
Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase (the meme-lord himself), joins the show to take us on the journey of Supabase leading Postgres for life, and how it all starts with Postgres as the base-layer substrate for the entire Supabase platform. They’re laser focused on the drive ahead, not the rear-view mirror.
Disclosure: Adam and Jerod are angel investors in Supabase.
Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what’s in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.
This week we’re joined by Dustin Bluck to discuss his acquisition of the well known (and beloved) Castro podcast app to take it indie-focused once again. As previous users of Castro, we were excited to dig into the details behind this popular podcast client to see what’s next, how the deal was done, a peek into the code, and where exactly this indie and creator focused podcast app can go.
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.
This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.
This week we’re talking to Scott Chacon, one of the co-founders of GitHub, to discuss the history and future of Git and Scott’s new project Git Butler, a branch manager tool that’s aiming to improve the developer experience of Git using Git. We also touch on the contentious topic of open source licensing and the challenges of defining “Open Source”, FSL vs GPL, and more.
This week Adam is joined by Zeno Rocha — the creator of the beloved Dracula theme and Co-founder and CEO of Resend. They discuss his personal journey and the challenges of balancing work and family life, how becoming a parent has given him new perspectives and influenced his decision to start his own company, the role of citizenship and immigration in his journey, how he prepared for the Y Combinator interview, meeting Paul Graham, the challenges of sending email, and the future of Resend and the possibility of a Series A round.
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.
Adam is joined by Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant — they discuss Bourbon, sniffing arms, better software, leading a successful startup, scaling teams, building vs acquiring, and Adam even gets Robert to commit to watching Silicon Valley!!
The Zed text editor has come a long way since Nathan Sobo came on the show last year to tell us about this follow-up to Atom. Zed is open source now, has the underpinnings of collaboration built in, is beginning its journey toward full extensibility, is coming to Linux soon & shows serious promise if Nathan’s team can mix their secret sauce just right.
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.
Amal & Nick are joined by Saron Yitbarek (developer, podcaster, community leader & serial entrepreneur) to catch up and discuss her latest project: Not A Designer
We discuss all the ins & outs of tech entrepreneurship & the challenges of building something new in today’s saturated market. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at how she does it & get a sneak peek on what’s possibly next! (Spoiler Alert: we brain stormed it here)
Jared Henderson joins us to discuss the state of the art in software parental controls and how we protect our children and lock down our home networks from the constant onslaught of malicious and unwanted content.
This week Jerod goes solo with Philipp Heckel, creator of ntfy, to discuss this simple HTTP-based service that lets you send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer. They discuss why he built it, how he built it, and what his plans are for the future of this beloved side hustle.
With a name like PartyKit, you know we just had to get its founder and CEO Sunil Pai on the show! PartyKit is an open source tool that simplifies creating collaborative, multiplayer applications. Join us to learn all about it and the journey of Sunil and his team!
This week Adam is joined by Abi Noda, founder and CEO of DX to talk about DX AKA DevEx (or the long-form Developer Experience). Since the dawn of software development there has been this push to understand what makes software teams efficient, but more importantly what does it take to understand developer productivity? That’s what Abi has been focused on for the better part of the last 8 years of his career. He started a company called Pull Panda that was acquired by GitHub, spent a few years there on this problem before going out on his own to start DX which helps startups to the fortune 500 companies gather real insights that leads to real improvement.
This week we’re joined by Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker. Now he’s back with his next big thing called Dagger — CI/CD as code that runs anywhere. We’re users of Dagger so check out our codebase if you want to see how it works. On today’s show Solomon takes us back to the days of Docker, what it was like on that 10 year journey, his transition from Docker to Dagger, Dagger’s community-led growth model, their focus on open source and community, how it works, and even a cameo from Kelsey Hightower to explain how Dagger works.
This week Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. Scott shares his journey to the CEO role, how he’s leading the company to not only grow revenue, but to also invest in developer facing features, their shift from a enterprise sales focus to a PLG driven model, and we even talk about Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.
This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.
