Our friend Ron Evans is a technologist for hire, an open source developer, an author, a speaker, an iconoclast, and one of our favorite people in tech. This conversation with Ron goes everywhere: from high-altitude weather balloons, to life on Mars, to Zeno’s paradox applied to ML, to what open source devs should learn from the Wu-Tang Clan & more.

Brian LeRoux joins Jerod to share how the Enhance team are bringing server side rendered web components to everyone. With Enhance WASM, you author components in friendly, standards based syntax and reuse them across multiple languages, frameworks & servers.

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.

Daniel Hooper lists out all the good ideas in computer science, Jeff Geerling declares 2024 the year corporate open source dies, Jared Turner says all kinds of works-in-progress are waste, Daroc Alden covers the leadership crisis in the Nix community & John Hawthorn explains why Ruby may be faster than you think.

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 we’re joined by Louis Pilfold, the creator of the Gleam programming language. For the uninitiated, Gleam is a functional programming language for building type-safe systems that compiles to Erlang and JavaScript and it’s written in Rust. We discuss the inspiration and development of Gleam, how it compares to other languages, where it shines, the overwhelming amount of support Louis is getting through GitHub sponsors, what’s next for Gleam and their near-term plans for a language server.

Forrest Brazeal is concerned about the open source threat from within, Vicki Boykis explains why Redis is forked, John O’Nolan and the Ghost team plan to federate over ActivityPub, Llama 3 is now available for “businesses of all sizes” & nolen writes up questions to ask when you don’t want to work.

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.

Kelvin Omereshone is here to get you excited about boring, reliable tech. He believes a combination of Sails, Inertia, Tailwind & your frontend rendering library of choice are a great combo for building web apps. Tune in to find out why.

YouTuber “Internet of Bugs” breaks down why AI “software engineer” Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov’s attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashicorp’s Cease and Desist letter, Brian LeRoux introduces Enhance WASM & PumpkinOS is not your average PalmOS emulator.

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…

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.

HashiCorp sends OpenTofu a nasty-gram in the wake of Matt Asay’s infringement claims, Polar is like Patreon but for software creators, a Common Corpus of LLM data is released on HuggingFace & Loki is an open source tool for fact verification.

Thisis our 14th Kaizen episode! Gerhard put some CDNs to the test, we’ve taken our next step with Postgres on Neon & Jerod pushed 55 commits (but 0 PRs)!

The big story right now is the recently uncovered backdoor in liblzma (aka XZ) – a relatively obscure compression library that happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH.

This incident is noteworthy for so many reasons: the exploit itself, how it was deployed, how it was found, what it says about our industry & how the community reacted. Let’s dig in!

Which is smarter: specializing in a particular tech or becoming more of a generalist? It depends! Which is why Jerod invited “undercover generalist” Adolfo Ochagavía on our “It Depends” series to weigh the pros & cons of each path.

Jerod, KBall & Nick discuss the latest news: Devin, Astro DB, The JavaScript Registry, Tailwind 4 & Angular merging with Wiz. Oh, and a surprise mini-game of HeadLIES!

Script flipped! Today we’re sharing two interviews of us on Other People’s Podcasts (OPP): Kathrine Druckman from the Open at Intel podcast invited us on the show at KubeCon NA in November and Den Delimarsky hosted Jerod on The Work Item podcast in February.

Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we’re bringing you conversations all about AI’s complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog.

Redis’ re-licensing prompts forks like Drew DeVault’s Redict, Matthew Miller thinks we need more community built software, Paul Gross makes the case that DuckDB is the new jq, Anton Zhiyanov shares how he makes a living as a developer despite being “pretty dumb” & Baldur Bjarnason chimes in on the state of the web developer job market.