Changelog Master Feed

Benn Stancil's weekly Substack on data and technology provides a fascinating perspective on the modern data stack & the industry building it. On this episode, Benn joins Jerod to dissect a few of his essays, discuss opportunities he sees during this slowdown & explain why he thinks maybe we should disband the analytics team.

Marcus J. Ranum's 2005 post on dumb ideas in computer security still holds up, Barry Jones argues why story points are useless, Posting is an HTTP client as a TUI, Varnish ceator Poul-Henning Kamp (_phk_) reflects on ten years of working on the HTTP cache & es-tookit is a major upgrade to Lodash.

Shawn "swyx" Wang is back to talk with us about the state of DevRel according to ZIRP (the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon), the data that backs up the rise and fall of job openings, whether or not DevRel is dead or dying, speculation of the near-term arrival of AGI, AI Engineering as the last job standing, the innovation from Cognition with Devin as well as their mis-steps during Devin's launch, and what's to come in the next innovation round of AI.

Git was designed to be distributed but there is a lot of gravity around GitHub. What does the model look like for a business that encourages you to run your own git server and what does the backend for gitea.com look like?

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.

KBall takes another dive into recent hot topics around reactivity and build systems, this time with three members of the Ember core team. They also talk about some of the reasons why the Ember community has been so long lived, how thinking about upgradeability leads to universality, and how features first built specifically for frameworks make their way into the language specification or universal libraries.

Daniel & Chris explore the advantages of vector databases with Roie Schwaber-Cohen of Pinecone. Roie starts with a very lucid explanation of why you need a vector database in your machine learning pipeline, and then goes on to discuss Pinecone's vector database, designed to facilitate efficient storage, retrieval, and management of vector data.

Mat Ryer has been writing HTTP services in Go for more than 13 years. Needless to say, he’s learned a lot along the way. Today, Johnny & Ian sit down with Mat to ask him all about it.

Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can’t fund Firefox & Hyrum’s Law.

Gareth Greenaway from the Salt project joins us for a trip down memory lane with configuration management and why open source projects have changed over the past decade.

Adam & Jerod discuss the news! But first, we discuss how you can keep up with the software world (good question, Tyler Boyd!) On the docket: Developer job postings trend, the Ladybird Browser Initiative, the Polyfill.js supply chain attack & is the future self-hosted?

Philipp Burckhardt, Athan Reines & the team behind stdlib.io believe in a future in which the web is a preferred environment for numerical computation. They’ve been working toward building that future for over a decade. Thanks to listener, Brian Zelip, Jerod sits down with Philipp to learn all about this excellent effort: where it’s been & where it’s headed.

Dependencies! We need them, but how do we use them effectively and safely? In this week’s episode Kris is joined by Ian and Johnny to discuss the polyfill.io supply chain attack, the history of dependency management and usage in Go, and the Go Proverb that “a little copying is better than a little dependency”. Of course, we wrap up the episode with some Unpopular Opinions!

Carol Lee (Clinical Scientist) shares her research on code review anxiety. We dive deep into her recent research paper “Understanding and Effectively Mitigating Code Review Anxiety”. We get into all the nooks and crannies of this topic — common code review myths, strategies for coping, the need for awareness and self-reflection, the value of exposure and practice to build confidence, the importance of team dynamics, respect, empathy, and connection, and more. This show is jam-packed with goodies for everyone…and we even give a nod to the work we did on our podcast Brain Science.

We’ve had representatives from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) on the show in the past, but we were super excited to talk through their 2024 AI Index Report after such a crazy year in AI! Nestor from HAI joins us in this episode to talk about some of the main takeaways including how AI makes workers more productive, the US is increasing regulations sharply, and industry continues to dominate frontier AI research.

Software developer jobs are trending down, the creator of dotenv creates a better dotenv, the Chrome team puts Gemini Nano AI model right inside your browser, a pollyfill.js supply chain attack hits 100k+ sites & Steph Ango asks, “What can we remove?”

Bailey Hayes & Taylor Thomas from Cosmonic join the show for a look at WebAssembly Standard Interfaces (WASI) and trade-offs for portable interfaces.

Welcome to Kaizen 15! We go deep on the big Changelog News redesign, give shout outs to folks who’ve helped us along the way & Gerhard takes us on his journey to turn Jerod’s pipe dream into a reality!

Jerod sits down with React Native aficionado, Simon Grimm, to catch up on everyone’s favorite native app platform & learn about Expo, which Simon thinks is the way forward for devs building with React Native.

Predrag Gruevski and Chris Krycho joined the show to talk about SemVer. We explore the challenges and the advantages of semantic versioning (aka SemVer), the need for improving the tooling around SemVer, where semantic versioning really shines and where it’s needed, Types and SemVer, whether or not there’s a better way, and why it’s not as simple as just opting out.