The Changelog

Gerhard Lazu joins us for Kaizen 16! Our Pipe Dream™️ is becoming a reality, our custom feeds are shipping, our deploys are rolling out faster & our tooling is getting `just` right.

Jimmy Miller talks to us about his experience with a legacy codebase at his first job as a programmer. The codebase was massive, with hundreds of thousands of lines of C# and Visual Basic, and a database with over 1,000 columns. Let's just say Jimmy got into some stuff. There's even a Gilfoyle involved. This episode is all about his adventures while working there.

Scott Chacon writes up his insider take on GitHub's success, Sentry wants other companies to take the Open Source Pledge, Benj Edwards used AI to reproduce his late father's handwriting, Dave Kiss explains the current hype that PHP is getting & Taylor Otwell raises $57 million series A from Accel.

Jerod & Adam share our Zulip first impressions, react to Elasticsearch going open source (again), discuss Christian Hollinger's blog post on why he still self-hosts & answer a listener question: how do we produce podcasts?

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.

A Rust for Linux developer resigns amidst rising tension in the Linux community, Bret Victor shows off what he's been working on for years, Rachel (by the bay) laments how useless "SRE" has become as a role, Doug Turnbull makes the case for hiring junior devs & Baldur Bjarnason says the LLM honeymoon phase is about to end.

Emily Freeman joins the show alongside our Ship It co-host, Justin Garrison! We hear Emily's burnout story & learn how she and Forrest Brazeal are putting tech-focused influencers on tap. But first: area code turf wars, bad movie reboots & buying used DVDs... at Starbucks?!

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.

The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk's Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing.

What happens when you take two #define champs (Taylor Troesh, Thomas Eckert), a grizzled veteran (Adam Stacoviak), a british bard (Mat Ryer), a PhD (Carol Lee) & you pit them against each other in a game of fake tech definitions?! There's only one way to find out...

Ryan Worl, Co-founder and CTO at WarpStream, joins us to talk about the world of Kafka and data streaming and how WarpStream redesigned the idea of Kafka to run in modern cloud environments directly on top of object storage. Last year they posted a blog titled, "Kafka is dead, long live Kafka" that hit the top of Hacker News to put WarpStream on the map. We get the backstory on Kafka and why it's so widely used, who created it and for what purpose, and the behind the scenes on all things WarpStream.

Waymo cars make bad neighbors, Leonardo Creed pulls together wisdom from Linus Torvalds & the Art of Unix Programming to conclude what good programmers worry about, Max Schmitt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience, ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor, Simon Tatham makes a list of code review anti-patterns & scientists confirm that 'flow state' is very much a thing.

Adam & Jerod catch up with our ol' friend, Suz Hinton! It's been a couple years since Suz was a regular on JS Party. Since then, she moved back to Australia, earned a degree in cyber security & won a fidget spinner from the NSA... but that's not all!

Flavors of Ship It on The Changelog — if you're not subscribed to Ship It yet, do so at shipit.show or by searching for "Ship it" wherever you listen to podcasts. Every week Justin Garrison and Autumn Nash explore everything that happens after `git push` — and today's flavors include running infrastructure in space, managing millions of machines at Meta, and what it takes to control your 3D printer with OctoPrint.

Chris Stjernlöf got nerd-sniped and ended up writing down his practices of reliable software design, Ben Visness has had enough with the npm community's propensity to pull in micro-libraries to suit every need, "Stay SaaSy" makes three metaphors for problem solving categories, Troy Hunt takes us inside the "3 billion people" National Public Data breach & Dasel is one data tool to rule them all.

You won't believe the bizarre secrets Jordan Eldredge found investigating corrupt Winamp skins (#7 will shock you)! You also won't believe how long we can wax nostalgic about the era of Napster, Aladdin & Pearl Jam.

Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath have joined forces to form a non-profit called Ladybird Browser Initiative to manage the newly forked Ladybird browser. We discuss what it's going to take to get to alpha, the why behind Ladybird, avoiding incentives other than those of the users, their plans for incremental adoption of Swift as the successor language over C++, and of course what they hope Ladybird can achieve as a truly independent open source browser that's for the people.

Jimmy Miller tells us about the best, worst codebase he's ever seen, The Phylum Research Team follows up on the great npm garbage patch, Zach Leatherman logs his findings on sneaky serverless costs, David Cain wants you to go on quests instead of goals & Ashley Janssen gives us szeven rules for effective meeting culture.

Database aficionado, Ben Johnson, joins Jerod to answer the age ol' question: which database should you use? Answering that isn't always easy, which means it's time to play the "It Depends" jingle & weigh (some of) the options.

Dennis E. Taylor joins the show to take us "Into the Bobiverse" and other books he's written. Dennis shares the backstory on how he went from programmer to author/writer and creator of Audible's Best Science Fiction Book of 2016, his process for iterating and developing the story as he writes, plans for a Bobiverse movie, and what's next in book 5 coming out in September 2024.