The Changelog

Spencer Chang caught our attention with the alive internet theory website, but he creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. Spencer's experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and flourishing for years to come.

Nilo Stolte explains why Zig is "a totally new way to write programs", George Mack gives twelve actionable ways to be more creative, Mario Zechner shares his findings on using MCP vs Bash tools, Josh Collinsworth compares creating AI art to medieval alchemy, LibrePods unlocks AirPods features for Android, and our first ever Changelog News Classifieds.

Do you like director's commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week's News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React's seemingly perpetual dominance, and more.

Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is "good taste" in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News.

A new AI-led tech role has emerged with a massive increase of job postings, Corey Quinn explains why younger devs won't tolerate pain in the AWS, Thomas Ptacek makes the case that you should write an agent, Paul Kinlan goes deeper on his dead framework theory, and Andrew Gallagher says to stop vibe coding your unit tests.

On this seventh iteration of our award-worthy game show filled with obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery: past winners battle to determine the champion of champions. (Also, Adam.)

Andrew Nesbitt builds tools and open datasets to support, sustain, and secure critical digital infrastructure. He's been exploring the world of open source metadata for over a decade. First with libraries.io and now with ecosyste.ms, which tracks over 12 million packages, 287 million repos, 24.5 billion dependencies, and 1.9 million maintainers. What has Andrew learned from all this, who is using this open dataset, and how does he hope others can build on top of it all? Tune in to find out.

Ahmad Alfy explains how URLs are state containers, Shrivu Shankar shares how he uses every Claude Code feature, Yusuf Aytas laments how AI broke technical interviews, Wu Xiaoyun tells how he saved TikTok $300k during his internship, and TOON is a new serialization format to save us some LLM tokens.

It's a FRIGHT...when your record a podcast with dead projects all around. Tech debt, poor choices, timing, market shift, and optimizing for the wrong things are all lurking around waiting to pop out at you! Just don't forget to push record.

Adam Jacob joins us to discuss how agentic systems for building and managing infrastructure have fundamentally altered how he thinks about everything, including the last six years of his life. Along the way, he opines on the recent AWS outage, debates whether we're in an AI-induced bubble, quells any concerns of AGI and a robot uprising, eats some humble pie, and more.

The Dead Internet Theory dies, Geoffrey Litt tries to code like a surgeon, Matt Sephton thinks spreadsheets are great for UI design, Nate Meyvis advocates for front-end maximalism, Hemant Pandey thinks 9-5 employment is a great option for most, David Miranda compares React to Backbone in 2025.

It's our first Kaizen after the big Pipely launch in Denver and we have some serious mopping to do. Along the way, we brainstorm the next get-together, check out our new cache hit/miss ratio, give Pipely a deep speed test, discuss open video standards, and more!

Ellie Huxtable's magical shell tool, Atuin, won developers' hearts by syncing, searching, and backing up our shell history with ease. Now Ellie is tackling the desktop with a GUI built to help teams make their workflows repeatable, shareable, and reliable.

Csaba Okrona lays out exactly what Flow is (then shows you how to engineer your way back to it), a smart vacuum turned against an innocent hacker, Matz and the Ruby core team step up to steward RubyGems, Simon Willison things Claude Skills could be bigger than MCP, and Luke Plant looks at technical debt from a more positive perspective.

Mike McQuaid and Justin Searls join Jerod in the wake of the RubyGems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money in open source, what sustainability really means for our community, making a career out of open source (or not), and more. Bleep!

We're joined by Deepak Singh from the Kiro team. Kiro is AWS's attempt at building an AI coding environment to take you from prototype to production. It does that by bringing structure to your agentic workflow with spec-driven development. Their aim: the flow of AI coding, leveled up with mature engineering practices.

Denis Stetskov describes how we've "normalized catastrophe" in the software industry, Meta is officially handing React and React Native over to a foundation, The New Stack reports on GitHub's Azure migration priority, Miguel Grinberg benchmarks Python 3.14, and The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman published his take on AI art.

Elixir creator, José Valim, is throwing his hat into the coding agent ring with Tidewave –a coding agent for full-stack web development. Tidewave runs in the browser alongside your app, but it's also deeply integrated into Rails and Phoenix. On this episode, José tells us all about it. Also: his agent flow, YOLO mode, an MCP hot take, and more.

Our friends at Cult.Repo launch their epic Vite documentary on October 9th, 2025! To celebrate, Jerod sat down with Evan You to discuss Vite's adoption story, why he raised money to start VoidZero, how developer documentaries get made, open source sustainability, and more.

Abner Coimbre makes a compelling case why our biggest technical talent should abandon for-profit social platforms, Noah Brier creates a Claude Code and Obsidian starter kit, Bharath Natarajan documents the Vercel vs Cloudflare fight, Toolbrew is a well-designed website brimming with common utilities, and Yusuf Aytas analyzes why over-engineering happens.

Over the past two months, we've seen some of the most serious supply chain attacks in npm history: phishing campaigns, maintainer account takeovers, and malware published to packages with billions of weekly downloads. What is going on?! What can we do about it? Our old friend, Feross Aboukhadijeh, joins us to help make sense of it all.

Charlie Marsh built Ruff (an extremely fast Python linter written in Rust) and uv (an extremely fast Python package manager written in Rust) because he believes great tools can have an outsized impact. He believes it so much, in fact, that he started an entire company that builds next-gen Python tooling. On this episode, Charlie joins us to tell us all about it: why Python, why Rust, how they make everything so fast, how they're starting to make money, what other products he's dreaming up, and more.

Andrew Churchill thinks companies should really be hiring junior engineers, Addy Osmani announces Chrome DevTools MCP, GitHub lays out a roadmap to fend off npm attacks, Jerry Liu builds an app that generates a timeline of your day's activities, and Sean Goedecke attempts to define "good taste" in the context of software engineering.

Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, the co-founders of Oxide, are on the pod live (to tape) from the stage at OxCon. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. The best part was this on-stage discussion with Bryan and Steve. Enjoy!

Voices of Oxide on the pod! Cliff Biffle (engineer), Dave Pacheco (engineer), and Ben Leonard (designer) are on the show today. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference called OxCon to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. Cliff Biffle is working on all Hubris and firmware. Cliff says "There's a lot that happens before the 'main CPU' can even power on." Dave Pacheco is leading the efforts on Oxide's "Update" system. And Ben Leonard in charge of all things brand and design at Oxide.

Adolfo Ochagavía believes we're approaching the problem of configuration from a flawed starting point, Annie Mueller hits us with a wakeup call about how she reads beginner tutorials, Brian Kihoon Lee spends some time meditating on taste, Namanyay thinks vibe coding is coders braindead, and Can Elma speculates on why AI helps senior engineers more than juniors.

Carl George joins the show to talk about Texas Linux Fest, Omarchy, Linux desktop environments, configuring Linux, and more. Use the code `CHL15` for 15% off your ticket to Texas Linux Fest.

Everything is changing. Adam is joined by his good friend Beyang Liu from Sourcegraph — this time, talking about Amp (ampcode.com). Amp is one of the many, and one of Adam's favorite agentic coding tools to use. What makes it different is how they've engineered to it to maximize what's possible with today's frontier models. Autonomous reasoning, access to the oracle, comprehensive code editing, and complex task execution. That's nearly verbatim from their homepage, but it's also exactly what Adam has experienced. They talk through all things agents, how Adam might have been holding Amp wrong, and they even talked through Adam's idea called "Agent Flow". If you're babysitting agents, this episode is for you.

Zach Gates quantifies the value of automating things, Albania's new prime minister names an AI "minister" to his Cabinet, Eckart Walther launches Really Simple Licensing (RSL) along with some big names on the web, Vishnu Haridas praises UTF-8's design, and Justin Searls disagrees with last week's headline story about AI coding tools and shovelware.

Mike Judge breaks down why he doesn't believe the AI coding claims add up, the folks behind Cactoide create an open source alternative to Meetup / Eventbrite, Ryan Farley tells the story of how RSS beat Microsoft, Dominik Szymański ditched Docker for Podman (and thinks you should too), and Stripe announces a new layer 1 blockchain called Tempo.

Jim Remsik has lived on the bleeding edge (but also the heart's center) of the Ruby world for decades. This fall, he's organizing six (yes, SIX) XO Ruby confs all around the United States. On this episode, Jim joins us to reminisce about the early days of Ruby and Rails, share what he's learned from so many years of organizing events, and invite all of us to join him on his upcoming 7500 mile road trip.

Dominik Meca is infuriated by Next.js, Josh Bressers explains why open source is just one person, Huon Wilson describes the usefulness of "Copy as cURL", Herman Martinus re-licenses Bear, and Nawaz Dhandala unpacks why dependency bloat is such a pervasive problem.

Arun Gupta, now a "free agent" after his surprise exit at Intel, joins us to discuss how he's dealing with his first job hunt since the 1990s. Along the way, we talk about agentic coding strategies, what GPT-5's release implies about the future, and more. (US buys 10% of Intel)++

Our friends at Cult.Repo launch their epic Python documentary on August 28th, 2025! To celebrate, we sat down with Travis Oliphant –creator of NumPy, SciPy, and more– to get his perspective on how Python took over the software world. Stick around for the twist ending! We set aside Python and dissect Travis' big idea to make open source projects financially sustainable through direct investment.

Elon Musk and xAI take on Microsoft, DHH ships version 2 of Omarchy (his love letter to Linux), Glyn Normington on managing developer's block, Mitchell Hashimoto declares that all Ghostty contributions must disclose AI tooling, the United States government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and Adam Derewecki thinks we should do things that don't scale, then don't scale.

Our Changelog & Friends proof-of-concept with Mat Ryer has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Originally recorded: 2023-02-08 Mat joins us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that's been on our radar. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It's good fun.

The epic show with Adam Jacob has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Adam goes solo with Adam Jacob 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 and enjoy.

Cursor has a big problem, Alireza Bashiri thinks plaintext beats todo apps, Manish built an offline AI workspace, OverType is a WYSIWYG markdown editor that's just a textarea, and sshrc lets you bring your config with you to remote machines.

Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company's $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he's avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is leading the way in biocomputing at FinalSpark where she is working on the next evolutionary leap for AI and neuron-powered computing. It's a brave new world, just 10 years in the making. We discuss lab-grown human brain organoids connected to electrodes, the possibility to solve AI's massive energy consumption challenge, post-silicon approach to computing, biological vs quantum physics and more.

Open source maintainers share their regrets, Thomas Dohmke steps down as GitHub CEO, James Kettle breaks down HTTP/2 from a security perspective, PHP is getting the pipe operator this November, and a class action copyright suit threatens Anthropic and the rest of the AI industry.

Gerhard calls Kaizen 20, 'The One Where We Meet'. Rightfully so. It's also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipely live on stage with friends.