The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as “the open source Firebase alternative,” a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam’s perspective, he’s never been more excited about what they’re bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone from 0 to more than 80,000 databases on their platform — and they’re still in beta…and it’s open...

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the...

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart’s Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way.

Our 4th annual year-end wrap-up episode! We don’t naval gaze often, but when we do… we make sure you get your money’s worth. Reflections, most popular episodes, our favs, and new this year: listener voice mails. Thanks for listening! 💚

We’re joined by Eran Yahav — talking about AI assistants for developers. Eran has been working on this problem for more than a decade. We talk about his path to now and how the idea for Tabnine came to life, this AI revolution taking place and the role it will play in developer productivity, and we talk about the elephant in the room - how Tabnine compares to GitHub Copilot, and what they’re doing to make Tabnine the AI assistant for every developer regardless of the IDE or editor you choose.

Today we’re bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we’ve covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and Christina Gorton for hosting us. Check out their show at dev.to/devdiscuss

We’re prepping for our 4th annual state of the “log” episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond. We thought it’d be awesome to include some listener voices on the show! So, please share your favorite Changelog guests, topics, or a-ha moments you’ve had over the last year. If you get your message included in the episode, we’ll send you a free t-shirt. It...

Today we’re joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it’s used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what’s next in funding open source creators, and we attempt to answer the question “what happens to open source once it’s funded?”

Today we’re joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify’s developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify’s hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of scaling millions of storefronts. We cover what developers can expect from the Hydrogen...

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by...

Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features $STDOUT and contains explicit language.

Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the struggle of being an open source software maintainer.

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring...

Today we’re talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill. If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we’ll get in touch and send you a...

This week we’re joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we’re talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great...

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It’s the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan’s history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna,...

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is...

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective.