Changelog Master Feed

Google has been releasing a ton of new GenAI functionality under the name “Gemini”, and they’ve officially rebranded Bard as Gemini. We take some time to talk through Gemini compared with offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. We also discuss the recent FCC decision to ban the use of AI voices in robocalls and what the decision might mean for government involvement in AI in 2024.

Our award winning worthy survey game show is back, this time Mat Ryer hosts it live on stage at GopherCon EU Athens 2024! Join in & play along as we see which team can better guess what these GopherCon gophers had to say!

Changelog Beats drops a new Dance Party album, Will McGugan’s new Toolong (tl) terminal app, Mitchell Baker is out as Mozilla CEO, Microsoft’s Jordi Adoumie announces sudo for Windows, Tatu Ylonen tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22 & Jack Lindamood gives an “Endorse” or “Regret” rating for ~50 different services, tools & processes he used over the 4 years he led infrastructure at a startup.

We’re taking you back to the hallway track at THAT Conference where we have 3 MORE fun conversations: one with Samuel Goff about the future of energy, one with YouTuber Jess Chan about the future of content creation & one with Vanessa Villa / Noah Jenkins about ag tech & the future of food.

The week Amal & guest co-host Eric Clemmons talk to Dan Abramov all about React Server Components. We learn about why they were created, what problems they solve & how they work to improve application performance. We also dive into the rollout and current support status, the origin story, the community response & walk through the 10+ years of React history which have forever shifted the world of web development.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she’s had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they’ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

Our “what’s new in Go” correspondent, Carlana Johnson, joins Johnny & Ian to discuss what’s new with the latest iteration of Go in version 1.22.

Nous Research has been pumping out some of the best open access LLMs using SOTA data synthesis techniques. Their Hermes family of models is incredibly popular! In this episode, Karan from Nous talks about the origins of Nous as a distributed collective of LLM researchers. We also get into fine-tuning strategies and why data synthesis works so well.

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist’s world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.

We’re taking you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we’re in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

KBall & Amal interview Alex & Pavel from the Angular Signals team. They cover the history, how the Angular team decided to move to signals, what the new mental model looks like, migration path & even dive into community integrations and future roadmap.

Angelica is joined by Neil S Primmer & Benji Vesterby to share their experience organizing “Capture the Flag” at GopherCon 2023. CTF events involve teams vying for supremacy as they strive to gather digital flags (presented as strings) and successfully submit them to the competition organizers. In essence, it’s a thrilling “scavenger hunt for nerds.” Join us as we unravel the intricacies and excitement of this unique gaming experience!

Recently the release of the rabbit r1 device resulted in huge interest in both the device and “Large Action Models” (or LAMs). What is an LAM? Is this something new? Did these models come out of nowhere, or are they related to other things we are already using? Chris and Daniel dig into LAMs in this episode and discuss neuro-symbolic AI, AI tool usage, multimodal models, and more.

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Our old friend José Valim & his team have been hard at work adding gradual typing to Elixir. They’re only 1-3% of the way there, but a lot of progress has been made. So, we invited him back on the show for a deep-dive on why, how & when Elixir will be gradually typed.

This week we’re going deep on security and what it takes to shift left, seriously. Adam is joined by Justin Garrison (co-host of Ship It), plus two members of the BoxyHQ team — Deepak Prabhakara, Co-founder & CEO and Schalk Neethling, Community Manager and DevRel as well as fellow Changelog Slack member. We discuss how to shift left, the role of the developer and the burden of security, the importance of tooling, the difference between authentication and authorization, and a mindset change for when security takes place — it’s a matter of “when” not “who.”

Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who…

Small changes in prompts can create large changes in the output behavior of generative AI models. Add to that the confusion around proper evaluation of LLM applications, and you have a recipe for confusion and frustration. Raza and the Humanloop team have been diving into these problems, and, in this episode, Raza helps us understand how non-technical prompt engineers can productively collaborate with technical software engineers while building AI-driven apps.

Over the past 8 years, Go Time has published 300 episodes! In this episode, the panel discusses which ones they loved the most, some current stuff that’s in the works, what struggles the podcast has had & what we’re planning for the future.