Changelog Master Feed

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

Filippo Valsorda & Roland Shoemaker from the Go Team return & bring Nicola Murino with them to continue catching us up on what’s new in Go’s crypto libraries. This is everything we didn’t cover + deep dives from Part 1!

The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.” We couldn’t agree more, and we are so happy that this week’s guest Casper (among other contributors) have created this resource for practitioners. During the episode, we cover the key categories to think about as you try to navigate the open source AI ecosystem, and Casper gives his thoughts on fine-tuning, vector DBs & more.

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite’s text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby’s open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

Jerod is back with another “It Depends” episode! This time he’s joined by Kris Brandow from Go Time and they’re talking all things API design. What makes a good API? Is GraphQL a solid choice? Why do we do REST wrong? And WTF does HATEOAS mean, anyway?

Gregg Tavares (author of WebGL/WebGPU Fundamentals) joins Jerod & Amal to give us a tour of these low-level technologies that are pushing the web forward into the world of video games, machine learning & other exciting rich applications.

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said “[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist.” Wise words. We discuss Hare (of course), why he’s so passionate about all things open source, the state of the language, fostering a culture that values stability, and oddly enough — what it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

In this enlightening episode, we delve deeper than the usual buzz surrounding AI’s perils, focusing instead on the tangible problems emerging from the use of machine learning algorithms across Europe. We explore “suspicion machines” — systems that assign scores to welfare program participants, estimating their likelihood of committing fraud. Join us as Justin and Gabriel share insights from their thorough investigation, which involved gaining access to one of these models and meticulously analyzing its behavior.

ChatGPT’s new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox’s share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can’t be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she’s ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the “code is read more than written” cliche with his own: “code is run more than read.”

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco? We also talk in-depth about Gergely’s self-published book, The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

This week we’re gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon…we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they’re working on at Sidero Labs.

Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.

Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry.

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.

Una Kravets, web platform ambassador & lead of the Google Chrome UI Developer Relations Team, joins Amal & Nick to take them CSS to school as they start this podcast in CSS kindergarten and end it with a Level-Up CSS Diploma. (LUCD?) We explore all the amazing features which have recently landed in CSS — enabling super-charged user experiences with no JavaScript. Don’t forgot to check out all the epic links & demos in the show notes — and hold on to your butts, kids, this one is a ride!

This week on we’re joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that’s designed to bring developers and design to the same tool. The question they’re trying to answer is “How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?” We go way back to Emil’s startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to here from 20 years ago (think PSD > HTML days), what they did to build Dev Mode, what they’re doing around codegen, the popularity of design systems, and what it takes to go from zero to Dev Mode.

Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the backstory technical details about this work from Shopify’s Russ Maschmeyer. Along the way we discuss how to come up with clever AI solutions (without training your own model).

The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a “eulogy” to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.

Jerod goes one-on-one with our old friend Justin Searls! We talk build vs buy decisions, dependency selection & how Justin has implemented POSSE (Post On Site Syndicate Elsewhere) in response to the stratification of social networks.

This week we’re talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company’s Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows.