The Changelog

We're making some big Changelog changes in 2025, the previously featured Stanford study on ghost engineers doesn't live up to the hype, Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repository into a simple text ingest of its codebase, Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyrd / Eventbrite & Matheus Lima warns us about six mistakes that new managers make.

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert join Adam and Jerod for a ShopTalk & Friends conversation on the viability of the web, making content, ads to support that content, Codepen's future plans, books, side quests, and social networks devaluing links.

Jerod is joined by Hack Clubber Acon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Latta and the Hack Club crew that's incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff.

Alex Russell answers the question, "If not React, then what?" Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch's Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare's R2 competitor.

Nick Sweeting joins Adam and Jerod to talk about the importance of archiving digital content, his work on ArchiveBox to make it easier, the challenges faced by Archive.org and the Wayback Machine, and the need for both centralized and distributed archiving solutions.

Adam & Jerod hallway-track-it before our All Things Open interviews. We discuss the trend in rebooting old school vehicles, our likes & dislikes of EVs, the Hummer's new crab walk, Tesla's gambit & more (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)

Ben Affleck's take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram's CodingFont.com is like Zoolander's Walk Off but for coding fonts.

Our friends Johannes Schickling & James Long join us to discuss the movement of local-first, its pros and cons, the tradeoffs, and the path to the warming waters of mostly local apps.

Today we're joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe... that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.

Evan Doyle says AI makes tech debt more expensive, Hunter Ng researches the ghost job ad phenomenon, Gavin Anderegg analyzes Bluesky in light of its recent success, Martin Tournoij rants against best practices & Evan Schwartz tells us why he thinks binary vector embeddings are so cool.

Adam & Jerod discuss the news! Our Merch sale, useful built-in macOS CLI utilities, the slow death of the hyperlink, systematically estimating a project's bus factor, The Browser Company abandoning Arc, the Dead Internet theory & more!

We're on the main stage at THAT Conference with Danny Thompson. He has an amazing story and journey into tech. Thanks to our friends at Cloudflare for helping us get to THAT Conference earlier this year to enable this conversation. Special thanks to Nick Nisi and Clark Sell for coming in clutch and getting us the audio to ship this show!

Changelog Merch is now on sale, IronCalc sets out to democratize spreadsheets, Grant Slatton writes about algorithms we develop software by, Mark Rainey gives respect to the ultimate in debugging, Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes & Johannes Kaufmann’s html-to-markdown converts entire websites into Markdown.

We take you one last time back to the All Things Open 2024 hallway track to talk with some friends, new & old. We speak with Alex Kretzchmar about self-hosting. We speak with Israa Taha about self-confidence. We speak with Avindra Fernando & Adhithi Ravichandran about self-employment.

The hallway track at All Things Open 2024 — features Carl George, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat for a discussion on the state of open source enterprise linux and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Max Howell, creator of Homebrew and tea.xyz which offers rewards and recognition to open source maintainers, and Chad Whitacre, Head of Open Source at Sentry about the launch of Open Source Pledge and their plans to helps businesses and orgs to do the right thing and support open source.

IEEE Spectrum reports on the return to physical buttons and dials, Microsoft released GenAIScript, iFixit's Elizabeth Chamberlain announces a big Right to Repair win, Daniela Baron reimagines technical interviews & John O'Nolan, shares some thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media

We join the Whiskey Web and Whatnot podcast live from the hallway track at All Things Open 2024. Topics include: Chianti, content creation, open source, fake jobs, cancel culture, Silicon Valley (ding), frontend frustrations, the Roman empire & more.

(Includes expletives) David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, joined the show to discuss this Rails moment and renewed excitement for Rails. We discuss hard opinions, developers being cooked too long in the JavaScript soup, finding developer joy, the pros and cons of the BDFL, the ongoing WordPress drama with WP Engine, and what's to come in Rails 8.

Daniel Quinn weighs in on how to develop with Docker The Right Way, Mitchell Hashimoto says Ghostty will be publicly released this coming December, Kevin Li writes about the value of learning how to learn, The Browser Company moves on from Arc & the React Native team ships its new architecture.

At the tail end of 2019, we got together with Quincy Larson to celebrate ten years of Changelog & five years of freeCodeCamp by recording back-to-back episodes on each other's pods. Can you believe it's now five years later and we're all still here doing our thing?! Let's learn what Quincy and the amazing community at freeCodeCamp have been up to!