Benn Stancil’s weekly Substack on data and technology provides a fascinating perspective on the modern data stack & the industry building it. On this episode, Benn joins Jerod to dissect a few of his essays, discuss opportunities he sees during this slowdown & discuss why he thinks maybe we should disband the analytics team.

Marcus J. Ranum’s 2005 post on dumb ideas in computer security still holds up, Barry Jones argues why story points are useless, Posting is an HTTP client as a TUI, Varnish ceator Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) reflects on ten years of working on the HTTP cache & es-tookit is a major upgrade to Lodash.

Shawn “swyx” Wang is back to talk with us about the state of DevRel according to ZIRP (the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon), the data that backs up the rise and fall of job openings, whether or not DevRel is dead or dying, speculation of the near-term arrival of AGI, AI Engineering as the last job standing, the innovation from Cognition with Devin as well as their mis-steps during Devin’s launch, and what’s to come in the next innovation round of AI.

Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase (the meme-lord himself), joins the show to take us on the journey of Supabase leading Postgres for life, and how it all starts with Postgres as the base-layer substrate for the entire Supabase platform. They’re laser focused on the drive ahead, not the rear-view mirror.

Disclosure: Adam and Jerod are angel investors in Supabase.

Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can’t fund Firefox & Hyrum’s Law.

Adam & Jerod discuss the news! But first, we discuss how you can keep up with the software world (good question, Tyler Boyd!) On the docket: Developer job postings trend, the Ladybird Browser Initiative, the Polyfill.js supply chain attack & is the future self-hosted?

Carol Lee (Clinical Scientist) shares her research on code review anxiety. We dive deep into her recent research paper “Understanding and Effectively Mitigating Code Review Anxiety”. We get into all the nooks and crannies of this topic — common code review myths, strategies for coping, the need for awareness and self-reflection, the value of exposure and practice to build confidence, the importance of team dynamics, respect, empathy, and connection, and more. This show is jam-packed with goodies for everyone…and we even give a nod to the work we did on our podcast Brain Science.

Software developer jobs are trending down, the creator of dotenv creates a better dotenv, the Chrome team puts Gemini Nano AI model right inside your browser, a pollyfill.js supply chain attack hits 100k+ sites & Steph Ango asks, “What can we remove?”

Welcome to Kaizen 15! We go deep on the big Changelog News redesign, give shout outs to folks who’ve helped us along the way & Gerhard takes us on his journey to turn Jerod’s pipe dream into a reality!

Predrag Gruevski and Chris Krycho joined the show to talk about SemVer. We explore the challenges and the advantages of semantic versioning (aka SemVer), the need for improving the tooling around SemVer, where semantic versioning really shines and where it’s needed, Types and SemVer, whether or not there’s a better way, and why it’s not as simple as just opting out.

Søren Fuglede Jørgensen builds a font thats also an LLM, Hugo Landau writes about the demise of the mildly dynamic website, SQL Studio is the simplest little database explorer ever, Mathew Duggan reviews GitHub Copilot Workspace & Stephan Schmidt lays out the case against mocking + what to do instead.

Daniel Stenberg shares his guiding principles for BDFL’ing curl, gives us his perspective on the state of the internet, talks financial independence, ensuring curl won’t be the next XZ & more!

Jacob DePriest, VP and Deputy Chief Security Officer at GitHub, joins the show this week to talk about securing GitHub. From Artifact Attestations, profile hardening, preventing XZ-like attacks, GitHub Advanced Security, code scanning, improving Dependabot, and more.

Luminousmen writes about Senior Engineer Fatigue, Microsoft rethinks its AI-based Recall feature, Mike Hoye gives a big shout out to the “diff” program, Thom Holwerda covers ChromeOS’ quiet switch to Android Linux subsystems & Mihail Eric tells the inside story on how Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system on Earth.

Justin Searls joins us for hot takes on Apple’s 2024 WWDC keynote. Apple Intelligence stole the show, but did it steal our hearts? Oh, and we learn all about Justin’s Vision Pro Life and how he hopes/expects Apple’s latest device to improve in future iterations.

Adam & Jerod hallway-track-it between Microsoft Build interviews. Was 1999 the best year in film history? Was 2004 the worst? Have you heard the full story behind Blues Traveler’s “Hook”? Are you still reading this? Go listen! (This episode is for Changelog++ ears only.)

Kelsey Hightower is back to share more of his wisdom. This time it’s one year after his retirement from Google. But guess what? He might be “retired,” but he’s not tired. In this episode Kelsey shares what drives him, what he fears, and how he thinks through his life choices and parenting. This is a good one.

Apple announces its “new” style of AI, piku gives you “git push” deployment on your own servers, Dabo Chen rebuilds nanoGPT in a spreadsheet, Mark Seemann thinks you’ll regret using natural keys in your database design & Glyph Lefkowitz describes his grand unified theory of the AI hype cycle.

What happens when you take three #define newbs (Thomas Eckert, Nick Nisi, Mat Ryer) & pit them against the grizzled vet, Adam? Find out on this episode because our award-worthy game of fake definitions is back & this time it’s even more legendary!

Mark Russinovich, Eric Boyd & Neha Batra join us to discuss the state of AI for Microsoft and OpenAI at Microsoft Build 2024. It’s safe to say that Microsoft is all-in on AI.

A popular open source iOS authenticator app goes rogue under new ownership, Andreas Kling steps back from SerenityOS & forks Ladybird, Vhyrro takes a thought-provoking try at a “static effect system”, Matt Bessey is over GraphQL & Marc-Andre Giroux still likes GraphQL sometimes (in the right context).

Tech lawyer Luis Villa returns to answer our most pressing questions: what’s up with all these new content deals? How did Google think it was a good idea to ship AI Summaries in its current state? Is it too late to opt out of AI? We also discuss AI in Hollywood (spoilers!), positive things we’re seeing (or hoping for) & Upstream 2024 (June 5th)!

Scott Guthrie joins the show this week from Microsoft Build 2024 to discuss Microsoft being all-in on AI. From Copilot, to Azure AI and Prompty, to their developer first focus, leading GitHub, VS Code being the long bet that paid off, to the future of a doctor’s bedside manner assisted with AI. Microsoft is all-in on AI and Build 2024’s discussions and announcements proves it.

Swizec’s article on not using AI to writes tests, LlamaFs is a self-organizing file system with Llama 3, a Pew Research analysis confirmed that the internet is full of broken links, Sam Rose built a spectacular interactive study of queueing strategies & Jordan Cutler shares a real-life experience of him writing clear/readable code… and it backfiring.

We kick off our Microsoft Build 2024 “coverage” in this free-wheelin’ conversation with our friend, Shaundai Person! We’re talking Netflix infra, we’re talking sales, we’re talking real-world AI usage, we’re talking career choices…. What’s a good next step? Listen in!

Bryan Cantrill, Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Adam to share his journey from Sun to Oxide – from Sun and Fishworks, to DTrace, to ZFS, to Joyent and Node.js, and now working to build on-prem cloud servers as they should be at Oxide.

Taylor Troesh writes Kyle explaining “Legacy Software” to the aliens, Vitaly Friedman addresses why so many designers feel misunderstood and under appreciated in business contexts, Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu & hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game.

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam to discuss their experiences with building the “perfect media server” and all the hardware and software involved to make it happen — LinuxServer.io, PerfectMediaServer.com, Plex, Jellyfin, ZFS, mergerfs, TrueNAS, Docker Compose and so much more in this episode.

Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what’s in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.

Tim Fisken explains the problem with soft deletion, a simple measure of software dependency freshness is proposed, a deep-dive on sound design in software, a web app with over 80 handy developer tools built in & Luke Plant reminds us that programming mantras are proverbs, not laws.