

Changelog Interviews
Changelog Media
Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo face their imposter syndrome so you don’t have to. Expect in-depth interviews with the best and brightest in software engineering, open source & leadership. This is a polyglot podcast. All programming languages, platforms & communities are welcome.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Oct 28, 2022 • 1h 39min
Linux mythbusting & retro gaming
This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 8 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.com
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:Jay LaCroix – LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Learn Linux TV
RetroPie
The Homelab Show
All Things Open 2022
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 21, 2022 • 1h 13min
The terminal as a platform
This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:Will McGugan – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Textualize.io
Textualize is Hiring!
Textualize/textual
Projects using Textual
Textualize/rich
Projects using Rich
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 14, 2022 • 1h 24min
Taking Postgres serverless
This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0.
We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 6 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.com
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Featuring:Nikita Shamgunov – Website, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
neon.tech
Neon doubles funding to $54M
DB-Engines Ranking
datafold.com
The Changelog #476: Supabase is all in on Postgres
The Changelog #461: Fauna is rethinking the database
Practical AI #94: Operationalizing ML/AI with MemSQL
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 7, 2022 • 1h 35min
A new batch of web frameworks emerge!
This week we’re talking fresh, faster, and new web frameworks by way of JS Party. Yes, today’s show is a web framework sampler because a new batch of web frameworks have emerged. There’s always something new happening in the front-end world and JS Party does an amazing job of keeping us up to date. So…what’s fresh, faster, and new?
The first segment of the show focuses on Deno’s Fresh new web framework. Luca Casonato joins Jerod & Feross to talk about Fresh – a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity.
In segment two, AngularJS creator Miško Hevery joins Jerod and KBall to talk about Qwik. He says Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he’s attempting to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG.
In the last segment, Amal talks with Fred Schott about Astro 1.0. They go deep on how Astro is built to pull content from anywhere and serve it fast with their next-gen island architecture.
Plus there’s an 8 minute bonus for our ++ subscribers (changelog.com/++). Fred Schott explains Astro Islands and how Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page, and the unused JavaScript gets replaced with lightweight HTML — leading to faster loads and time-to-interactive.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 7 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.com
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Featuring:Luca Casonato – GitHub, XFred K. Schott – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XFeross Aboukhadijeh – Website, GitHub, XKevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAmal Hussein – GitHub, XShow Notes:JS Party #234 - #
Fresh docs
Islands Architecture
Deno’s Discord
JS Party #237 - #
Qwik
Partytown
JS Party #238 - #
Astro 1.0 announcement post
Astro’s website
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 30, 2022 • 1h 23min
A guided tour through ID3 esoterica
This week we turn the mics on ourselves, kind of. Lars Wikman joins the show to give us a guided tour through ID3 esoterica and the shiny new open source Elixir library he developed for us. We talk about what ID3 is, its many versions, what it aims to be and what it could have been, how our library project got started, all the unique features and failed dreams of the ID3v2 spec, how ID3v2 and Podcasting 2.0 are solving the problem differently, and how all of this maps back to us giving you (our listeners) a better experience while listening to our shows.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 14 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – The time series platform for building and operating time series applications — InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn more at influxdata.com/changelog
Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:Lars Wikman – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
A new chapter for Changelog podcasts (our shows have chapters baked in now, whoop whoop!)
thechangelog/id3vx
Id3vx – a library for parsing and encoding ID3 tags
Ship It! #70: Kaizen! Four PRs, one big feature
Folyo
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 23, 2022 • 1h 27min
Product development structures as systems
This week we’re talking about product development structures as systems with Lucas da Costa. The last time we had Lucas on the show he was living the text-mode only life, and now we’re more than 3 years later, Lucas has doubled down on all things text mode. Today’s conversation with Lucas maps several ideas he’s shared recently on his blog. We talk about deadlines being pointless, trajectory vs roadmap and the downfall of long-term planning, the practices of daily stand-ups and what to do instead, measuring queues not cycle time, and probably the most controversial of them all — actually talking to your customers. Have you heard? It’s this newly disruptive Agile framework that seems to be working well.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 6 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:DEX: Sort the Madness – Join our friends at Sentry for their upcoming developer experience conference called DEX: Sort the Madness. This event will be in-person in San Francisco AND virtual on September 28. This is a free conference by developers for developers where you’ll sort through the madness and look at ways to improve workflow productivity. Learn more and register
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Featuring:Lucas Fernandes da Costa – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Useful engineering metrics and why velocity is not one of them
How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable
How high capacity utilisation hurts a team’s performance
How and why exploiting uncertainty makes products more profitable
Why tall hierarchies slow organizations down and how to fix them
Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework
Why your daily stand-ups don’t work and how to fix them
Why long-term plans don’t work and how to fix them
“Planning Is Guessing” at Startup School by David Heinemeier Hansson
Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability
The Changelog #488: Mob programming deep dive (with Woody Zuill)
The Changelog #340: All things text mode (with Lucas da Costa)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 16, 2022 • 1h 17min
Stable Diffusion breaks the internet
This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.”
You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog
Featuring:Simon Willison – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Simon Willison on Wikipedia
Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
Stability.ai
Greg Rutkowsk on ArtStation and on Twitter
Stable Diffusion Launch Announcement
Stable Diffusion Public Release
The full text of the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license
Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3
Twitter thread about the ethics of the Stable Diffusion release from Joshua Achiam who works on AI safety at OpenAI
Lexica.art - that really good search engine for 10m+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
Simon’s Twitter thread about Stable Diffusion - I keep on adding new things to this as they happen, the thread has been running for a few weeks now
4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - a great post that talks through the process involved in getting good results out of Stable Diffusion using image2image and multiple round-trips through the model
This tweet from Simon has a animated GIF of the Stable Diffusion Discord scrolling by during the 1.5 model preview
Textual Inversion also see this thread on Twitter
This tweet talks about the Stable Diffusion concepts library, using Textual Inversion
This tweet has great examples of Textual Inversion in action
Simon’s Datasette Cloud preview - Check it out and signup
Compressing images with Stable Diffusion
“neuromancer” on Lexica
Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images
The Changelog #296: Burnout, open source, Datasette
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 9, 2022 • 1h 20min
Typesense is truly open source search
This week we’re joined by Jason Bosco, co-founder and CEO of Typesense — the open source Algolia alternative and the easier to use ElasticSearch alternative. For years we’ve used Algolia as our search engine, so we come to this conversation with skin in the game and the scars to prove it. Jason shared how he and his co-founder got started on Typesense, why and how they are “all in” on open source, the options and the paths developers can take to add search to their project, how Typesense compares to ElasticSearch and Algolia, he walks us through getting started, the story of Typesense Cloud, and why they have resisted Venture Capital.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
InfluxData – All of the open source software InfluxData creates is either MIT-licensed or Apache2-licensed. These are very permissive licenses. But why are they all for permissive licenses? Paul Dix shares his thoughts on the spirit of open source and why freedom, evolution, and impact drive them to license InfluxData’s open source software as permissively possible. Learn more at influxdata.com/changelog
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Featuring:Jason Bosco – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Typesense on the iconic Nasdaq billboard in Times Square
typesense.org
typesense/typesense
Typesense Cloud pricing
Typesense on HN
Why Upgrade to GPLv3
Airbyte
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 2, 2022 • 1h 15min
Building actually maintainable software ♻️
This week we’re sharing the most popular episode of Go Time from last year — Go Time #196. We believe this episode was the most popular because it’s all about building actually maintainable software and what goes into that. Kris Brandow is joined by Johnny Boursiquot, Ian Lopshire, and Sam Boyer. There’s lots of hot takes, disagreements, and unpopular opinions.
This is part two of a three part mini-series led by Kris on maintenance. Make sure you check out Go Time #195 and Go Time #202 to continue the series.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – All of the open source software InfluxData creates is either MIT-licensed or Apache2-licensed. These are very permissive licenses. But why are they all for permissive licenses? Paul Dix shares his thoughts on the spirit of open source and why freedom, evolution, and impact drive them to license InfluxData’s open source software as permissively possible. Learn more at influxdata.com/changelog
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Featuring:sam boyer – GitHub, XIan Lopshire – GitHub, XKris Brandow – GitHub, XJohnny Boursiquot – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Go Time #195
Go Time #202
Uber’s Go Style Guide
Why smart engineers write bad code
Rant about “performant”
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 27, 2022 • 1h 25min
Building Reflect at sea
This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.”
We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 4 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog
Featuring:Alex MacCaw – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
A personal update
Alex’s first appearance on The Changelog
reflect.app
Clearbit
Earl Grey Capital
Google - “Catamaran”
The Manager’s Handbook
Ross Moser
Beginning of Infinity
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
remirror/remirror
Replicache
Mimestream
The Changelog #455: Building software for yourself with Linus Lee
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!


