1
The world of open source metadata (Interview)
103 min
311/18/2025Andrew Nesbitt builds tools and open datasets to support, sustain, and secure critical digital infrastructure. He’s been exploring the world of open source metadata for over a decade. First with libraries.io and now with ecosyste.ms, which tracks over 12 million packages, 287 million repos, 24.5 billion dependencies, and 1.9 million maintainers. What has Andrew learned from all this, who is using this open dataset, and how does he hope others can build on top of it all? Tune in to find out. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates. Outshift by Cisco – The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at AGNTCY.org. Miro – The innovation workspace for the age of AI. Built for modern teams, Miro helps you turn unstructured ideas into structured outcomes—fast. Diagramming, product design, and AI-powered collaboration, all in one shared space. Start building at miro.com Featuring:Andrew Nesbitt – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: ecosyste.ms ecosyste-ms/oss-taxonomy Octobox Libraries.io Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
2
Why is Zig so cool? (News)
9 min
311/18/2025Nilo Stolte explains why Zig is “a totally new way to write programs”, George Mack gives twelve actionable ways to be more creative, Mario Zechner shares his findings on using MCP vs Bash tools, Josh Collinsworth compares creating AI art to medieval alchemy, LibrePods unlocks AirPods features for Android, and our first ever Changelog News Classifieds. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
3
Retreat to attack (Friends)
104 min
311/18/2025Do you like director’s commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week’s News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React’s seemingly perpetual dominance, and more. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates. NordLayer – Protect your business with NordLayer, the toggle-ready network security platform built for modern teams. VPN, access control, and threat protection—no hardware or complex setup required. Get 28% off NordLayer yearly plans this Black Friday with code changelog-28 at nordlayer.com/thechangelog Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Changelog News #169 Alive internet theory The Winamp era Meshtastic Zstandard FDE exploding with 800% more postings Dead framework theory You should write an agent Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
4
DO repeat yourself! (Interview)
79 min
311/18/2025Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is “good taste” in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 4 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates. NordLayer – Protect your business with NordLayer, the toggle-ready network security platform built for modern teams. VPN, access control, and threat protection—no hardware or complex setup required. Get 28% off NordLayer yearly plans this Black Friday with code changelog-28 at nordlayer.com/thechangelog Featuring:Sean Goedecke – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail? How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer Avoiding worry driven development What is “good taste” in software engineering? Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews Situational Awareness: the decade ahead Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
5
This new AI role is exploding (News)
8 min
311/18/2025A new AI-led tech role has emerged with a massive increase of job postings, Corey Quinn explains why younger devs won’t tolerate pain in the AWS, Thomas Ptacek makes the case that you should write an agent, Paul Kinlan goes deeper on his dead framework theory, and Andrew Gallagher says to stop vibe coding your unit tests. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
6
#define: sheer resistance (Friends)
102 min
311/18/2025On this seventh iteration of our award-worthy game show filled with obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery: past winners battle to determine the champion of champions. (Also, Adam.) Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates. Outshift by Cisco – The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at AGNTCY.org. Miro – The innovation workspace for the age of AI. Built for modern teams, Miro helps you turn unstructured ideas into structured outcomes—fast. Diagramming, product design, and AI-powered collaboration, all in one shared space. Start building at miro.com Featuring:Taylor Troesh – Website, GitHub, LinkedInThomas Eckert – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XMatthew Sanabria – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XE. David Aja – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Moar game shows! Chorus Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
7
The overlooked power of URLs (News)
7 min
311/18/2025Ahmad Alfy explains how URLs are state containers, Shrivu Shankar shares how he uses every Claude Code feature, Yusuf Aytas laments how AI broke technical interviews, Wu Xiaoyun tells how he saved TikTok $300k during his internship, and TOON is a new serialization format to save us some LLM tokens. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
8
We see dead projects (Friends)
78 min
311/18/2025It’s a FRIGHT…when your record a podcast with dead projects all around. Tech debt, poor choices, timing, market shift, and optimizing for the wrong things are all lurking around waiting to pop out at you! Just don’t forget to push record. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Sass Ampcode Meteor Quicksilver (QSApp) Raycast RethinkDB FaunaDB Asciinema Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
9
Agentic infra changes everything (Interview)
123 min
311/18/2025Adam Jacob joins us to discuss how agentic systems for building and managing infrastructure have fundamentally altered how he thinks about everything, including the last six years of his life. Along the way, he opines on the recent AWS outage, debates whether we’re in an AI-induced bubble, quells any concerns of AGI and a robot uprising, eats some humble pie, and more. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Featuring:Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Anthropic on agentic misalignment System Initiative Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
10
Code like a surgeon (News)
8 min
311/18/2025The Dead Internet Theory dies, Geoffrey Litt tries to code like a surgeon, Matt Sephton thinks spreadsheets are great for UI design, Nate Meyvis advocates for front-end maximalism, Hemant Pandey thinks 9-5 employment is a great option for most, David Miranda compares React to Backbone in 2025. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X