It’s officially official. I just turned off our last Slack integration. We’re no longer announcing new episodes there. It’s been more than six months since we invited Zulip’s Alya Abbott on the pod and decided to kick the tires to see if Zulip could replace Slack for Changelog’s community. The answe...

We’re kicking off 2025 with some big changes. Starting in January, we’ll be focusing all of our efforts on producing The Changelog (News, Interviews, Friends) as the single best developer podcast experience. In order to do this, we’re stopping production of Go Time, JS Party, Ship It, and Practical ...

In the 14+ years we’ve been making The Changelog podcast, it has never gone viral. We’ve had popular episodes and not so popular episodes. We’ve made episodes we love and episodes listeners love. But we’ve never had a viral moment like Elon Musk smoking weed or Jeff Bezos talking Blue Origin on our ...

Jerod’s Note: The short embedded below of Tammer Saleh on Ship It! created a firestorm of comments from folks who were unsatisfied with the lack of explanation behind his conclusion. I caught up with Tammer at KubeCon NA 2023 and took the opportunity to ask him to clarify and defend the comment. Thi...

It’s not that uncommon to have the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder produce your podcast’s theme song. But it’s super uncommon to collaborate with BMC over the course of 7 years to produce fresh, custom beats for your entire podcast portfolio. Theme songs, outros, ad music, ins, outs, stabs, robot no...

This is a fancified excerpt of Carl M. Johnson’s unpopular opinion on the Go Time podcast. Click here to listen along while you read or watch the video on YouTube. Jump to the end for the poll results. 📊 My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML, because there are situations where XML is appropr...

The LAST Strange Loop conference is right around the corner! The conference has accumulated 673 videos on its YouTube channel, which means there’s gold in them hills, but finding the gold might consume some of your precious time. Good news! I was hanging out in the conference’s Slack when someone as...

Editor’s Note: After publication, Kris joined us on Changelog & Friends to discuss this article, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system. Early reviews of that episode have included the words “great” and “awesome”… On Go Time...

Our Frontend Feud game show series forces me to survey JS Party listeners frequently to get their thoughts on software, development, life, and software development life. Each question has to be accompanied by an <input type=text> because providing choices ruins the entire point of the game. So, befo...

This is a fancified excerpt of Jonathan Norris’ unpopular opinion on Go Time #275. Jonathan is Co-Founder & CTO @ DevCycle where they’re using WebAssembly in very interesting ways. To get the full experience you should listen while you read. 🎧  Click here to listen along while you read. It's better!...

The late, great Fred Brooks wrote many words about software engineering. You may have heard of Brooks’s Law or read his seminal book, The Mythical Man-Month. Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard at least one colleague proclaim: Nine women can’t make a baby in one month! This is a powerful meta...

After reading Lucas da Costa’s Why deadlines are pointless and what to do instead, I agree with almost every point he makes, especially this one: It’s about time we start calling deadlines by their real name: pressure Lucas goes on to describe how deadlines can cause harm, can’t actually make people...

The podcast moguls of Changelog Media have been keen to introduce chapters into their podcast episodes and they reached out to me for a hand. And would you know, now they have chapters and the Elixir community has a shiny new ID3 tag library. Chapters are neat, they let you see a Table of Contents, ...

Adam and I have wanted our podcasts to have chapters for a looooong time. Like, multiple years long. They’re such a great way to navigate and explore an episode. You can skip directly to the subjects that interest you, skip past the ones that don’t, and even discover new parts of the show1 that piqu...

This post is a fancified excerpt from Lee Robinson’s guest appearance on The Changelog podcast. Lee is the VP of Developer Experience at Vercel, so he really knows his stuff on this topic! To get the full experience you should listen while you read 💯 🎧  Click here to listen along while you read. It'...

Now that everyone is back after KubeCon EU 2022, and all caught up with their notifications, it’s time for one more story of people, tech & upcoming #shipit episodes: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in 7by7 format There are no words that would do justice to the amount of talented, hard-working ...

I won’t call SQLite’s current moment a comeback, because the most used database engine in the world doesn’t have anything to come back from. I’m going with “renaissance”, because despite its already mass adoption, there has been something of a rebirth of interest from one software sector that had pr...

What you’re about to read is a fancified excerpt from Ship It! #44. You should read the original transcript or listen to the entire conversation for more context. To set the stage, this is Kelsey’s response to Gerhard asking what the biggest takeaway should be from their conversation. The reason we ...

As developers, we use TypeScript for a few different reasons. The self-documentation aspects are huge – being able to step into an unfamiliar function and know the shape of the objects it’s expecting is a massive boon when working on a large project. The added tooling features, with IntelliSense and...

This is a fancified excerpt of Liana Leahy from JS party #203. Liana spent 20 years as a developer before transitioning to product, so she knows what she’s talking about here. To get the full experience you should listen while you read. 🎧  Click here to listen along while you read. It's better!   🎧 ...

The meeting was supposed to be short. The incident seemed a straightforward case of human error by the new engineer. Surely all they had to do was tell them not to do it again and move on, right? But as the meeting went on, a series of perplexing questions began to be raised: “How did the new engine...

Did you know Linux is approaching 30 years old? Did you know Unix is around 50 years old? I’m not knocking them — I’ve been using Linux since they were distributed on floppies. However, Unix was built for machines like the PDP-7 — you know, the kind that takes up an entire wall. The PDP-7 - a minico...

I love automation. It’s just magical when an application or a script *just does the thing* 100x faster than I could by hand and infinitely more accurate. Especially for mundane tasks. Magic. In the world of magical automation, GitHub Actions are a grade A Elder Wand I created a GitHub action that au...

On our Lessons from 10k hours of programming episode with Matt Rickard, we were discussing Matt’s reflection on source code vs Stack Overflow, where he says: Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on StackOverflow. I asked him to elaborate on that and provide some context...

This is a fancified excerpt from The Changelog #451 where we discussed modern Unix tooling like bat, exa, curlie, and more. If you’d prefer not to read, the audiogram is embedded at the end. This is just going completely off the top of my head. I didn’t read it off Wikipedia, but if I was gonna writ...

Programs like AWS Activate, the Google Cloud Startup Program, and Hatch by DigitalOcean offer free cloud credits to startups to help them grow. For software projects that aren’t eligible for funding through one of these incubators, most cloud providers also offer free tiers and services for a limite...

When it comes to open source, we came for the code, but we stayed for the people. Some of the best, brightest, & kindest people we’ve met over our years doing The Changelog are maintainers of open source software. We’ve been working (alongside others) to support, encourage, and shine our spotlight o...

App structure is complicated. Good app structure improves the developer experience. It can help you isolate what they are working on without needing to keep the entire codebase in your head. A well structured app can help prevent bugs by decoupling components and making it easier to write useful tes...

AMA Happy Hour with Priyanka Sharma Ad-hoc conversations with you Carlos, Chico, Katie, Rahul & Silviu were my favourite. They would not have happened was it not for your Happy Hour sessions Priyanka. And what would brilliant ideas be without your hard work Colleen & Kristi, and the rest of your tea...

In my 15+ years of web development, there are very few things I can say are unequivocally a good idea. It almost always does depend. Storing timestamps instead of booleans, however, is one of those things I can go out on a limb and say it doesn’t really depend all that much. You might as well timest...