The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - A new era for the Changelog Podcast Universe (News)

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

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.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, December 9th, 2024. For the fifth time in the last nine years, a page about deaths in the given year got more visits than any other page on Wikipedia. The list of deaths in 2024 page garnered over 44 million views this year. We're a morbidly curious bunch, aren't we? Okay, let's get into this week's news. A new era for the changelog podcast universe. Let's start off with some literally changelog news. Here's my co-host Adam. Quote, we are kicking off 2025 with some big changes. Starting in January, we'll be focusing all of our efforts on producing the ChangeLog news, interviews, and friends as the single best developer podcast experience. In order to do this, we're stopping production of GoTime,

JS Party, ShipIt, and Practical AI. But don't worry, there's continuation and spinoffs in motion. End quote. This was a really hard decision to make, but we needed to create space for experiments, explorations, and more coding. We love all of our pods. Thankfully, each one has a continuation story. Oh, and CPU.fm is coming soon. Ghost engineers, more like ghost researchers. It appears the Stanford study about ghost engineers that I chose to headline episode 122 wasn't worthy of our coverage. A few of our community members pointed that out in our discussion thread,

and Amelia posted on Macedon summarizing many of its issues. Quote, What flawed methodology did this study use? It assessed code changes made by these engineers, not by lines of code change, but by simulating a panel of 10 experts to evaluate each commit. This fatally flawed study does not account for management and planning, research to unblock work, collaboration with other staff, or helping other staff. Once again, actually writing code is a small part of a software

engineer's actual job. That's like assessing structural engineers on the basis of calculations done. Clown emoji. A lot of time is spent in communications, planning, and helping others. End quote. Sorry about that, y'all. I do my best to only bring you links of interest and value, but sometimes I miss that mark. Git Ingest produces prompt prompt friendly extracts. Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repo into a simple text ingest of its code base. Now, why would you want that? Because then you can easily feed the entire repo into any LLM as context. If you're currently looking at a GitHub repo, just convert hub in the URL to ingest and bam, a prompt-friendly extract ready for download or copy-paste.

It's now time for Sponsored News. Kubernetes without nodes on Fly.io. Annie Sexton is back on Fly's YouTube channel talking about how they're doing Kubernetes without nodes. Spoiler alert, they use virtual Kubelet to manage your cluster, but how they do it is worth the price of watching. Quote, with Fly's managed Kubernetes service, we don't run Kubelet because there

are no nodes. End quote. So, where do you put the pods, Annie? Find out for yourself. Link to that video is in the chapter data and our companion newsletter. And thanks once again to Fly for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Storing times for human events. Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyard and Eventbrite, two websites that have to deal with storing the time that an event is happening. Quote,

An event happens on a date at a time. The precise details of that time are very important. If you tell people to show up to your event at 7 p.m. and it turns out they should have arrived at 6 p.m., they'll miss an hour of the event. Some of the worst bugs an events website can have are the ones that result in human beings traveling to a place at a time and finding that the event they came for is not happening at the time they expected. So how do you store the time of an event? End quote. Simon points out that the best practice of storing events in UTC

breaks down for future events because time zones and locations and user errors and international political shenanigans. His suggestion, quote, My strong recommendation here is that the most important thing to record is the original user's intent. If they said the event is happening at 6 p.m., store that. Make sure that when they go to edit their event later, they see the same editable time that they entered when they first created it. Mistakes you're going to make as a new manager. Mateos Lima knows that moving from an individual contributor to a manager is a significant career step that many engineers will make,

just like he did. Quote, reflecting on my first couple years as an engineering manager, I realized that the lessons I learned are not unique to me. Many new managers face similar experiences. That's why I want to share these insights with you. My goal is to support and connect with other new managers who are going through this exciting yet demanding transition. Here's my summary of his six mistakes you're likely to make.

One, reluctance to delegate. Two, missing your old dopamine. Three, equating team size with success. Four, missing the engagement level mark. Five, mismanaging perception. And six, giving in to imposter syndrome. Read Mateos' blog post for the details. That's the news for now.

But do give our companion newsletter a scan for even more stories worth your attention, such as a first look at S3 iceberg tables, self-guaranteed promises, grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters, and of course, our award-worthy unordered list of other awesome links. Get in on that newsletter at changelog.com slash news.

In case you missed it, last week I interviewed Akon from Hack Club about their cool new high-seas initiative. And we had the Shop Talk guys, that's Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert, on ChangeLog and Friends. Scroll back in your feed to find those. And coming up this week, we have a Founders Talk style deep dive with Fly to IO founder, Kurt Mackey and Kaizen17. Yes, Gerhard Lazou returns and we talk a lot about CPU.fm

plus Gerhard's big surprise. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.