The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - An app can be a home-cooked meal (News)

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Researchers in Japan achieve a world record in data transmission speeds, Robin Sloan explains how an app can be a home-cooked meal, Windsurf founders Varun Mohan & Douglas Chen are headed to Google, new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says it's too late for the incumbent, Anton Zaides says stop forcing AI tools on your engineers, and Adrien Friggeri visualized his ten-year running streak.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday, July 14th, 2025. At risk of unleashing your green monster, I just have to report that researchers in Japan have achieved a world record in data transmission speed at 1.02 petabits per second over 1,123 miles. Just how fast is that? It's more than 3.5 million times faster than the average internet speed in the US right now. Are you jealous yet?

I am. Okay, let's get into the news. An app can be a home cooked meal. This post by Robin Sloan was originally penned in February of 2020, but I'm sharing it now because this new wave of vibe coding tools makes it even more true now than when he wrote it. Quote, I made a messaging app for and with my family.

It is ruthlessly simple. We love it. No one else will ever use it. I wanted to share a few notes about how and why I made it, both to A, offer a nudge to anyone else considering a similar project, and B, suggest something a little larger about software. End quote.

That something a little larger about software that he's referring to is that the learn to code movement was mostly about market value, but the learn to cook movement almost never is. Robin suggests that if we think of coding more like cooking, we can use software to make our little world a better place. Quote, this messaging app I built for and with my family, it won't change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a user base inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty? Is it

simply the feeling of being home? End quote. From one perspective, AI coding tools are scary because they threaten our market value. But from a different perspective, AI coding tools unlock a world of opportunity to create home-cooked software never before possible or at least not worth the effort. Let's get cooking. Google hires Windsurf CEO

If you thought OpenAI was buying Windsurf for Buku bucks, you were once right, but now you're wrong. That deal is off. Instead, Google is hiring CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf's R&D employees for their DeepMind team. Not an acquisition, just hiring them for, yes, buku bucks. This seems like a great deal for Google.

It's cleaner than an acquisition in almost every way. Seems like a great deal for Windsurf's founders. They got a large portion of those buku bucks, but it seems like a raw deal for the remaining Windsurf employees who have equity and or options in the company. And Google isn't alone. Microsoft and Meta have made similar moves recently. Be careful out there, especially if you're considering non-cash

compensation at an AI related startup, which is quickly becoming the only kind of startup that exists. It's too late for Intel. It's difficult to fathom how fast and hard Intel has fallen from the top of the semiconductor world. Here's a report from the mouth of new CEO Lip Bu Tan. Quote, on training, I think it's too late for us. 20, 30 years ago, we were really the leader.

Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies. End quote. Yikes. They've already laid off thousands of employees around the world and their costs continue to explode due to high R&D spending. Plus they faced a $16 billion loss

in quarter three of last year. To put Intel's fall in perspective, there was a day when they were considering acquiring Nvidia for $20 billion. Today, Nvidia's market cap is 40 times the size of Intel's. It's now time for sponsored news. Depot Build Autoscaling for Everyone Depot just launched general availability for Build Autoscaling, which dynamically scales

your remote build capacity based on workload demand. Whether you're pushing one commit or 100, your builds stay fast without managing any infrastructure. And it's available today on all paid plans. Here's founder and CEO, Kyle Galbraith, quote, "'When we first launched Depot, our goal was to make Docker image builds exponentially faster.

Why? Because we experienced the absolute drudgery of waiting for container builds locally and in CI. It's the modern day equivalent of watching paint dry because saving and loading layer cache over networks negated all performance benefits of caching and building multi-platform images required emulation which brings builds to a crawl.

So we built the solution we have always wanted. A fast, shareable, and reliable container build service that could be used from any existing CI workflow or anywhere you were using Docker build." Learn more at depot.dev, links in the newsletter. Stop forcing AI tools on your engineers Here's Anton Zadis imploring people in leadership roles to stop forcing AI on their engineers.

I'm definitely not saying that we should ignore these tools. There are engineers who are old fashioned and resist without giving it a real chance. You do have a responsibility to help your team adapt to the new world and it is a new world but there are so many better ways to do it. End quote. I couldn't agree more. Here's a few better ways that Anton suggests. One, give time to explore.

Two, share what worked in your org. And three, give people time to adopt it their way. This jives with Abhi Noda's response when I asked him how he's approaching AI adoption at DX in last week's Friends episode. Abhi referenced Netflix as an example of an organization that employs super smart engineers and has been super quiet about AI adoption because they're just letting their super smart engineers make super smart decisions about AI

just like they tend to make super smart decisions about other tooling choices. That seems like a super smart way to go about it. 10 years of running every day visualized. Adrian Fergeri went on a run on July 11th of 2015 and every single day since. It started like many streak start with small ambitions. I headed out on a run on a Tuesday, then did another one the next day, and the day after, and I took the Friday off.

When I woke up on July 11th, 2015, I remember thinking I could have done 4 days in a row. So I set out to try and do that. And then 4 days turned into a week, then a month, then 2, then 6, then a year, and here I am. 10 years later." End quote. Adrian didn't merely run every day, he tracked his running via Strava and documented his runs creating compelling visualizations of his annual mileage, workout activity by time of day, treadmill versus outdoor distributions, pace, heart zone rates, weather conditions, states, countries and continents visited, you name it.

On the overall impact of running, Adrian says, quote, "'Running has changed my life and I hope I'll still keep "'this going for another decade. "'I've been extremely lucky to have had the support "'of my wonderful wife Molly through this journey "' and I couldn't have done it without her patience. How many times has she heard me say, I'll be back in a few in the mornings?" That's an impressive achievement and an inspiring set of visualizations that are so good, I almost went for a run myself.

Then I remembered how much I hate it. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to our changelog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as Vercell acquires Nuxt Labs Firefox is fine, the people running it are not And a human friendly alternative to Netstat Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news Last week on the pod we sat down with Don McKinnon to talk all about searchcraft

and Abhinota from DX joined us to share some cold hard data on just how productive AI coding tools are actually making developers. Scroll up in your feed for those episodes and stay tuned because we have some great ones coming up this week. On Wednesday, Adam does a Founders Talk with Retools David Hsu and on Friday, Nick Nisi joins us once again to discuss all the latest news. Have a great week, like, subscribe and 5 star review us if you liked the show and I'll talk to you again real soon.