The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The code, prose & pods that shaped 2023 (News)

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeBlog News for the week of Monday, December 18th, 2023. Can you believe it? This is already our final news episode of the year. Thanks for reading and listening along in 2023. This episode diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous episodes and picked, in my humble opinion, the coolest code, the best prose, and my favorite episode of the changelog from each month.

Let's do it. We're in January. Twitter is still called Twitter. Threads? Never heard of it. People are joining the Fediverse in droves. Coolest code is GetSim, Jacob Stopak's Python-based CLI that quickly generates a visual of how any Git command would

impact your local repo without actually doing it and potentially interrupting your dev workflow. Best pros goes to Justin Etheridge. There's no substitute for experience, but you can take a sizable shortcut if you're willing to learn from somebody else's experience. Justin wrote down 20 things he learned from his experience as a software engineer, and there's a bunch of shortcuts in there, yours for the taking. And my favorite episode in January, mainframes are still a big thing with Cameron Say. Cameron's passion and enthusiasm for technology, plus his keen ability to explain complex topics to plebs like Adam and I, make this a must-listen conversation for anyone who regularly touches a keyboard.

Next up, February. The AI gold rush is still on. Prompt engineering is losing its luster. Microsoft's Sidney Bing is propositioning journalists. Coolest code is Elk for Mastodon. The open-source, view-based web client for Mastodon is beautiful, full-featured, and a shining example of a community that absolutely loves building cool software in public. Best pros?

Scalability is overrated by Waseem Daher. Waseem's counter-startup culture take on scalability is focused on business tasks. But all the same principles apply to software engineering. Some things should be built to scale. Other things shouldn't. Deciding which is which is often the hard part. And my favorite episode of the month, Ironic Juxtaposition Acknowledged. What it takes to scale engineering.

Rachel Potvin, former VP of engineering at GitHub, really knows her stuff, so he asked her to share everything she's learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering. Remember March? Chat GPT plugins are about to change everything. AI tech demos abound. GitHub Copilot X is going to give it to you. Coolest code comes from Aaron Tenderlove Patterson, who took a BMW shifter and converted it into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim. Need I say more? No, I do not. Best pros belong to Retools' Ryan Lucas, who put together a gorgeous and comprehensive treatment of the history and legacy of Visual Basic. The lead, how Visual

Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. And my favorite changelog episode of the month, bringing Whisper and Llama to the masses. The work Georgi Gerganov is doing with Whisper.cpp and Llama.cpp is so impressive and truly democratizing.

These might be the most important software projects of the year, and I'm tickled that we got to sit down with Georgie and pick his brain about them. In April, open source language models have started to fight back. Twitter's algorithm is kind of open source now, and passkeys are bubbling up in the zeitgeist. Coolest Code is a collaboration platform and get hosting for open source software, content and projects. It's called Codeburg, and it's not run by a company, but a nonprofit based in Berlin. The service boasts about its community roots and commitment to privacy. They say your

data is not for sale. All services run on servers under our control and no dependencies on external services. Best pros, 90% of my skills are now worth $0, but the other 10% are worth 1000x. When Kent Beck writes a headline like that one, people stop and read. You probably already know or remember the context, but just in case, Kent writes, quote, my skills continue to improve, but chat GPTs are improving faster. It's a matter of time. End quote. And my favorite episode of the month, LLMs break the internet. There's no better person to document, analyze, use, and prognosticate about LLMs with than our friend, Simon Willison. This one is just a hoot to listen to as Simon frequently oscillates from frenzied excitement to leery doomsaying.

We are now in May, and people are wondering if big tech really has an AI moat. People are wondering if Python will remain dominant. People are wondering, what's a vector database? Coolest code is Mojo, a programming language for all AI developers. I thought Python was the programming language for all AI developers. It is, but maybe it won't always be. But even then, it still would be, sorta. Best pros goes to why chatbots are not the future. Amelia Wattenberger makes her case that our current primary form of interacting with LLMs ain't it.

I'm convinced, but what comes next? And my favorite episode of May, introducing changelogging friends. This one is a bit self-serving, but I love our new talk show format, and from the feedback we're getting, so do most of you. This was our inaugural episode where Adam and I lay out the idea, the plan, and what to expect. Let's talk. In June, Apple unveils its new vision, Reddit goes dark, and AI may have poisoned its own well. Coolest code is Valtown. What if GitHub Gists could actually run and AWS Lambda were actually fun?

Valtown is a social website to write and deploy TypeScript, build APIs and schedule functions from your browser. Cool stuff. Best pros, some blogging myths by Julia Evans. Julia is one of the most successful developer bloggers out there. So when she decides to write up some myths about blogging, it's worth paying attention to what she has to say.

Myth, you need to be original. Myth, you need to be an expert. Myth, writing boring posts is bad, and more. My favorite episode in June, don't make things worse. I will always love this episode for the simple reason that it was my first time meeting Taylor Shroesch. You might love it because we dive deep on interesting topics like yak shaves, dependency selection, negative 10x engineers, and Ikea-oriented development.

It's now time for some sponsored news. Our friends at Neon have been taking the developer world by storm with their serverless Postgres offering. What makes Neon's Postgres different? They separate storage and compute to make on-demand scalability possible. Compute activates on an incoming connection and scales to zero when not in use. Their storage is different too. The fault-tolerant scale-out system integrates with cloud object stores like S3 to offload cold data for cost optimization. Very cool stuff. Oh, and did you know you can try serverless Postgres with just a single command?

Type psql-hpg.neon.tech and you're up and running with a scalable, cost efficient, and easy to use database. Thanks again to Neon for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Check out what they're up to by following the link in your show notes. We've reached July. Oracle smacks IBM over Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Facebook launches threads and Twitter is now called X. Coolest code goes to Eli Huxtable's A2N, a command line tool that helps you make better use of your shell by giving Control-R superpowers. Every line you write is stored, ready to be queried, and run again at any point from any machine you wish. Never forget. Again. Best Pros. Streak Redemption by Lucas Mathis.

Lucas takes up one of the problems with using streaks as a motivator and how he suggests you can design your app to provide some way to recover from a streak loss after it's happened. And my favorite episode of the month, Storytime with Steve Yegge. Steve rants and raves about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. I'm not sure who had more fun, us listening to his stories or Steve telling them. It's now August, Heshy Corp adopts the business source license. Debian celebrates 30 years and captions are declared useless. Coolest code is from hardware hacker Ivan Kuleshov, who modded a Mac mini to run via power over ethernet and documented the entire

wild adventure. Don't try this at home, but do read this at home with your favorite beverage. Best prose goes to things you forgot or never knew because of React. Josh Collinsworth's posts have contributed heavily to the pendulum starting to swing the other direction away from React lately. You could also credit RSC and React's ever tighter association with Next.js

as contributing factors, but Josh gets some credit too. And my favorite episode, an aberrant generation of programmers, Justin Searle's widely read essay on enthusiast programmers and intergenerational conflict becomes our most downloaded episode of the year. I guess everyone wants to hear about the looming demise of the 10x dev. In September, Bun 1.0 comes out of the oven, OpenTF forks Seriform, and OpenTofu forks OpenTF's name. Coolest code is TextualWeb, which takes a textual-powered TUI and turns it into a web application.

That means you can now send your terminal app to your mom by pasting a link to it over iMessage. She'll be so proud of her little baby. Best Pros, the worst programmer I know by Dan North, who tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he's ever worked with, who also happens to be one heck of a programmer. Tim scored zero points on the company's productivity metric and almost got fired, but... And my favorite conversation, open source is at a crossroads. Steven O'Grady from Red Wunk joins us to discuss the definition of open source,

the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. October. InfluxDB drops Go for Rust. Changelog drops some beats. And Netflix drops dropping off DVDs in your mailbox. Coolest code goes to Bruno, API Explorer. Bruno is cool because it's a lot like Postman Friends,

but it stores your collections directly in a folder on your file system using a plain text markup language called BRU, or BRU, I suppose. Quote, you can use Git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections. Bruno is offline only. There are no plans to add CloudSync to Bruno ever. End quote. Best pros. You're not lacking creativity. You're overwhelmed. Jorge Medina hits close to home by describing decision fatigue. Quote, it's exhausting. It's an epidemic and it has turned us into digital hoarders, end quote.

His advice? Curate to create. And how do you go about that? By building a curation system, of course. And my favorite episode, the beginning of the end of physical media. Christina Warren, aka Film Girl, pours out a drink with us and laments the end of the golden age of access to the films we all love. This episode is quintessential ChangeLogging friends. In November, the internet watches OpenEye unravel in real time, then re-ravel, then I'm not sure. Coolest code is SSHX, which lets you share your terminal with anyone by link on a multiplayer infinite canvas. It has real time collaboration with remote cursors

and chat. It's also fast and Intuin encrypted with a lightweight server written in Rust, so you know it's cool. Best pros, the beauty of finished software. Jose M. Gilgado writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write A Song of Ice and Fire. Jose old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write A Song of Ice and Fire. Jose goes on to praise the beauty of Finnish software. He says Finnish software is software that isn't expected to change, and that's a feature because you can rely on it to do some real work. And my favorite episode of November, Backslash is our Trash. We always force, I mean ask Matt Reier to make up songs for us when he comes on the show,

but this particular episode, he really delivers the goods with two smash hits, Auto Magically and The Eponymous. Backslashes are trash. Finally, December. I remember it like it was just yesterday. Also today. And tomorrow too. What day is it again?

Coolest code goes to hair. Drew DeVault and his friends have set out to build a programming language that will last 100 years. It doesn't get much cooler than that. Best pros? The chimerologists. The chimeraologists. The chimerologists. No idea how you say that word.

Robin Burgeon tries to formalize a name to describe people with a certain set of skills that no one can explain. And my favorite episode of the month, Pound to Find Game Theory, dude. What happens when you take four grizzled Pound to Find veterans and throw an Emma Bostian into the mix? Find out on this episode because our award worthy game of of fake definitions is back and this time it is better than ever alternate episode title your best excuse yet to stop procrastinating and use your employer's personal development fund to sign up for changelog plus plus so you can listen to the two yes two bonus rounds in which we reveal the actual winner of the game. Speaking of Changelog++, it's time once again,

it's time once again to shout out to our newest members. James M, Eduardo M, Adam D, Joshua L, Felipe L, Nicholas W, Ricardo M, Jack O, Todd B, Louis P, and Nicholas L. We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned

cash. If Changelog Plus Plus is new to you, that's our membership program that you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work, and get shout-outs like the ones you just heard. Have a great week,

send Changelog news to your friends if you dig it. And we'll talk to you again next year.