Our 5th annual year-end wrap-up episode! Sit back, relax, pour a glass of your favorite beverage and join us for listener voice mails, our favorite episodes, some must-listens, and of course the top 5 most listened to episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Deno creator Ryan Dahl goes one-on-one with Jerod to discuss their new npm support, why he’s so excited about JavaScript containers, Deno Deploy’s present & future, what he thinks about alternative runtimes like Bun, WinterCG, how Wasm fits into the story & more!

That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous test coverage, or to take arms against a sea of bugs…

For our last 2022 Kaizen episode, we went all out:

• 💪 @jerod outdid himself in the number of improvements shipped between Kaizens
• 🕺 A few of our listeners contributed → prompted us to create a new contributing guide
• 🗺 We now have a new infrastructure diagram

All of this, and a whole lot more, is captured as GitHub discussion 🐙 changelog.com#433. If you want to see everything that we improved, that is a great companion to this episode.

On a previous episode of Go Time we discussed binary bloat, and how the Go protocol buffer implementation is a big offender. In this episode we dive into the history of protocol buffers and gRPC, then we discuss how the protocol and the implementation can vary and lead to things like binary bloat.

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production.

We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations.

Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens next.

Our guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of Basecamp & HEY, and a lot more - check out dhh.dk.

In this episode, we’re joined by tech Lawyer Luis Villa to explore the question, who owns code? The company, the engineer, the team? What about when you’re using AI, Machine learning, GitHub Copilot… is that still your code?

We’re back with another spicy YepNope debate! This time, Amelia and KBall are arguing that there’s real value to (continue) using React in 2022, while Amal and special guest (and author of the post which stemmed the whole debate) Josh Collinsworth argue that React’s time leading innovation has passed. Of course, the stance each panelist is taking is assigned ahead of time. Is that how they really feel? Tune in and find out!

Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery, is back to talk about his latest book, Modern Software Engineering, a Top 3 Software Engineering best seller on Amazon UK this September. Shipping good software starts with you giving yourself permission to do a good job. It continues with a healthy curiosity, admitting that you don’t know, and running many experiments, safely, without blowing everything up. And then there is scope creep…

This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.”

You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?

The new stable diffusion model is everywhere! Of course you can use this model to quickly and easily create amazing, dream-like images to post on twitter, reddit, discord, etc., but this technology is also poised to be used in very pragmatic ways across industry. In this episode, Chris and Daniel take a deep dive into all things stable diffusion. They discuss the motivations for the work, the model architecture, and the differences between this model and other related releases (e.g., DALL·E 2).

(Image from stability.ai)

Egon Elbre and Roger Peppe join Mat for a conversation all about bloat (and how to avoid it). Expect talk of code bloat, binary bloat, feature bloat, and an even-more-bloated-than-usual unpopular opinion segment.

This week we’re sharing the most popular episode of Go Time from last year — Go Time #196. We believe this episode was the most popular because it’s all about building actually maintainable software and what goes into that. Kris Brandow is joined by Johnny Boursiquot, Ian Lopshire, and Sam Boyer. There’s lots of hot takes, disagreements, and unpopular opinions.

This is part two of a three part mini-series led by Kris on maintenance. Make sure you check out Go Time #195 and Go Time #202 to continue the series.

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment, and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Daniel and Chris delve into protein folding, and explore the implications of this revolutionary and hugely impactful application of AI.

Go 1.18 was a major release where we saw the introduction of generics into the language as well as other notables such as fuzzing and workspaces. With Go 1.19 slated to come out next month, one has to wonder what’s next. Are we in store to be blown away by new and major features like we saw in 1.18? Not exactly but there are still lots of improvements to be on the lookout for.

Joining Mat & Johnny to touch on some of the most interesting ones is Carl Johnson, himself a contributor to the 1.19 release.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel explore the geopolitics, economics, and power-brokering of artificial intelligence. What does control of AI mean for nations, corporations, and universities? What does control or access to AI mean for conflict and autonomy? The world is changing rapidly, and the rate of change is accelerating. Daniel and Chris look behind the curtain in the halls of power.

What’s this? A Frontend Feud! The ShopTalk guys return to defend their championship over Syntax against new contenders: Una and Adam from The CSS Podcast!

Gerhard’s transition to a senior engineer started 10 years ago, when he embraced the vim mindset, functional core & imperative shell, and was inspired to seek simplicity in his code & infrastructure. Most of it can be traced back to one person: Gary Bernhardt, the creator of Execute Program, Destroy all Software and the now famous Wat idea.

Few stick around long enough to understand the long-term impact of their decisions on production systems. Even fewer are able to talk about them as well as Gary does.

Drausin Wulsin, Director of ML at Immunai, joins Daniel & Chris to talk about the role of AI in immunotherapy, and why it is proving to be the foremost approach in fighting cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious diseases.

The large amount of high dimensional biological data that is available today, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, creates unique opportunities to push the boundaries of what is possible in biology.

To that end, Immunai has built the largest immune database called AMICA that contains tens of millions of cells. The company uses cutting-edge transfer learning techniques to transfer knowledge across different cell types, studies, and even species.

Adam and Jerod are joined by Ken Kantzer, co-founder of PKC Security. Ken and his team performed upwards of 20 code audits on well-funded startups. Now that it’s 7 or 8 years later, he wrote up 16 surprising observations and things he learned looking back at the experience. We gotta discuss ’em all!

The year is 2053. The tabs-vs-spaces wars are long over. Ron Evans is the only Go programmer still alive on Earth. All he does is maintain old Go code. It’s terrible! He must find a way to warn his fellow gophers before it’s too late. Good thing he finally got that PDQ transmission system working…

Rob Barnes (a.k.a. Devops Rob) and Rosemary Wang (author of Infrastructure as Code - Patterns & Practices) are joining us today to talk about infrastructure secrets.

What do Rosemary and Rob think about committing encrypted secrets into a repository? How do they suggest that we improve on storing secrets in LastPass? And if we were to choose HashiCorp Vault, what do we need to know?

Thank you Thomas Eckert for the intro. Thank you Nabeel Sulieman (ep. 46) & Kelsey Hightower (ep. 44) for your gentle nudges towards improving our infra secrets management.

While scaling up machine learning at Instacart, Montana Low and Lev Kokotov discovered just how much you can do with the Postgres database. They are building on that work with PostgresML, an extension to the database that lets you train and deploy models to make online predictions using only SQL. This is super practical discussion that you don’t want to miss!

Adam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he’s a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what’s to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he’s considered an innovator by many. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

What you’re about to hear is the fireside chat Adam had with Jack at Square Unboxed 2022. Jack and Adam discuss the vision Square has for the developer platform and why it’s so central to the company’s strategy.

This week we’re talking with Bruce Schneier — cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer (of many books). He calls himself a “public-interest technologist”, a term he coined himself, and works at the intersection of security, technology, and people.

Bruce has been writing about security issues on his blog since 2004, his monthly newsletter has been going since 1998, he’s a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a board member of the EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt. Long story short, Bruce has credentials to back up his opinions and on today’s show we dig into the state of cyber-security, security and privacy best practices, his thoughts on Bitcoin (and other crypto-currencies), Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project, and of course we asked Bruce to share his advice for today’s developers building the software systems of tomorrow.

Let the debate begin (again)! This time we’re arguing whether or not single-page apps were a big mistake. This premise was inspired by Chris Ferdinandi’s SPAs were a mistake post.

Divya & Nick represent Team Yep and KBall goes solo on Team Nope. Jerod, as per our usual arrangement, is on Team Winner.

Daniel Rosenwasser and Ryan Cavanaugh from the TypeScript team at Microsoft join Nick and Boneskull to catch us up on the latest happening with the TypeScript project, including what’s exciting in the new 4.7 beta release. Then, we dive deep into the new, TC-39 stage 1 Type Annotations proposal, what it is, and what it means for the future of a not really typed JavaScript!

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian’s been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton.

This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You’ll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson’s unique skillset, why Brian thinks C has stood the test of time, his thoughts on modern languages like Go and Rust, what’s changed in 50 years of software, what makes platforms like Unix and the web so powerful, his take as a professor on the trend of programmers skipping the university track, and so much more.

Seriously, this is a must-listen.

Jen Looper from Web Dev for Beginners and Front-end Foxes joins Jerod and Ali to discuss the exciting (but also intimidating) prospect of getting in to web development in 2022! Where should you start? What technologies should you focus on? Is it better to go all-in on a framework or stick with the fundamentals? Stuff like that!