Our Slack is dead. Long live Zulip!
It’s been more than six months since we invitedZulip’s Alya Abbotton the pod and decided to kick the tires to see if Zulip could replace Slack for Changelog’s community. The answer has been a resoundingYES! Here’s why.
A new era for the Changelog Podcast Universe
We’re kicking off 2025 with some big changes. Starting in January, we’ll be focusing all of our efforts on producingThe Changelog (News, Interviews, Friends) as the single best developer podcast experience. In order to do this, we’re stopping production ofGo Time,JS Party,Ship It, andPractical AI. But don’t worry—there’s continuation and spin-offs in motion!
The Changelog has never gone viral
In the 14+ years we’ve been makingThe Changelog podcast, it has never gone viral. I’m not here to complain about that!
We’ve had tons of success with our shows and I’m super grateful that we get to make awesome developer pods for a living. I do think the fact is interesting, though, and worth exploring.Hopefully this exploration is an encouragement to other folks who record deep conversations for niche audiences like we do.
NixOS has one fatal flaw
This short from myShip It! apperance created a firestorm of comments from folks who were unsatisfied with the lack of explanation behind my conclusion. Let me explain…
Introducing Changelog Beats
We’re excited to announce the release ofTWO full-length musical albums for your streaming and purchasing pleasure! If you’ve been head nodding to our beats during our shows and you’ve been wishing for a way to listen outside of our pods, then this release will be an absolute delight.
XML is better than YAML. Hear me out...
My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML, because there are situations where XML is appropriate, but there’s no situation where YAML is appropriate. Let me explain…
Strange Loop's greatest hits
The LASTStrange Loop conference is right around the corner!
The conference has accumulated 673 videos onits 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 asked:
What are some of y’all’s favorite past Strange Loop talks? As someone who knows the conf by reputation but hasn’t been before, I’m curious what some of your favorites are!
A barrage of YouTube links followed, so I scooped them up to share here so everyone can enjoy these golden Strange Loop talks ✨
"Waterfall" doesn't mean what you think it means
This post expands on mywaterfall is far superiorUnpopular Opinion, providing the background for how I arrived at it, adds some suggestions for improving your software development process, and includes a bonusUnpopular Opinion at the end.
Things we always remind ourselves while coding
We asked 100JS Party listeners what ONE thing they always have to remind themselves when coding. Survey says!
WebAssembly runtimes will replace container-based runtimes by 2030
The advantages ofWebAssembly, with its tight security model, very fast boot-up time, scalability at the edge, much smaller footprints, and portability across environments will really drive a shift away from container-based runtimes for things Kubernetes and edge workloads by 2030.
There’s a ton of energy around making this happen within the WebAssembly community.
There's still no silver bullet
Arbitrary deadlines are actually awesome
After reading Lucas da Costa’sWhy 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 code faster, and so on. I agree with that too. But does that make thempointless? Not necessarily!
Sometimes a littlepressure is just what the doctor ordered. Here’s what I mean by that.
Id3vx – a library for parsing and encoding ID3 tags
I helped build chapter support for Changelog podcasts. Let’s parse some ID3 tags!
A new chapter for Changelog podcasts
Our shows have chapters baked in now, whoop whoop! This post details some of the challenges we had to overcome to get that done, including a brand new open source Elixir library for reading & writing ID3v2 tags.
The three pillars of Developer Relations
The way that I run my Developer Relations team focuses on three different things:
- Education 🧑🏫
- Community 🤝
- Product 🎁
In this post, I will explain each one of those pillars independently.