The code, prose & pods that shaped 2024 (News)

0:28What up nerds? 50 previous episodes and picked, in my humble opinion, the coolest code, the best pros, and my favorite episode of the changelog from each month. Let's do it. January. All the AI hype is losing its luster. The chaos continues on NPM and Zed goes open source. Coolest code is Ollama. As the volcano of new data models continues to erupt, what's a dev to choose? How about a tool that helps you switch between them easily and even customize or create your own. Of all the tools I covered this year, Olama is one of the few that I actually adopted and still use today. Best pros goes to a plea for lean software.

1:12These amazingly prescient pros weren't written this year, but they bubbled back up in January because their author, Nicholas Wirth, passed away on New Year's Day. Wirth also happens to be the creator of Pascal and the dubber of Wirth's Law, which we pound to find. in January as well. And my favorite episode in January goes to Dear New Developer, in which Dan Moore joins us, the author of Letters to a New Developer, a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. Dan shared his best advice for new devs, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking.

1:49Next up, February. Apple Vision Pros get unboxed. People are building stuff on ActivityPub. Changelog beats, throws a dance party. Coolest code is pagespeed.dev. This rad open source web app by Daniel Rowe is the fastest, easiest way to create shareable core web vitals and page speed insights for any website. Use it to test your own sites and or shame your frenemies into speeding up the web. And best pros goes to the undercover generalist. Quote, since starting out as an independent contractor, I've always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer yet having to market myself as a specialist.

2:28Below follows an account of my struggles hoping it might be useful for other adventurers out there. End quote. This amazing piece of writing by Adolfo Ochogevia was his coming out party and even landed him with me on our It Depends series where we weighed the pros and cons of generalizing versus specializing. And my favorite episode, you have how many open tabs? We take you to the hallway track at that conference in Austin, Texas where we have three fun conversations. One with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party. One with our new-ish friend Amy Dutton from Compressed FM, now of JS Party. And one with our brand new friend slash longtime listener Andres Piñeda from the Dominican Republic.

3:07That brings us to March. Laid off tech workers battle for available jobs. Redis circles the toilet. And I invent a diabolical pyramid scheme of links. If you know, you know. Coolest code comes from Louis Pilfold for Gleam. his friendly language for building typesave systems at scale, which hit the big 1.0 milestone in March. Lots of people really like it, and we really liked talking with Louis all about why that is. And best prose goes to Anton Zianov, who wrote, I'm a programmer, and I'm stupid. Anton has been getting paid to code for 15 years despite being, in his own words, pretty dumb. What does he do about that?

3:45He keeps things incredibly simple. But wait, that's not dumb. That's smart, which means he's dismantled his own premise, which might be dumb. I don't know. I want to stop now. And my favorite changelog episode of the month is Retirement Is For Suckers. The Cameron Say joins us once again. This time we learn more about his life and history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI and quantum computing, and how they might affect the tech labor market, and more. In April, Giatan is on the loose. The world's first AI software engineer isn't, and OpenTofu versus HashiCorp heats up.

4:22Coolest code is Enhance Wasm, which wants to bring server-side rendered web components to everyone. I think that could be pretty cool. Quote, author your components in friendly standards-based syntax. Reuse them across multiple languages, frameworks, and servers. Upgrade them using familiar client-side code when needed. End quote. That sounds so cool, in fact, that I invited Brian LaRue on JS Party for a deep dive. Best pros. the Wi-Fi only works when it's raining. This is perhaps my favorite story of the year. In fact, we were lucky enough to have Pedrog Grewski on Friends to talk Semver and our Changelog++ members were treated to a bonus segment where we had Pedrog tell the story again and let us ask some follow-ups.

5:07And my favorite episode of the month, the old hot and juicy frequent guest and almost real-life friend Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent open source meets business drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative. We are now in May. Small language models are on the rise. Slop has become a term of art. And I first learned of the dead internet theory, which you're probably sick of by now. Coolest code is Superfile, a pretty fancy and modern terminal file manager. Twoies are so hot right now. Superfile is a great example of why.

5:43Best prose goes to the sound of software. This is the finale of a four-part series on the role that sound plays in software design. And my, oh my, do you get a lot of bang for your buck with this one. Here's what I said about it back in May. Quote, this is a must read for anyone who designed software and hasn't thought seriously about the sound design. They cover when to use sound, what makes good sound design, implementation details, and how to get started. Good stuff, end quote. And my favorite episode of May, It's a long and windy road. This conversation with Shonday Person at Microsoft Build was called Peak Friends by one happy listener.

6:21Not only that, but it was the episode that we debuted our alternate theme song, Your Favorite Ever Show. In June, the open source rug pulls continue, the Lady Bird browser spreads its wings, and Apple finally gets serious. Coolest code is DuckDB 1.0. DuckDB began six years prior to this 1.0 release in June. but adopting pre-1.0 software can be foolish, and especially so when that software is a database. You may notice our database coverage of late has been almost entirely of the Postgres or SQLite variety. But if I were going to do a database episode soon, DuckDB would be one of the few I'm actually interested in learning more about.

7:01Best pros goes to senior engineer fatigue. I felt this post by Luminous Men in my old bones. What characterizes senior fatigue? According to the author, deliberate deceleration, e-efficiency over activity, the question of value versus relevance, and the overwhelming desire to start a podcast. Okay, I made up that last one, but did I really though? And my favorite episode in June, retired, not tired. Kelsey Hightower comes back to share more of his wisdom. This time, it's one year after his retirement from Google, but guess what? He might be retired, but he's not tired. In this episode, Kelsey shares what drives him, what he fears, and how he thinks through life choices and parenting.

7:42Oh, and there's Bidetalk, a surprising amount of Bidetalk. It's now time for sponsored news. Session replay for mobile is here. Sentry's session replay feature has been a hit with developers. Imagine getting a video-like reproduction of a user session when dealing with an issue. The result is being able to reproduce the root cause of issues faster and getting a better understanding of user impact. That's exactly what Sentry launched recently in open beta for mobile platforms. Session replay for mobile is currently available for Android and iOS on both native SDKs as well as for React Native and Flutter.

8:20Every replay has a detailed view, the embedded video player, and rich debugging context allows you to see every user interaction in relation to network requests, front end and back end errors, back end spans, and more. Get your session replay on at sentry.io and use code changelog to get$100 off their team plan. Thank you once again to our friends at Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News. We've reached July. CrowdStrike strikes. CDN.polyfill.js as well. And Zerp phenomena are becoming apparent. Coolest code goes to posting an HTTP client. not unlike Postman and Insomnia. As a TUI application, it can be used over SSH and enables efficient keyboard-centric workflows.

9:05Your requests are stored locally in simple YAML files, meaning they're easy to read and version control. Best pros, programming advice for my younger self. If you've been following news for a while, you know I have a penchant for blog posts including hard-earned learnings and advice that we can all benefit from. You know, stuff like, if you're shooting yourself in the foot constantly, fix the gun. Quote, Marcus Buffett finally thinks he's a decent programmer, so he's rounded up a bunch of his learnings and wrote them down with the idea of what would have gotten me to this point faster. And my favorite episode of the month, Code Review Anxiety.

9:40I'm a big fan of Carol Lee, PhD, and a big fan of this conversation where she shared with us her research on code review anxiety. We get into all the nooks and crannies of the topic, common code review myths, strategies for coping, the need for awareness and self-reflection, the value of exposure and practice to build confidence, the importance of team dynamics, respect, empathy, and connection, and more. Later in the year, Carol came back and embarrassed everyone except me on our pound-to-find game show. It's now August. Turns out most programmers are unhappy. Llama 3.1 gives ChatGPT a run for its money and scientists confirm flow state.

10:18It's a thing. Coolest code, ChartDB. What's cool about this open source, self-hostable web app is its instant schema import. Quote, run a single query to instantly retrieve your database schema as JSON. This makes it incredibly fast to visualize your database schema, whether for docs, team discussions, or simply understanding your data better. Best pros goes to do quests, not goals. I love David Cain's reframing of short-term goals, which are uninspiring, into quests because I'm on a side quest to fix my Vim config is a lot more fun and impressive than saying I've been tweaking my Vim config for the last four hours.

10:55And my favorite episode in August, Why We Need Lady Bird. Getting to interview Defunct, aka Chris Wonstroth, alongside Andreas Kling was the cherry on top of this delicious episode. We discuss what it's going to take to get to Alpha, the why behind Lady Bird, avoiding incentives other than those of the users, their plans for incremental adoption of Swift as the successor language over C++ and Rust, and of course, what they hope Lady Bird can achieve as a truly independent open source browser that's for the people. In September, Zulip enters the chat, Laravel raises a boatload of cash, and WordPress starts to implode.

11:32Coolest code is OpenFreeMap. OpenFreeMap takes map data from OpenStreetMap and serves up the necessary tiles in various styles for anyone to render them on their websites or apps for$0. Best pros? Your company needs junior devs. Doug Turnbull does a good job laying out the case for hiring junior devs, a drum that I've been beating for years. Doug makes a lot of great points in this article. I'll add one. Junior devs are plenteous. That means you can take your time and find the ones that will really gel with your organizational culture. Also, you don't have to pay them as much while you train them up and make them more valuable so you can pay them more.

12:09And my favorite conversation of August, the best worst code base. Come for the software gore. Stay for that time the Secret Service busted into Jimmy Miller's door for hacking. October. Evan Yu starts a startup, ghost job sightings abound, Space X caught a booster with chopsticks, and Matt Molenweg goes rogue. Also, ARC's dead browser walking. Wow, a lot happened in October. Coolest code goes to deal with it GIF emoji generator, not to be confused with the deal with it GIF emoji generator, which doesn't exist because GIF isn't a word. If all software was serious business, the world would be not a very enjoyable place at all.

12:49and this deal with a gift generator is a very enjoyable place. Best pros. Cognitive load is what matters. I was highly tempted to quote this entire article back when I covered it. I did my best not to, but it was still a big pull quote. Here's a smaller one. There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint.

13:25End quote. The overarching point, we should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. But how? And my favorite episode, Elasticsearch is open source again. On this one, Shade Manon joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately, what made them hit rewind and return to open source. In November, buttons and knobs are back in vogue, spreadsheets are being democratized, and democracy is being tested in production.

14:04Coolest code is IronCalc. IronCalc is an MIT-licensed, work-in-progress spreadsheet engine written in Rust, but usable from a variety of programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Node, and possibly R, Julia, or Go. Their ambition extends beyond code too. They want to drive the spreadsheet industry forward through R &D, community building, and a knowledge base. Cool stuff. Best pros, a career ending mistake. John Arundel says when it comes to this post, you came for the schadenfreude, but you'll stay for the thought-provoking advice. Kudos to John on the excellent wordplay in this post. The career ending mistake is not planning the end of our careers.

14:45Got it. Now, what exactly does it mean to plan the end of your career? Hmm. And my favorite episode of November, Bus Factors and Conspiracy Theories. I think we recorded more Adam and Jared discuss the news style episodes in 2024 than any previous year. Turns out I love hanging out with Adam and just shooting the breeze and our listeners don't seem to mind it either. Expect more like this with some other randos, of course, next year as well. Finally, December. I remember it like it was just yesterday. Also today. and tomorrow too. What day is it again? Coolest Code, MarkWen, a Markdown-style journal language by Rob Cook for plainly writing logs, Gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, to-dos, timelines, calendars, or anything that happens over time.

15:31Rob hasn't merely designed the MarkWen language. He also created Meridium, a collaborative editor for it that supports custom commands, snippets, visualizations, autocomplete, and more. And the best pros, The Skill That Is Not Doing by Dylan Fitzgerald. Quote, it's compellingly easy, even invisible, to stay in the loop of doing. The thing is, sometimes the best use of your time, the most effective action is to do nothing, to sit, wait, and let the system that you put into motion move without your intervention, to not mess with what's working, and to make time and space for your team to figure things out for themselves, end quote.

16:10And my favorite episode in December, Shop Talkin' Friends. I like the way one listener, Fred Rocha, described this episode better than we did. Fred says, quote, What happens when you get four senior web folks who are awesome at speaking and give each other space to ruminate? Great things. Thanks, Fred. I'm glad you enjoyed it. That's the news for this year. But it's time once again for some Changelog++ shoutouts. Shoutout to our newest members.

16:44Erica E, Jess H, Trong L, Andrew OB, John Baptiste C, and Eric C. We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash. If Changelog++ 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 shoutouts like the ones you just heard. Have a great week, send Changelog news to your friends if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again next year.