The code, prose & pods that shaped 2024 (News) - The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday December 16th, 2024. Can you believe this is already our _final_ News episode of the year?! Thanks for reading & listening along in 2024! This episode diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous episode and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite episode of _The Changelog_ from each month. Let's do it.

In January: All the AI hype is losing its lustre. The chaos continues on npm. 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 'em easily & even customize or create your own. Of all the tools I covered on News this year, Ollama is one of the few that I actually adopted & still use today. Best prose goes to A plea for lean software. These amazingly prescient prose weren't *written* this year, but they bubbled back up in January because their author, Niklaus 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 #defined in January as well.) And my favorite episode in January: Dear new developer Dan Moore joins us, 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 shares his best advice for new developers, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking.

Next up, February: Apple Vision Pros get unboxed. People are building stuff on ActivityPub. Changelog Beats throws a Dance Party. Coolest code is page-speed.dev: This rad, open source web app by Daniel Roe is the fastest, easiest way to create shareable Core Web Vitals & PageSpeed Insights results for any website. Use it to test your own sites and/or shame your frenemies into speeding up the web. Best prose: The undercover generalist. > 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... Below follows an account of my struggles, hoping it might be useful for other adventurers out there. This amazing piece of writing was Adolfo Ochagavía's coming out party and even landed him with me on our "It Depends" series where we weighed the pros/cons of generalizing vs specializing. And my fav episode: You have how many open tabs?!! We take you to the hallway track at THAT Conference in Austin TX, where we have 3 fun conversations: one with our old friend Nick Nisi from JS Party, one with our new(ish) friend Amy Dutton from CompressedFM (who has been a guest on JS Party of late) & one with our brand new friend / long-time listener Andres Pineda from the Dominican Republic.

Remember, March: Laid off tech workers battle for available jobs. Redis circles the toilet. Jerod invents a diabolical pyramid scheme (of links). Coolest code comes from Louis Pilfold for Gleam, his friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale, which hit the big 1.0 milestone in March. Lots of people really like it and we really liked talking with Louis Pilfold all about why that is. Best prose belong to Anton Zhiyanov 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? He keeps things incredibly simple. But that’s not dumb. That’s smart! Which means he’s dismantled his own premise. Which might be dumb? … I need to stop… And my favorite Changelog episode of the month: Retirement is for suckers THE Cameron Seay joins us once again! This time we learn more about his life/history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI / quantum computing and how they might affect the tech labor market & more!

In April: Jia Tan is on the loose. The world's first AI software engineer isn't. OpenTofu vs HashiCorp heats up. Coolest code: Enhance WASM wants to bring server side rendered web components to everyone. I think that could be pretty cool. > 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. So cool, in fact, that I invited Brian LeRoux on JS Party for a deep-dive. Best prose: 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 Predrag Gruevski on Friends to talk Semver and our Changelog++ members were treated to a bonus segment where we had Predrag tell the story again and let us ask some follow-ups. And my favorite episode: The ol' hot & 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. I first learn 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. TUIs are so hot right now. Superfile is a great example of why Best prose goes to The Sound of Software. This is the finale of a four-part series on the role sound plays in software design and my, oh my, do you get a lot of bang for your buck. Here's what I said about it back in May: > This is a must-read for anyone who designs software and hasn’t thought seriously about the sound design. They cover when to use sound, what makes good sound design, implementation details & how to get started. Good stuff! And my favorite episode of May: It's a long & windy road This conversation with Shaundai Person at Microsoft Build was called "peak Friends" by one happy listener. Not 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 Ladybird browser spreads its wings. Apple finally getes Siri-ous. Coolest code is DuckDB 1.0.0 DuckDB began six years prior to their 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 / 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. Best prose: Senior Engineer Fatigue I felt this post by “luminousmen” in my old bones... What characterizes “Senior Fatigue”? According to the author: deliberate deceleration, efficiency over activity, the question of value vs relevance & the overwhelming desire to start a podcast. Ok I made up that last sentence, but did I really though? 😉 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 his life choices and parenting. *Oh, and bidet talk. A surprising amount of bidet talk.*

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We've reached July: CrowdStrike strikes. cdn.pollyfill.js too. ZIRP 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. Your requests are stored locally in simple YAML files, meaning they’re easy to read and version control. Best prose: Programming advice for my younger self If you've been following News for awhile, you know I have a penchant for blog posts about hard-earned learnings/advice we can all benefit from. You know, stuff like, "If you're shooting yourself in the foot constantly, fix the gun." Good one, Marcus! > Marcus Buffett finally thinks he’s a decent programmer, so he 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 I'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 this 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, she embarrassed everyone (except me) on our #define game show...

It's now August: Turns out most programmer are unhappy. Llama 3.1 gives ChatGPT a run for its money. Scientists confirm flow state is a thing. Coolest code: ChartDB. What’s cool about this open source, self-hostable web app is its instant schema import: > Run a single query to instantly retrieve your database schema as JSON. This makes it incredibly fast to visualize your database schema, whether for documentation, team discussions, or simply understanding your data better. Best prose goes to Do quests, not goals. I love David Cain’s re-framing of short-term goals (which are uninspiring) into *quests*! “I’m on a side quest to fix my Vim config” is a lot more fun (slash impressive) than “I’ve been tweaking my Vim config the last 4 hours” 🤣 And my fav episode: Why we need Ladybird Getting to interview defunkt (Chris Wanstrath) 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 Ladybird, avoiding incentives other than those of the users, their plans for incremental adoption of Swift as the successor language over C++, and of course what they hope Ladybird 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. WordPress starts to implode. Coolest 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 website (or app) for zero dollars. Best prose: 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 off & on for years. Doug makes a lot of great points in this article. I’ll add one: junior developers 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 & make them more valuable so you can pay them more. And my favorite conversation: The best, worst codebase. Come for the software gore, stay for that time the Secret Service busted in Jimmy Miller's door for hacking. Clip!

October: Evan You starts a startup. Ghost job sightings abound. SpaceX caught a booster with chopsticks. Matt Mullenweg goes rogue. Arc is a dead browser walking. Coolest code goes to Deal With It GIF emoji generator Because if all software was *Serious Business* the world would be not a very enjoyable place at all. Best prose: Cognitive Load is what matters I was highly tempted to quote this entire article. 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. The overarching point: we should reduce the cognitive load in our projects as much as possible. But how? And my Fav episode: Elasticsearch is open source, again Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, 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. Democracy is being tested in production. Coolest code: 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 (wasm), Node.js 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 & a knowledge base. Cool stuff! Best prose: 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 word-play in this post. The career ending mistake is not planning the end of our careers. Got it! Now, what exactly does it mean to plan the end of your career? And my favorite episode of November: Bus factors & conspiracy theories I think we recorded more "Adam & Jerod discuss the news" 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. Tomorrow, too. What day is it? Coolest code: Markwhen A markdown-like journal language by Rob Koch for plainly writing logs, gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, todos, timelines, calendars or anything that happens over time. Rob hasn’t merely designed the Markwhen language, he also created Meridiem, a collaborative editor for it that supports custom commands, snippets, visualizations, autocomplete & more! Best prose: The skill that is not-doing. Dylan Fitzgerald: > 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’ve 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. And my favorite episode: ShopTalk & Friends I like the way one listener (Fred Rocha) described this episode better than the way we did: > What happens when you get four senior web folks who are awesome at speaking and give each other space to ruminate? (Great things.)

That's the news for this year, but it's time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs! **SHOUT OUT** to our newest members: Gianluigi R, Jim VW, Dhruman B, James K, Maciej F, Erika E, Jess H, Trung L, Andrew OB, Jean-Baptiste C & Eric C! _We appreciate you_ for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash. (If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝) Have a great week, **send Changelog News to your friends** if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again next year. 💚

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