We see dead projects (Friends)
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
1hr 18min Oct 31, 2025
It’s a FRIGHT…when your record a podcast with dead projects all around. Tech debt, poor choices, timing, market shift, and optimizing for the wrong things are all lurking around waiting to pop out at you! Just don’t forget to push record.
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Featuring:
- Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
- Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Jerod Santo
So I've got a confession to make...
Adam Stacoviak
Okay...
Jerod Santo
One time...
Adam Stacoviak
One time...
Jerod Santo
...when I was doing an interview for this show, I went about 20 minutes into the show and I realized that I did not hit the Record button.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, gosh...
Jerod Santo
And it was a guest, a guy I had just met that day, and we were grooving, and we were having a blast... And then I stopped and I said "I am so sorry, because I've done this --" How many times have we done this?
Adam Stacoviak
Just so many.
Jerod Santo
So many. In fact, I think my personal episode count has broke the 1000 mark at this point. And I think you're getting close to that.
Adam Stacoviak
I wouldn't doubt it.
Jerod Santo
Yes. And I said, "I am so sorry." I'm not gonna dox him... And I said, "...but I have not been recording this." Now, I said "Hopefully, you're recording a local of your own", and he said "I am." And I said "I'm recording a local of my own." And he said "Okay, I think we're good then." And we stopped and made sure that he was recording and it was good, and you could hear him, and mine was recording, and it was good, and... Relief. Sudden rush of relief when we realized we hadn't wasted 20 good minutes. Now, that was a couple of years ago. And I got another confession to make...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, gosh...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] And this is a confession to you, Adam, because you know this. This is a confession to our dear listeners... I did it a second time.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah... Sure did.
Jerod Santo
However, this time we did not have any backups.
Adam Stacoviak
Nope... My QuickTime has been on the fritz... It keeps crashing on me, or something or other...
Jerod Santo
Mine's running, but you can't do it with one voice... So we just spent 45 minutes recording some dynamic dialogue for y'all.
Adam Stacoviak
Some really good stuff. Really good stuff.
Jerod Santo
Good stuff. And it's now into the ether. We were piping it to /dev/null the whole time.
Adam Stacoviak
That's not cool. That's a bad place to go if you want the good stuff. The good stuff does not go to /dev/null, okay? It goes to maybe Temp, temporarily...
Jerod Santo
I would be very happy if we found that conversation in Temp, so we can restore it and give it to Jason and say "Edit this, would ya?"
Adam Stacoviak
"There it is! There it is, in Temp."
Jerod Santo
But we think it's /dev/null. We're pretty sure, we're a hundred percent sure it's /dev/null. So...
Adam Stacoviak
Riverside should tell you this though, right? This should be a Riverside feature.
Jerod Santo
That would be a great feature. Like, "You're getting dramatic. Are you recording right now?" It's similar to how your watch says "Are you working out?"
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Like "Hey, are you doing a run?" and you're like "No, but sure --"
Adam Stacoviak
\[unintelligible 00:04:50.16\] Don't make fun of me.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] I know, it's kind of insulting sometimes. You're like "I'm not actually working out, I'm just a little bit out of shape and I'm breathing heavy, okay?" But when you do forget to start your workout, it's pretty nice.
Adam Stacoviak
It is nice. It's like, "Yes, I am."
Jerod Santo
And had we gotten a notification, even like three or five minutes into that diatribe, we would have been so happy.
Adam Stacoviak
So happy.
Jerod Santo
Because you can't just go back and redo the same conversation.
Adam Stacoviak
No, we can't. We have to leave that one in the ether for you guys. It was really good.
Jerod Santo
It was so good, you guys. You were gonna love it.
Adam Stacoviak
You should have been there.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
You should have been there. Okay.
Jerod Santo
Alright.
Adam Stacoviak
Let's do a new show then. Let's do a brand new show.
Jerod Santo
Setting all of that aside, which none of you guys know what we're talking about, but that's fair...
Adam Stacoviak
We do. If you see it on our faces right now...
Jerod Santo
You can't know what we're talking about.
Adam Stacoviak
If I'm like a little white, like a ghost, that's why.
Jerod Santo
Today's episode is all about death...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah. So much death.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] The death of projects. The death of open source projects, the death of closed source projects... This show is called "I see dead projects", and it is an episode request from a good friend, Thomas Eckert, who requested it last year for last Halloween, and we didn't do anything about it.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:06:06.14\] Dreams come true...
Jerod Santo
Now, Thomas, you get what you asked for, a year later. And his idea was "Hey, what if you just go out and find some of these stories of open source and other projects that have gone by the wayside, whether they were abandoned, whether they were beat out by competitors, whether money destroyed them, or maybe they were just finished... Whatever it was, find some stuff and tell those stories." Now, we're not going to tell you all about Quicksilver.
Adam Stacoviak
Can't do it.
Jerod Santo
Because we just told each other about it...
Adam Stacoviak
It would hurt too bad...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] And it hurts too bad. It hurts so good... But that gives us more time to talk about other things, that aren't Quicksilver. And I got off onto a tangent while researching this. I got off onto a "Killed by Google" tangent. Because when I think of the death of many pieces of software, that many people have loved - don't you just think Google's murdered so many of them? Well, find your way to killedbygoogle.com, where we have a three by three grid maintained by Cody Ogden on GitHub - an open source project that loads a cool website from a JSON file - with 298 things that Google has killed over the years. I haven't even built that much software in my life. Have you had 298 software projects? Probably not.
Adam Stacoviak
No, that's a lot. There's one I didn't even know was dead, right here.
Jerod Santo
Uh-oh, you just found out. Chromecast?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I don't even use it, but I'm surprised by that one.
Jerod Santo
I think they've decided they were going to discontinue that, and replace it with like some new Google TV thing, or something...
Adam Stacoviak
I think it's still software, right? It's still a protocol. You can still cast to your --
Jerod Santo
Oh, I think maybe Chromecast, the hardware.
Adam Stacoviak
It does say hardware.
Jerod Santo
The actual Chromecast.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Like, they're not going to produce those anymore. But there's so many things... Of course, the big ones, right? So the biggest one that kills me to this day would be Google Reader...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah...
Jerod Santo
Killed over 12 years ago. Faithfully served from 2005 to 2013... And not only did Google kill Google Reader, it kind of killed RSS as a social phenomenon. I mean, except for us weirdos and hippies...
Adam Stacoviak
Never let it go.
Jerod Santo
...who are still using our RSS readers, like Feedbin, or Feedly, or what have you... But the death of Google Reader drove away what we'd say like mass adoption of RSS as a thing. And that was a big bummer... How about Google Wave? Heard of Google Wave?
Adam Stacoviak
A lot of buzz around that one, right? Was that --
Jerod Santo
It was so weird.
Adam Stacoviak
What was Wave? Was that the -- oh, I was thinking about Google Plus.
Jerod Santo
Oh, that was a follow up. I think Google Wave came first...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it attempted to --
Jerod Santo
Google Wave, released in 2009...
Adam Stacoviak
Yes.
Jerod Santo
It was like real-time, collaborative stuff... It was like a collaborative editing tool, kind of like in a social network fashion, of like "We're all working on this thing together and talking to each other." And that was the idea, like you hop on the wave and you ride it for a while. And it was very interesting. I think it was very much a single-page app, with all the Google engineering in it... Got tons of people super-excited.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm seeing a trend here when I'm looking at these. Maybe I'm just in a certain era looking at these, but... Killed almost 13 years ago. Killed about 13 years ago. Killed 13 years ago. Like, what happened 13 years ago, Google?
Jerod Santo
\[00:09:59.08\] Right.
Adam Stacoviak
Was there something going on? A lot of them died 13 years ago. Or just the ones I'm looking at. Yeah, Reader was a tough one, because - I agree. I mean, that one seemed misplaced; like, a thriving project... It's like "Can you just figure out how to make some money from it, and not kill it?" But just like you can't go to Target today and buy a Blu-Ray... What's up with that? Who's killing the Blu-Rays, man?
Jerod Santo
The death of physical media.
Adam Stacoviak
Physical media is dying. It really is dying. And my Plex catalog is suffering as a result. Such a shame...
Jerod Santo
Well, this website also catalogs open source things... AngularJS, killed almost four years ago... \[unintelligible 00:10:46.05\] 11 years old. You have Polymer --
Adam Stacoviak
Wait, AngularJS is dead?
Jerod Santo
AngularJS is dead according to KilledByGoogle.com.
Adam Stacoviak
That's so wild, because I think I know somebody who was just talking about it. I won't name them, because it's embarrassing... And they weren't aware of this. This is news to them.
Jerod Santo
So I think --
Adam Stacoviak
This is news -- they were excited. They were like "Yes...!"
Jerod Santo
Oh, that's not good. Sorry, y'all. No, I think they replaced it with Angular, without the JS.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, okay.
Jerod Santo
So it's I don't know if that's a spiritual successor, or a fork, or a rebrand... I don't know what it is in relation, because I don't play in this pond... However, AngularJS as a thing is dead, and Angular, which you can find at angular.dev, is probably the same thing...? I don't know, some of our Angular fans out there can let us know what's up with that. But AngularJS was killed. So I guess rest easy to Adam's --
Adam Stacoviak
...unspoken of friend, yeah.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, maybe they were talking about Angular.
Jerod Santo
Maybe they already know \[unintelligible 00:11:48.24\]
Adam Stacoviak
Angular.dev, versus AngularJS.org...
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
...to be clear. a lot of death over there at Google, you know? I think about two years ago when we were first talking about this AI hype wave, and what's happening there... I think I was even bullish saying that Google would not win, and they would die... What's wrong with me? But they're all playing this catch-up game.
Jerod Santo
Did you say that on this show?
Adam Stacoviak
I just said they're in trouble if they don't change. I mean, they seem so far behind the ball...
Jerod Santo
Well, Google search as it currently existed certainly was being assaulted.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. I mean, it's dead to me. I only google something if I'm just trying to find a thing. So it's usefulness has degraded to about 10% of my needs. It hasn't become less useful, it's just not as useful as other things. My needs have shifted. That's just how it works. Well, I want a recipe... Give me the recipe. Riff with me. Make Mexican chicken with me, okay? Don't point me to 17 Mexican chicken recipes... Let's be chefs. Let's make some food. Let's go!
Jerod Santo
Good rant. I like that. That was a solid rant. Alright, so lots of stuff killed over there by Google, of varying qualities and interests... But that's just kind of how they do what they do, and sometimes we feel a vein, and other times we don't really know what it was. Google Revolve... I have no idea what that was.
Adam Stacoviak
Nah.
Jerod Santo
Google Now? No idea. Songza? Beats me. Google Flu Trends. Heard about it for the first time right now. It's been dead since 2015. So lots of engineers over there, and lots of engineering... So let's turn now to something else.
Adam Stacoviak
Ooph... Well, didn't fully prepare for this one, but mostly; let's just say mostly.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Adam Stacoviak
I would say there's been a lot of advancements on the frontend; one in particular that has evolved, naturally, is CSS. It lagged for a bit there... I think there were things like Sass, and... Gosh, there was something else. Less was a thing...?
Jerod Santo
Yes, Less.js.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:14:04.14\] I'm just reminded about this in my brain just now... Don't know about Less, it never really caught on personally for me, for some reason... But the original Sass was created by the person, which I can't remember his name in the moment, but he's a close friend, and I'm so sorry... Created Haml, which was popular to Rubyists back in the day.
Jerod Santo
That's right.
Adam Stacoviak
It was white space-aware, similar to Python is... And the original Sass syntax was just that, it was a pre... Pre processor?
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
It pre processed... Before you got the actual CSS. It was kind of cool. I've done a terrible job of explaining it, but... Sass, to me - I don't know if this is true; don't be offended if you're still working on this... It's kind of like dead, or dying. It's evolved, it did its job, just like Quicksilver... You didn't hear about that now, did you, listener? No, you didn't... That's okay. Just like Quicksilver... We discussed that in the ether show, so to speak... Quicksilver enabled this first mover phenomenon to help Apple essentially bake a lot of features in that Quicksilver launched with... Gotta bring that pun back. And then Sass did the same thing, I believe, in a great spirit to CSS. The goal was never "Let's make Sass the thing", it was "Let's make CSS better by adding Sass to it." You pre-processed this superset of CSS, is what Sass was. It sat above and on top of CSS proper. And it gave you a lot of superpowers you just didn't have on the frontend. And I don't know where it's at right now, honestly...
Jerod Santo
Well, I went to sass-lane.com/blog, and it's officially dead.
Adam Stacoviak
Is it?
Jerod Santo
Posted on the 23rd of October, 2025. It was five days ago.
Adam Stacoviak
Dang. How timely.
Jerod Santo
LibSass... Great timing for this.
Adam Stacoviak
This is breaking news!
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Sass'es end of life.
Jerod Santo
LibSass has reached end of life. LibSass and the packages built on top of it have been deprecated since October of 2020. So that's five years ago. In the five years since we made that announcement, the Sass language has continued to evolve to support the latest CSS features like color spaces, and embedded Sass. Made it easy to run Dart Sass across numerous different languages and platforms. Dart Sass now meets essentially all the use cases that LibSass once did. At the same time, development of LibSass has faltered. There hasn't been a new commit to the source code repository since December of 2023, and there are numerous issues languishing unaddressed. The time has come. To be clear, LibSass is no longer maintained, and will receive no future updates. So that's LibSass.
Adam Stacoviak
That is LibSass.
Jerod Santo
I don't know what Dart Sass is, because I'm not in that world, but I think this is --
Adam Stacoviak
I can give you a little bit of that picture... So I remembered Hampton Catlin... So I remember the name. That's the person. Created Haml, created Sass... I believe Sass was... I don't know, C++ maybe? I know LibSass was definitely C++. And so the engine, I believe, for Sass was slow, and the challenge for a while, and the argument for many was "It's slow. Can you make it faster?" And I believe they extracted out the engine, which was LibSass. And that was rewritten. It came many years after Sass was even a thing... I think it was originally written in Ruby, now that I remember; maybe it was Ruby. And LibSass was written in C and C++. It was meant to be the library that others could leverage to make their Sass better. So if you had a different Sass implementation, you had one in Ruby, you'd have one for Dart... Dart was a language. A Google language, actually, I believe.
Jerod Santo
Mm-hm. I should see if they've killed it yet. Hold on.
Adam Stacoviak
Let's go see.
Jerod Santo
KilledByGoogle.com. Oh, Dart, you are safe. "Continue using Dart."
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:18:12.12\] You are safe. That is not cake. And that's pretty much it. You've got LibSass, which was the promise of the future... Get that thing extracted out of that slow Ruby world, if I'm speaking correctly... If I'm not, just assume it's truth, okay? I believe there was a NodeSass, because the Node ecosystem needed a special way, and they leveraged LibSass to make NodeSass...
You had SCSS, which was more like the traditional SAS -- or sorry, CSS syntax, which had parentheses, and curly braces, and all the fun stuff... Yeah. And now what do we have? We've got Tailwind, right? Is that what we have? I resist the frontend. If I have to go to the frontend these days, man, I'm just upset. I'm just upset. Put it in the terminal. Put it in the terminal. That's where I live now, okay?
Jerod Santo
So Sass was the radically different-looking one, right? Like, it was no curly braces, it was white space-significant...
Adam Stacoviak
Right. It was the OG.
Jerod Santo
Okay. And just like Haml was very much a minimal and white space-significant templating language, Sass looked different than CSS. And so you kind of had to learn a separate -- maybe call it a dialect of CSS, in order to use it. And then SCSS... So that was Sass. SCSS, which was also part of, I think, LibSass and the whole Sass community, was the, as you said, kind of the more CSS-looking version, that still got the features that you wanted. Because the features that it had, that you really wanted...
Adam Stacoviak
Well, you could drop it in for CSS. You can literally take a .css file and just call it .scss and you were using Sass.
Jerod Santo
It was a superset of CSS, correct.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
But what you really wanted was nesting and variables. And then it got fancier from there, and people who are hardcore frontenders and designers who love CSS and all the features, you could like use it as a polyfill, basically, to get new CSS features before they existed.
Adam Stacoviak
Precisely. And that's what the attraction was, was that.
Jerod Santo
Totally. And now most of that's pretty much built-in. I mean, variables and nesting... I'm a happy camper. I don't need much else in my CSS.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. Includes, and imports, and a lot of that stuff was all... I mean, hats off to everyone involved there. Natalie... I think there's Chris... I forget his last name at the moment. These were dear friends of mine over the years, just paid attention closely to that... I mean, thankfully all that work went into it, because it all poured into eventually a better CSS world, and it's no longer needed. So I think to say dead, in this case... End of life, I believe, is the better term, like they did in the blog. Because it did its job. It was not meant to replace CSS, it was meant to augment and be a superset of it, to push it forward and give you features that you just couldn't have otherwise. Because you could just use CSS. It was actually kind of hard to use Sass, because of the S-A-S-S version, because of the S-C-S-S version, because of the eventual LibSass... And just, it seemed like a challenging space to get into.
I will say, though, that the original syntax that mimicked the beauty of what Haml brought, which was this white space-aware, white space-significant world, you can easily see what you said before, which was important, which was the nesting. You could see how far based on indentation you were being, and you could tell pretty quickly while looking at a Sass file how terrible your CSS nesting and inheritance and tree essentially was, your specificity was just way off, or way too...
Jerod Santo
Way too deep.
Adam Stacoviak
Way too deep, yeah.
Jerod Santo
\[00:22:11.04\] Too specific.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. Too many selectors.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. And that, I think to this day, is the pro argument for white space-significant languages, is that you can at a glance see if you're getting crazy with your indentations. That being said, while I understand that stance, I think you can also see it even with curly braces... I guess you're not required to indent, but anybody who's not indenting their code... Like, talk about death - you're dead to me. Just don't care. Don't care to collaborate with you.
Adam Stacoviak
You better indent that code.
Jerod Santo
That's right. \[laughs\] Or you may have another thing coming. So the indentation as advantage of white space significance is the scannability... I get it. I just think it's not such an advantage. That being said, I'm not a white space hater. I've enjoyed -- I liked Haml quite a bit, I like how clean it looked, and I appreciate Python at times, as well... Although even with white space-significant, I've seen some pretty gnarly Python code. So you can make a mess no matter where you are in the world... Just start being messy.
**Break**: \[00:23:27.03\]
Adam Stacoviak
You know, there's nothing like a good project that was brand new, though, that can use the original, the OG Sass syntax... Because you didn't have to compete with old CSS to move around and support. You could just start this new world with this indented world, and... Until you had to copy CSS from Stack Overflow or something like that, you were pretty happy. And then you had to like paste it, and then do a bunch of deletion, and we didn't have AI back then to like automate this stuff... Gosh, that's wild to even say that. "We didn't have AI back then."
Jerod Santo
Yeah, the bad old days.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:25:53.02\] Yeah. Why would I write that code? It would do it for you, okay? It will do it for you. Listen, today, I took a little break... I just want to think about a feature. I just want to think about a feature. Here I am in AMP, and I'm like "Hey, AMP, can we talk? Can we talk? I've got an idea for the future, and I just want to think about it with you." Man, I dropped that idea in there... I'm not kidding you, dude, I got an email, went and read it, responded back, was happy... "Okay, let me get back to my AMP, let me see what they did..." The feature was done. I said "Let's think about it", okay? "Let's talk about this. Let's not do the work..." Made a bunch of changes, all correct, and stuff... Shifted to production, and everything... Gosh! In a blink of an eye, I meant to think about it, and the feature was done. What a world. What a world. That's not even a joke, man. That's not hyperbole. That's true. That was not fabricated for podcast material. That was straight up truth.
Jerod Santo
I just got a little bit concerned when you started talking to AMP, in kind of like a Marvin Gaye-style voice, you know?
Adam Stacoviak
"Let's talk about it. Let's think about it..."
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
Well, I was being -- I really was like "I know you're a doer... Okay? I know you're a doer, AMP. You just go and do stuff. Can we just talk about it?" "No! I'm a doer!" AMP says "I'm going to go do this! I can't plan, I only do." It plans well. It's got the oracle. Comes back with good stuff. But I went and got that email taken care of, came back, and it was done. And I was like "Alright, cool." I was kind of upset, because I really wanted to think about it, but it wasn't necessary. It's like "Gosh, man... I just want to think about that feature for a second." No, I can't. It's done. No input.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, but was it good?
Adam Stacoviak
It was a pretty simple feature.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
It didn't require a lot of thinking. I'm just trying to incrementally inch into this one, because I had a whole failed version of it... I will reveal to you right now what it is... I've been itching this scratch for a while to replace Pi-hole with DNS-hole. I like it a lot. It's just got a good ring to it, and I can't let it go. I failed -- the first project version of it, just total failure. I was vibing all over the place, slinging code slop everywhere, Rust memories, unsafe things... Just --
Jerod Santo
Oh, my goodness...
Adam Stacoviak
Just dead code everywhere. If you're a Rustacean, you're just pissed at my code, okay? You're just slapping my code all around. Well, I learned my lesson, okay? I just went ahead and said "That's v1. It is now a reference-only project", and just started off simple. And now simple is so much better. In fact, DNSimple is sitting at -- it's resolving all my DNS queries as we speak, on this podcast.
Jerod Santo
DNSimple is?
Adam Stacoviak
Sorry, DNSimple. DNSimple. DNS-hole. DNS-hole is resolving all of my DNS queries right now.
Jerod Santo
Oh, it is?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
That's pretty cool.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm excited about that.
Jerod Santo
I have a new phenomenon when I try to start a new project now where I don't know what language it should be in anymore. I used to have opinions... But I do eventually resolve. So for instance, I started up this Static Site Generator thing that does some crawling, and blah, blah, blah... And I just tell it what I want. This is Claude Code, and I'm like "You just do your thing and come back to me." And it came back to me with a Python script. And I was like "Well, I guess I didn't specify... I didn't want to specify", but now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking "Nah. No, not really." And I'm like "Let's rewrite this in JavaScript. No TypeScript, please... Just pure JavaScript. Keep it clean, keep it loose. Give me options."
Adam Stacoviak
No types. No types.
Jerod Santo
Do not constrain me. I'm vibe coding, okay?
Adam Stacoviak
That's right.
Jerod Santo
\[00:29:51.29\] And so it ports it to JavaScript in the blink of an eye. And I'm like "That was cool." And then I build out some features, and I get going... I realize I want this actually to run on a remote server, which is a shared server, so I don't have access to Npm. I have Node there, it's an older version; I can run it, but I can't run Npm. And of course, this thing vibe coded up a couple of packages... I think mostly around requests, and stuff like that. Maybe like HTML parsing and query stuff... So I'm like "Well, that sucks." And so I'm like "You know what? Port yourself to Go." And then bam! Go. And I said "Compile yourself to --
Adam Stacoviak
Always bet on Go.
Jerod Santo
I like Go for that reason. You're just "Compile yourself to Go", I've got everything in one binary, I just SCP that sucker to the remote server... It's compiled against the Linux that they expect over there, in my shared hosting. It even embeds the HTML templates, and the CSS, and everything. You embed it all in one binary, dude. So cool.
Adam Stacoviak
One binary, to save them all. That's how it goes right there.
Jerod Santo
And you either rsync, or SCP that sucker anywhere you want, and just run it. No dependencies, no package managers... Now, the code is kind of verbose and ugly... But who cares?
Adam Stacoviak
Do the tests pass? Does it work?
Jerod Santo
I'm glad that you said the second part... \[laughs\] Because I did not request any tests. Well, the thing about Claude Code is if you give Claude Code a task, it's going to write the task, and -- if you don't specify "Please also write specs", or whatever. If you're just like "Do this thing." It's going to actually test that it does it via its own little shell scripts, and stuff. It's going to output to a test directory, and it's going to grep the thing, and it's going to sed, and it's going to awk, and it's going to count lines, and whatever it's got to do to make sure that it's right. And then it's going to say "Hey, I'm done." And you're like "That's testing."
Adam Stacoviak
That's testing.
Jerod Santo
Now, I don't have an automated test suite at the end of the day, but...
Adam Stacoviak
That's right. Those tests are like one and done. Bye, see ya. But yeah, they work --
Jerod Santo
It's all low stakes stuff anyways. That's what I use it for, is like low stakes. I'm not resolving my own DNS with it, or something.
Adam Stacoviak
In that case, it is higher stakes...
Jerod Santo
Yeah, it is.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm \[unintelligible 00:32:11.00\]
Jerod Santo
Alright. Well, we're upstream here... Let's go to another project that is dead, for various definitions of the word 'dead'. We aren't declaring death. In fact, I know this one still lives, in a sense... But it doesn't live in the way that it originally was pitched to live, which was as the future of web development. Yes, I'm talking about MeteorJS.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah. Wow.
Jerod Santo
Remember MeteorJS...? Often imply called Meteor... It was open source, it was a full stack JavaScript framework... Came out around 2011, back in the early days of jQuery, Backbone, Node, stuff like that. Initially developed by some folks at Y Combinator... Yes, this was one of the reasons why it's now being declared dead, because it was VC-backed from the start. But built by some cool devs: Jeff Schmidt, David Greenspan... He co-created Etherpad. Remember Etherpad?
Adam Stacoviak
Rings a bell, yeah.
Jerod Santo
Etherpad was one of the very first things that was collaborative editing, like Google Docs... And it was open source and self-hostable, and so people would stand it up and they would use it for their own little real-time collaborative editors inside their web apps... And it was very cool. I'm not sure what's going on with Etherpad. That could probably be another story there. Matt DeBergalis... I'm not sure how to say your last name, Matt... And Nick Martin. That was the team... Dropped - huge fanfare. April 2012, largest Hacker News debut of all time, according to this... Probably since then there's been larger ones, but at least at the time it was huge. It got lots of fanfare, lots of people trying it... It exploded in popularity... Kind of a typical hockey stick growth kind of thing. Raised more money. Raised more money. This is an MIT-licensed project that just keeps raising more money.
\[00:34:19.13\] In July 2012 they secure $11.2 million in seed funding from A16Z. They hire people, they buy infrastructure... By 2013 they release a package manager, by Tom Coleman. That was actually integrated into the core. There's this Discover Meteor, which was either a newsletter or some sort of website, co-authored by friend of the show, Sascha Greif, and Tom Coleman. Of course, you know, Sascha was big into Meteor for a long time.
Adam Stacoviak
Really big, yeah.
Jerod Santo
And you know, things continued up and to the right. 2014 they raised $20 million, Series B round... And they've totaled over $31 million raised. FathomDB comes out, so they have a database, a cloud database... Galaxy, they launched Galaxy, which is like a hosting platform for Meteor apps... So that was kind of the play, was "It's all open source and free, but if you want it to be hosted by us on our Galaxy, that's how you pay money." And performance monitoring. So they started to productize around 2013, continued to grow... I mean, the package registry had thousands of community packages, it started to integrate Npm in 2015... They got worldwide production apps out there. So, I mean, not unsuccessful, by any means. I'd call this success, for many definitions of that word.
Things continued to go okay. In 2016 they were exceeding their revenue goals, according to them... But community debates arose. There was purists who loved the all-in-one simplicity, others demanded deeper modern tooling integration... So the community started to disagree on the tech itself, and the direction that it should go. They started moving towards GraphQL, and that laid the groundwork for Apollo. Remember Apollo GraphQL? That's still out there, which was a spinoff. And then what happened basically was just like new JavaScript frameworks came out, that were more interesting to more people. And because they were so fueled by VC money, they needed to grow faster than they could grow.
Eventually, Discover Meteor grew outdated, people started moving on... The State of JavaScript survey, of course, is Sascha Greif's thing. He's been doing it for a long time now. So the State of... The State of JS actually cataloged Meteor's interest, and then you could start to see the decline. And sometimes that is a -- what do you call it; a self-fulfilling prophecy... People started to see it declining in interest, and so they were less likely to be interested in it... And just that momentum downwards can actually be a problem. And so the transparency around that actually perpetuates it. But it still got worked on.
And then, in 2019, all of a sudden, they changed... MDG, which is the company behind it all, pivoted from Meteor to Apollo GraphQL. They saw more money in that, I think... This deprioritized Meteor's core development, frustrating people... And then in October 2019 Tiny Capital, who are owners of Dribbble and other things, acquired Meteor.js and Galaxy (that's their hosting service) assets for an undisclosed sum. So it got sold off, and renamed Meteor Software. It got put into maintenance mode... I mean, more emphasizing maintenance than growth. And Tiny, which is the company that bought it, pledged they'd support it for long-term, like five years. Still out there...
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:38:18.04\] Still going.
Jerod Santo
Yup.
Adam Stacoviak
That's wild to think about that, honestly.
Jerod Santo
They call it a renaissance. Meteor 3.0 and beyond. People still working on it. It has a small community... And so by no means dead. Legacy, perhaps... The influence endures. It helped birth Vue.js, Apollo, obviously, other things... Storybook... But by no means did it take the world over as it was supposed to. And so in that sense, the original mission of Meteor as the future of web development - it's gone with the wind.
Adam Stacoviak
You know, I never got on the train. I never understood it, personally. It was always confusing to me.
Jerod Santo
They did an interesting thing like munging server and client code early on, which of course, the React team has been struggling to make that a thing, in the public's eyes, at least... They made it technically a thing, but in terms of adoption and people understanding it, it's been an uphill battle for them as well. Meteor had that from the very start. I did use it one time for a hackathon. I had a lot of fun with it. Built a game for a hackathon... And it was very strange, knowing "Am I writing server code, or am I writing client code?" And they were syncing stuff for you... It was very kind of advanced at the time that it was out there. It had a lot of cool innovations in it. Maybe because of the time that I tried it, but also what I tried it for, to me it felt more like a toy than a tool that I would build a business around. Not that it necessarily was, but that's just the way that it felt to me. So I never took it super-seriously, but obviously, lots of people did, and they've had lots of -- they got 44,000 GitHub stars, 508,000 installs, 29,000 Stack Overflow questions... So, I mean, they definitely got out there, and people use it, but...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
...no longer as culturally relevant, surely, as it was back in the good old days.
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, to be honest about the dead bodies in the JavaScript world is just plentiful.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, that's true.
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, good luck winning that war..
Jerod Santo
Well, even when you're winning, two years later all of a sudden they're like "Yeah, we're just not interested anymore."
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, "We need something new. We don't even actually -- you still solve our problems, you're still good... We just don't like you anymore, okay? We're just used to getting new things. Where's the new thing?"
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
That's my feeling as a frontender in the JavaScript world, is just like expect change, expect churn... And honestly, it's what tired me out of really wanting to play in that world at all. It's just like trying to keep up is basically impossible.
Jerod Santo
That being said, if you look at it today, it's basically the same thing as it was five years ago... I mean, what's popular in JS land frontend world today? It's React, basically. It's Next.js. You have people raging against Next.js, you have other -- I mean, there's always experimentation, there's always people saying "React is dead", React is this or that... But it's still just the 800 pound gorilla right now. And yeah, there's been innovations along the way, and alternatives along the way, but it's not like there's been an upheaval. You know, there's this HTMX movement, a return to form of multi-page apps, as they call them now... It used to just be how we build things, versus single-page apps and multi-page apps... Server-side rendering...
Adam Stacoviak
\[unintelligible 00:42:02.16\]
Jerod Santo
Full-stack frameworks, I think, are more interesting to the JavaScript community than they ever have been, but aside from that - I mean, it's kind of been more steady, in the last probably five years, than it was prior to that.
Adam Stacoviak
I wonder if that's because of entrenchment, though.
Jerod Santo
\[00:42:19.26\] Oh, for sure.
Adam Stacoviak
It's just too hard, there's too much sunk cost in the world of React and Next to move away from it easily. There's too much investment into the infrastructure, the usage of it... I was thinking about this recently with Git. You make any piece of software, almost everything thinks you're using GitHub to host it. It's going to be there, and you're going to have actions. And so CI begins with actions files, essentially. That's where your CI begins if you're starting fresh. And then everything's assumed to be around Git and GitHub. And I love Git, I think Git's great, but I just saw our friends over at Fallthrough talking about the newest thing, and I'm not even sure what it's called, but there's a new thing in town to check out.
Jerod Santo
Jujutsu?
Adam Stacoviak
What's it called?
Jerod Santo
Jujutsu.
Adam Stacoviak
Jujutsu. There you go. Which I'm not even versed in, but I'm just thinking "How in the world do you even -- how does the world move away from, at this point, Git?" It's too entrenched. All you can do is really improve it... Maybe you have some people try and use - maybe the 5 to 10 to 20 percenters are going to try and use something different... But you're just going against the current... And it's just more challenging. Until it's not, I guess...
Jerod Santo
Well, slowly, and then all at once. That's what they say.
Adam Stacoviak
That's true.
Jerod Santo
Slowly, and then quickly.
Adam Stacoviak
Slow, then fast.
Jerod Santo
That's right. That's how you get rich, that's how you get poor, that's how you get entrenched, that's how you get disrupted...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it's so fast. It is. Things happen in one fell swoop, as they say. That's what I heard. So many swoops... So Meteor - this is on your list, Meteor? Well, Angular...
Jerod Santo
Well, Angular I just saw on the website. But Meteor was on my list, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Meteor. Yeah. Is that how you spell the word Meteor? I don't even know.
Jerod Santo
M-E-T-E-O-R. Meteor.
Adam Stacoviak
That's how you spell Meteor?
Jerod Santo
Unless you're talking about something that has more meat in it than something else. It's Meteor...
Adam Stacoviak
Meteor.
Jerod Santo
That's why I kept calling it Meteor, because I didn't want to accidentally say meatier, like "Let's talk about something with more depth to it."
Adam Stacoviak
Right. Let's get some meat on these bones in here.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
Let's get these Meteor out here.
Jerod Santo
You've got another one? You want to -- we can loop... And I think it's been long enough. We can loop back to Quicksilver. It's going to feel fresh. It's going to feel so fresh.
Adam Stacoviak
I think it might feel fresh, yeah. The pain is a little less fresh --
Jerod Santo
The pain of our loss is -- yeah. Time heals all wounds...
Adam Stacoviak
I'll give it another try.
Jerod Santo
Let's talk Quicksilver. People want to hear it.
Adam Stacoviak
Take two. Here we go.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Adam Stacoviak
Alright. Quicksilver, if you're not familiar with this, is a software from \[unintelligible 00:45:09.19\] 2003. A long time ago. That's the beginning of the internet, essentially. It's not actually the beginning of the internet, but it's pretty close to it.
Jerod Santo
No, it's not at all.
Adam Stacoviak
It's not at all. It's about 15 years after the beginning, maybe more. It depends on who you ask. But Quicksilver was a app launcher for Mac at that time OS X. Not macOS. This is how far back it goes.
Jerod Santo
Or OS X, as a lot of people call it, OS X.
Adam Stacoviak
OS X, yes. Unless you're a Mac geek.
Jerod Santo
Mm-hm.
Adam Stacoviak
That likes Gab. That was a good one. Got lost in that one...
Jerod Santo
You just sidelined yourself with a stupid reference... \[laughter\]
Adam Stacoviak
A little Mac geek going on there...
Jerod Santo
It's 2003, you're running macOS X, probably like Lion, or Leopard, or some sort of a cat. It was a big cat.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes... Who the heck knows which one it was, but it was a kitty cat, yeah.
Jerod Santo
That's right. And Quicksilver was launching your stuff, man.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:46:12.01\] You wanted to launch things, and you would go and you would go to your app directory, or you would go to your dock bar and you would click the button for your app. You'd see it bounce, you'd wait for it, and that was cool. No, that was not cool.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, it'd bounce forever.
Adam Stacoviak
No, that's not cool. You had to do Command+Space to conjure this new thing called a HUD, a heads up display... And it would give you the ability to conjure these things to happen. Apps to launch, math to be done, terminals to be opened, Finder windows to be discovered, is what Quicksilver gave the world.
Jerod Santo
So many things.
Adam Stacoviak
So many things. It was made in 2003 by a fellow named Nikolas Ditkov. Made in 2003, released several versions of it... Always seemed to be in beta. Basically, in beta for 10 years. But it was the darling. It was what launched literally the ability to have these launch bars, these launch apps to do this. It didn't win, though... It only led to innovation being done by Apple absorbing it, or our friends over at LaunchBar...
Jerod Santo
Copying it.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, absorbing it, copying it... Yeah. Absorbing I guess is probably not the truth. Copying the features, baking them into the operating system... First mover advantage did not work out for them. LaunchBar, Alfred, Raycast - that's what I use... Now, I did use Alfred, and I'm still a semi-happy... How would I be? I'm not sure if I'm happy or not. I guess less than happy, because I spent my money and I'm not using the value anymore... Owner of a lifetime license of Alfred. I'll never use it again... Just saying. Just saying.
Jerod Santo
There's no chance they can win you back?
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, I just don't think so. Never say never, though... My buddy Justin taught me that. But you know, I don't see it happening.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Adam Stacoviak
I don't see it happening.
Jerod Santo
What about Quicksilver? Are you ever going to go back to Quicksilver?
Adam Stacoviak
I don't even know where to go. Where would I find Quicksilver these days? I think it's still a thing, but I don't even know.
Jerod Santo
Brew cask install? I have no idea. I will say this... Quicksilver was the coolest. I mean, I'm not going to say I bought a Mac because of it, but it was certainly in the calculus. I was like "I want a Mac because I want to use Quicksilver." It was minimally attractive, like it was aesthetically pleasing, but it was also minimal; almost invisible at times. I mean, it's obviously invisible when you don't invoke it, but it had a cool kind of purplish, translucent vibe to it... And then the combination of things you could do, the actions you could take, beyond just -- if it was just an app launcher, then I don't think it would have been quite as popular. But it had this, like...
Adam Stacoviak
Extensibility.
Jerod Santo
...extensibility and like combinability that made it really powerful. And you could find a file, pass it to a thing, have it output something, transmogrify it, I don't know, capital-case it, and then spit it back out the other side... And so the power users and the nerds, they would show you how many cool stuff you could do with Quicksilver. And that's why I wanted to run it.
Now, that being said, I only ever used it basically for math and for app launching, which you know to this day is what I use all my app launchers for... Which is why I'm a Spotlight user. It does both those things just fine. But I wanted the power. I wanted the Quicksilver power. And so your story is basically competition... Why didn't it get better? Why didn't they win?
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:50:07.11\] I think it just died on the vine. I think it just -- it got there, hung out in beta, it seemed to not move, and so when something seems to not move and it says beta, you kind of think "Well, maybe it's not moving. Maybe there's no true maintenance behind this thing", and so your appreciation and belief in something kind of wanes. Launch Bar comes around, seems to be newer, seems to be fresher, more Mac-native feeling... Same thing, I think, with Alfred... Alfred is still amazing software. No offense to Alfred whatsoever. I'm not going to use it anymore, because -- well, I moved on. But I suppose if Raycast died, I'd probably fall back on my free lifetime license. Anyways, we'll see.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] So then you could use it again.
Adam Stacoviak
Raycast, don't die.
Jerod Santo
Well, Quicksilver was open source though, and these other ones aren't.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I mean, I guess --
Jerod Santo
Does that mean anything to you? Does that not sell you on it more, or make you want to support it or use it?
Adam Stacoviak
I think in the altruistic terms of open source, of course. But I'm not going to personally maintain it, so the fact that it is or is not doesn't personally matter to me, because I'm not doing the maintenance of it. And I'm not going to care enough to step in. It's not a problem I want to solve. That's why I'm thankful for Raycast. They've done a great job. I think Raycast is, by far -- they've got a great free version of it. You can pay to use it as well... And I think it's the best version of an app launcher. They've got a lot of cool stuff in there. And obviously, they even have -- I think it's like... What is it called? I don't even use it too often, but here and there they've got Raycast AI. A whole chat window. And I believe it ships free with all the free models. Now, if you actually have Raycast AI, I believe you can pay to use other models, you can swap models, you can save things... I think they could have done and should still potentially do a better job of that chat app. Like, it lives in Raycast, the launcher, so arguably, potentially the best thing they've built - a unified chat app for Mac that's Mac-native is buried in somewhere you wouldn't expect.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
It's like, you turn over that rock - boom. Gold. What's up with that? Why is the gold under the rock? It doesn't belong there. It belongs in my pocket, or my safe.
Jerod Santo
On the shelf, where you can see it.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I want to see the gold. Don't put it under the rock. So I don't know...
Jerod Santo
Gold's pretty valuable these days.
Adam Stacoviak
And Raycast is venture-backed... They could fail as a company for those reasons... I don't think they will. In fact, I haven't talked to him in a while, so I don't know.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, but a lot of those Meteor users didn't think they were going to fail either.
Adam Stacoviak
That's true, man. That's true.
Jerod Santo
Not that you all failed, but you know what I mean.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. I did find Quicksilver though on GitHub. It is, naturally, GitHub.com/quicksilver/quicksilver.
Jerod Santo
Recent commits, recent activity? Anything going on over there?
Adam Stacoviak
This is a bot... So I don't know for sure... 5,909 commits total, one yesterday from \[unintelligible 00:53:24.10\] integration bot. So I'm not sure about that one in particular. Although on the 23rd of October there was a merge pull request, pull request 3080, which was from the branch Quicksilver copy configuration build step. If you've got to use Quicksilver, there it is. It's there for you, waiting. And it's open source. What is the license...?
Jerod Santo
If you're listening to this and you do use Quicksilver to this day, let us know in the comments. We want to hear from you.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. Did you move at all? Did you come back? Apache 2.
Jerod Santo
\[00:54:12.14\] Are you still running macOS Lion...? Sorry, OS 10 Lion.
Adam Stacoviak
OS 10, yeah. 76 issues, two pull requests open... Not that bad. It seems to be tended. There's not like a thousand issues, for example.
Jerod Santo
Are you wishing you took it off your dead list, though?
Adam Stacoviak
Nah, it's still dead.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
Nah, it's still dead. It's still dead. You guys are working on this, I can't say that. It's just rude. I'm sorry for being rude. It's just good podcast nature to say "Hey, don't --" If I was standing next to you in the hallway track of a great conference, I wouldn't be that rude. It's dead to me. I'm not going to use it. Can I come back? Man, absolutely. Give it a try. Raise some money. That's the way you get to prosper, is raise some cash.
Jerod Santo
It sounds like that's the way that you die.
Adam Stacoviak
Maybe.
**Break**: \[00:55:05.26\]
Jerod Santo
Speaking of, how about RethinkDB?
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, gosh, man... Blast from the past.
Jerod Santo
Remember RethinkDB?
Adam Stacoviak
Slava Akhmechec.
Jerod Santo
That's right.
Adam Stacoviak
Akhmechet.
Jerod Santo
That's right. \[laughs\] Whichever way you say it, I'm going to say it's right.
Adam Stacoviak
They're both right.
Jerod Santo
Rethink was a very interesting database... A scalable NoSQL - back in the craze of NoSQL - database with a declarative query language for real-time apps, launched in 2009. It was active probably till 2016. The company actually declared bankruptcy in 2016, and the core team was disbanded. The repo was archived... I mean, this one's dead-dead.
Adam Stacoviak
So dead.
Jerod Santo
\[00:58:04.12\] They did inspire some community forks, such as ElephantDB... RethinkDB - you can go back and find that one in our archives. Of course, we've had Slava Akhmechet on the show, I think probably at the beginning of RethinkDB, and I think at the end of RethinkDB. Wasn't that right?
Adam Stacoviak
I'm thinking two times during its heyday, and one potentially on its wayday. Bye-see-ya.
Jerod Santo
Oh, I like that.
Adam Stacoviak
That's the wayday.
Jerod Santo
The heyday and the wayday?
Adam Stacoviak
That's right. You're going on your way. Bye-see-ya. You're on your way now.
Jerod Santo
Now, why did RethinkDB fail?
Adam Stacoviak
I would only speculate at this point, I really don't know.
Jerod Santo
My speculation - and this is just speculation - I just think they couldn't capture market share. I think MongoDB was just too dominant in the NoSQL database department of the world. And Rethink just couldn't get there. But didn't they write a -- I mean, now we're going deep into my brain archives, because I'm starting to remember... Didn't they actually even write up a thing, "Why RethinkDB failed"? And didn't we actually do an episode maybe even called "Why RethinkDB Failed"? I'm starting to remember something like this. Check out our last episode with RethinkDB, what it was called.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I'm scouring the internet right now for information...
Jerod Santo
Okay... I think the long and the short of it is no product-market fit. I mean, that's what the startup guy would say. They had some design choices that were odd, because they had their own language... This is why when the FaunaDB people came on the show. And in fact, I think FaunaDB also, at this point - can we consider that one dead? I'm not sure.
But I haven't heard about it in a long time. They also created their own query language, and I remember saying "Are you sure you guys want to do that? Because it's very difficult to get people to just use your query language. Can't you have it be SQL-alike?" That being said, Mongo did it. So I mean, they're all kind of following the Mongo playbook. But Mongo really did succeed where so many others failed.
Adam Stacoviak
Well, if this is true, founder Slava Akhmechet said that there were two main problems. They picked a terrible market, and then they optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness. So they optimized for correctness, simplicity, and consistency, which are all great engineering goals, but those were not what the market valued.
This is also in a day when a lot of things were happening on ABOS. A lot of databases were popping up. So we're now past a lot of this... You had CockroachDB, you had a lot of databases come out of seemingly nowhere, to solve problems. Some of them open source, some of them not... Obviously, the ones who are not just didn't have a chance. And then ultimately, it came down to just competition at ABOS, and adoption elsewhere. There was a lot of motion around databases, and so you had a lot of choice.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, there was a thriving market of offerings.
Adam Stacoviak
Now we just want Postgres, right? Postgres.
Jerod Santo
Postgres for life, man... Why not?
Adam Stacoviak
You know, why would you choose anything else than Postgres? I just don't know. They were eventually acquired by the Linux Foundation, the CNCF, a few months after the shutdown in 2016... And it continues to be an open source project to this day, but I don't know who's using it. I don't know what's happening.
Jerod Santo
Doesn't everything continue to be an open source project to this day, though? I mean, it's not like the source goes away... Otherwise, it's -- like, you could say that about anything that's dead.
Adam Stacoviak
Is this -- I want to know if this is Claude trying to get into my good graces, considering what I just said a little bit ago about AMP... At the very end, it says --
Jerod Santo
Why is that?
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:02:02.22\] "Fun fact. I see one of the discussions mentioned an episode from the Changelog about RethinkDB. You folks have quite the archive." Come on, Claude...
Jerod Santo
It told you that?
Adam Stacoviak
That's what it said.
Jerod Santo
Do you have that in your ClaudeMD, like "By the way, I host the Changelog podcast, and we have quite the archive"?
Adam Stacoviak
I think it knows. It knows who I am.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it's definitely pandering to me, because it's like "Yo... Great job."
Jerod Santo
That is pandering.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes.
Jerod Santo
But it worked. Did it work? You do prefer Claude now, to AMP.
Adam Stacoviak
So Fauna.com actually doesn't go anywhere, which was the location of FaunaDB. F-A-U-N-A dot com. It's either in my block list, DNS-hole, or it's dead. I'm thinking it's dead.
Jerod Santo
Mine redirected to Fauna Robotics, which is a different company.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, I'm using Safari, so mine don't redirect, man. Safari does its own thing, okay? It really does. Let me go into Chrome... What does Chrome do...?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, Faunadb.org is what you're looking for.
Adam Stacoviak
Ah, okay. So, okay, my bad.
Jerod Santo
"It's a strongly consistent OLTP database with a hybrid blah, blah, blah..." Open source project, it's still very early stage... Yeah, you're probably looking at --
Adam Stacoviak
It used to be .com.
Jerod Santo
Well, you're probably talking about the company, and I'm talking about the open source. And the company might be gone, but the project's still open source, because they all are, right? The last commit to the FaunaDB repo was six months ago. Oh, and the only commit was all six months ago. So I think they open-sourced it and moved on.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. They were like "Listen. Crunch the history, put it out there... Cash the -- no, don't cash the check. That'll bounce... Get out of here. Just get out of here...! It's over. We didn't do it."
Jerod Santo
That's right.
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, they had some really good ambition, though. I mean, I remember that conversation...
Jerod Santo
Totally. Really smart guy.
Adam Stacoviak
The CTO was -- no offense to him, but I recall him just being a little just monotone.
Jerod Santo
Monotone. He was.
Adam Stacoviak
Very monotone.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
And I think he left months after our conversation. I don't know. Some things are meant to live and some things are meant to die.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] That's very final.
Adam Stacoviak
If we keep going, I'll just keep making stuff up, okay? I'll just keep making it up.
Jerod Santo
Well, should we keep going or should we call it? We do have a couple of things, just quick mentions. ICQ...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, gosh.
Jerod Santo
Remember ICQ?
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah. Let's do a little leave it list.
Jerod Santo
Leave it list?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. Like, ICQ is cool, man.
Jerod Santo
For sure. And you are cool if you had a low ICQ number.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I don't know what mine was.
Jerod Santo
You used to be able to buy the numbers off of eBay and stuff, too. Did you know that?
Adam Stacoviak
You probably still can.
Jerod Santo
You probably can. I was not that cool. I came way late to ICQ. In fact, I used it because someone made me use it. Sometimes people are talking, they're like "Yeah, we use this", and I'm like "Dang it. I have to install a new app." But I did have... There was an open source project that actually combined a bunch of chat messengers, of which ICQ was one. AIM... Others... I think it was called Pidgin.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, I recall Pidgin.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. Or Gaim...
Adam Stacoviak
It was a bird. It was a bird one. Is it the Pidgin, do you think?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, Pidgin was a bird. It also means like -- it's like a... It's spelled not like the bird, but like the language feature... I think a pigeon language is like a language that multiple people use, as a crossover... Let me google that instead of just talking out my butt.
Adam Stacoviak
While you're doing that, there's a Reddit post, one year ago, so this is actually 28 years, not 27, as I read it... So it says "After 27 years, ICQ is officially shutting down today."
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:06:08.24\] "End of an era for one of the first messaging apps." So 28 years ago.
Jerod Santo
Okay, so Pidgin, at Pidgin.im - also dead. Last modified in 2020. It's a chat program that which lets you log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. XMPP, IRC, Bonjour, Simple, Silk, Sefer... I mean, tons of these I've never heard of. Sametime. I thought there was an ICQ... Oh, and then, that's a Windows, Linux and other Unix-like client. On macOS try ADM. Do you remember ADM?
Adam Stacoviak
That's what I was talking about, yeah. The pigeon. I was thinking ADM.
Jerod Santo
That's the that's the bird, ADM.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, I used that one.
Jerod Santo
Yup. Jabber...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah.
Jerod Santo
Google Talk... Remember GTalk?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Google probably also killed GTalk.
Adam Stacoviak
There's still some chat up in there in Gmail...
Jerod Santo
ADM is also open source...
Adam Stacoviak
GChat.
Jerod Santo
Let's see... Latest release of ADM runs on macOS X. 10.7, 10.5, or newer. So this is also dead.
Adam Stacoviak
Man, all this dead stuff...
Jerod Santo
But it's because this audience they serve is gone. I mean, who needs to connect to these different chat apps nowadays? Nobody.
Adam Stacoviak
Only fools.
Jerod Santo
Last commit here was like four years ago. So we're finding all kinds of dead projects as we just talk. To go back to the word pidgin... Pidgin is a grammatically simplified form of a contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common. That's a great name then for a program that does what it did.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
And so if you speak Swahili and I speak English, and we don't have a crossover language, we would develop between our people groups this third simpler language, so we could actually communicate, and we'd call that a pidgin language. Interesting.
Adam Stacoviak
Very interesting.
Jerod Santo
So ICQ was rad, ICQ is gone... Skype was cool for a minute.
Adam Stacoviak
Dude, Skype was crucial.
Jerod Santo
It really was.
Adam Stacoviak
A lot of good days on Skype.
Jerod Santo
And now it's gone, I assume... Does Microsoft still ship new versions of Skype?
Adam Stacoviak
It's dead, man.
Jerod Santo
Who cares, man...
Adam Stacoviak
Teams. Long live Teams.
Jerod Santo
It's irrelevant. Oh yeah, Teams...
Adam Stacoviak
I would never use Teams, personally, but...
Jerod Santo
What are non-Microsoft people using? I guess Discord... For voice it's probably Discord at this point.
Adam Stacoviak
Even real time -- I guess Zoom won that, right?
Jerod Santo
Zoom...
Adam Stacoviak
For a while it was Skype. You would skype somebody. You would never zoom somebody.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
Then we would WebEx... Ugh, gosh...
Jerod Santo
\[unintelligible 01:09:03.13\]
Adam Stacoviak
I almost punched my screen just now, dude... Ooh, it was a bad situation. \[unintelligible 01:09:10.05\] It was almost a situation here. Yeah...
Jerod Santo
Like, you say WebEx, and that's like worse than Rochambeau... You know, pick one. It's like, yeah...
Adam Stacoviak
WebEx is just nasty. Nasty, man... You know, I do miss the fact that -- gosh, I'm just like brain farting... Not ICQ. IRC... Is IRC still a thing?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I mean, it's as niche as ever. I think it had a moment when people were interested in it, but then like Freenode freaked out... I can't remember what happened with Freenode, but like people that were running Freenode ended up being weirdos, or something... Somebody can fill us back in on that. And IRC just never had a chance in that way.
Adam Stacoviak
It's a shame, because there's a lot of people who found their love for the thing they do on a mailing list, or some sort of... What were the original like chat rooms called? They were like PDP hubs, or something like that, or... I don't know what they were called. I'm not even from that era. But I kind of miss the days I didn't take a part in, in a way.
Jerod Santo
\[01:10:15.04\] \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
This one was simpler. Now everything's commercialized. Like, if I can't make money doing this, it doesn't belong. And that's just kind of sad, man... It really is. I think you should scratch your own itches. I'm just scratching itches, that's all. It's a pretty wild world out there these days.
You know, one thing I was taking note of when I was looking at Wikipedia for Quicksilver was how cool that logo was, man... That's what made Quicksilver cool. It had a lot of cool things initially.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
The cool HUD, the cool logo, the colors, the new thing... It just doesn't work out sometimes. And if you go to Meteor's -- that's how I said it too, Meteor... Meteor Software on YouTube - they're thriving. Like, one month ago, 135 views. Seriously? I mean, four months ago, 3x faster builds, 409 views... They're thriving on there. They're just busting it up. Putting their content out there.
Jerod Santo
So should I take it back?
Adam Stacoviak
No, they're dead, man. They're dead, man. They're dead.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
That was me being politely facetious.
Jerod Santo
You know what I think is dead? I think this episode is dead.
Adam Stacoviak
You know, folks, I'm just really sad for you, because version one was better.
Jerod Santo
So good. It was perfect software.
Adam Stacoviak
It was, man. It was good stuff. And we did a good job with this episode, but I feel like we kind of botched it...
Jerod Santo
Well, we botched it when we didn't hit the Record button, you know? The rest of the time, we've been kind of just...
Adam Stacoviak
...begrudgingly here, just podcasting. It's like "We've gotta be here now", you know...
Jerod Santo
We've just kind of been coping...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it's been hard.
Jerod Santo
So I guess, you know, sorry... But also, you're welcome.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. It is what it is, as they say. In closing though, I do want to say one thing.
Jerod Santo
Okay.
Adam Stacoviak
Off the thread we were in there, but I did mention AMP. And I do want to say that AMP is free. You see this, Jerod? Ampcode.com...
Jerod Santo
I did see this. This is interesting. AMP is free... But free as in how?
Adam Stacoviak
Free as in you're the product again, okay? They're gonna advertise to you.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] You just went straight backwards on this thing. You're the product again. Yeah, they're gonna sell your eyeballs.
Adam Stacoviak
That being said, though, I don't know what they're tracking, so I can't say that for sure... But it's the first that I'm aware of where you can use a - I've said it before, my favorite AI agent, coding agent, for free. And I've hit limits with it, I think it's a couple hours. I don't know what the actual limit is, but after a bit, they're like "Listen, we've only got six advertisers. You've seen them all."
Jerod Santo
And the way it works is they show you ads in the terminal, right?
Adam Stacoviak
Right above -- so you have your prompt area, then you have the chat area... That's been what's been going by. And right between those two, perfectly sandwiched - I think they've done a great job with the UI on this, too - is this a subtle text-based ad. It's not even a bother, honestly. And I've actually enjoyed them. Like "Oh, sweet. They're doing that? Cool. Nice." I find myself actually wanting to see the -- I want to see the ads.
Jerod Santo
It doesn't bother me. I mean, you're opting into this free thing, with -- it's all straightforward, the way it works. So if you need to use it for free, and you're okay with ad-supported, I think it's a great option. So I would say there's no shame in that game whatsoever.
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:14:04.14\] If you want it to deep-think for you - well, ask nicely, okay? Because this probably isn't gonna do it. \[laughter\] It's like, "There ain't no thinking in here. We just do around here."
Jerod Santo
So if the whole time it's deep thinking, could it show you like a video ad? That'd be kind of cool, turn it into like ASCIInema style in your terminal... That would be sick.
Adam Stacoviak
That'd be kind of cool.
Jerod Santo
I'd watch those...
Adam Stacoviak
Here's Star Wars. ASCII Star Wars.
Jerod Santo
No, not Star Wars. That's not an ad. It has to be like Dawn Soap, or something.
Adam Stacoviak
Even worse.
Jerod Santo
All they need to do is take typical advertisements, like TV commercials, and they need to turn them into ASCIInema with some sort of software program, and feed those into your terminal. That'd be sweet.
Adam Stacoviak
There's a dog that hunts there, I think, maybe. But I don't know.
Jerod Santo
We should talk to our friends at Sourcegraph and at the very least get a Changelog ad up in there. Like "Hey, while you're sitting here waiting for this thing to go, why don't you listen to the Changelog, dudes?"
Adam Stacoviak
Absolutely. So my prescription though for people is this: "Don't sleep on this free." It doesn't have to be your daily driver, but... What about free docs? Who wants some free docs? Because this thing will just wind up and do whatever you want for a couple hours, unfettered, every day. So you basically have two to three hours per day of AMP Code that you can just use. It still has the oracle, so does everything else that it has... It's nothing different about it that I can tell. It seems just as smart, just as able... And get yourself some free documentation, maybe some free thinking, some deep thinking, have it write some tests for you... Stuff you don't really want to do, and maybe you're not going to do. Maybe do a code review for you... Every day, for free. Boom. You're wasting it. It's like free labor, just sitting there. Scoop it up. Take it.
Jerod Santo
Alright. Well, thank you for hanging out with us...
Adam Stacoviak
Yes, friends, thank you so much... Remind me, is this our spooky episode?
Jerod Santo
Spooky, man.
Adam Stacoviak
This was spooky. Was it a little spooky?
Jerod Santo
Well, you're acting a little spooky there. You're like "Dead, dead...!"
Adam Stacoviak
\[unintelligible 01:16:14.11\] I was just trying to like lean into it, okay?
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
Trying to play a role here, do my job.
Jerod Santo
You got the sixth sense "I see dead projects" up in there.
Adam Stacoviak
That's right.
Jerod Santo
Although that got probably cut before we started hitting record.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah... You might have it, though...
Jerod Santo
Let's say goodbye, friends, before we --
Adam Stacoviak
I think you need to say it twice though, so that's cool, though.
Jerod Santo
Oh, good.
Adam Stacoviak
Enjoy your Halloween, eat lots of candy, brush your teeth, and support open source.
Jerod Santo
Stay spooky. Bye, friends.
Adam Stacoviak
Stay spooky.
