The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Changelog Media

Daniel Hooper lists out all the good ideas in computer science, Jeff Geerling declares 2024 the year corporate open source dies, Jared Turner says all kinds of works-in-progress are waste, Daroc Alden covers the leadership crisis in the Nix community & John Hawthorn explains why Ruby may be faster than you think.

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.

This week we’re joined by Louis Pilfold, the creator of the Gleam programming language. For the uninitiated, Gleam is a functional programming language for building type-safe systems that compiles to Erlang and JavaScript and it’s written in Rust. We discuss the inspiration and development of Gleam, how it compares to other languages, where it shines, the overwhelming amount of support Louis is getting through GitHub sponsors, what’s next for Gleam and their near-term plans for a language server.

Forrest Brazeal is concerned about the open source threat from within, Vicki Boykis explains why Redis is forked, John O’Nolan and the Ghost team plan to federate over ActivityPub, Llama 3 is now available for “businesses of all sizes” & nolen writes up questions to ask when you don’t want to work.

If Changelog News had an extended edition, this might be it! Jerod & Adam discuss Hashicorp’s Cease and Desist letter, Redis getting forked, Boston Dymanics’ scary cool new robot, Justin Searls’ extensive use of the Apple Vision Pro, Thorston Ball moving from Vim to Zed, Firefox becoming hard to use, Beeper joining Automattic & more.

This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.