The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The code, prose & pods that shaped 2024 (News)
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, 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 and listening along in 2024. This episode diverges from our traditional fare.
I've reviewed the 50 previous episodes and picked, in my humble opinion, the coolest code, the best prose, 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, Ollama is one of the few that I actually adopted and still use today. Best pros 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, 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. Next 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. Below 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 Ochagovia 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 Pineda from the Dominican Republic. That 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.
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