Jason Willems believes the tech monoculture is finally breaking, Don Ho shares some bad Notepad++ news, Tailscale’s Avery Pennarun pens a great downtime apology, Milan Milanović explains why you can only code 4 hours per day, and Addy Osmani on managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code.

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• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.

Featuring:

• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

We discuss the buzz around Clawdbot / MoltBot / OpenClaw, how app subscriptions are turning into weekend hacking projects, why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street, and what it all means.

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• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
• Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price.
• Squarespace – A website makes it real! Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase.

Featuring:

• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• OpenClaw — personal AI assistant
• Mintlify
• Macrumors Buyer’s Guide: Mac Mini
• Your app subscription is now my weekend project
• The future of software engineering is SRE
• Why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

As the creator and long-time maintainer of ESLint, Nicholas Zakas is well-positioned to criticize GitHub’s recent response to npm’s insecurity. He found the response insufficient, and has other ideas on how GitHub could secure npm better. On this episode, Nicholas details these ideas, paints a bleak picture of npm alternatives like JSR, and shares our frustration that such a critical piece of internet infrastructure feels neglected.

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• Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price.
• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
• Squarespace – A website makes it real! Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase.

Featuring:

• Nicholas C. Zakas – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• How GitHub could secure npm
• JSR: the javascript registry
• vlt /vōlt/

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Clawdbot drives Mac Mini sales, Swizec Teller on the future of software engineering being SRE, Daniel Stenberg decided to end curl’s bug bounty program, zerobrew takes some of the best ideas from uv and applies them to Homebrew, and Phil Eaton on LLMs and your career.

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• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.

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• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab’ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what’s possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the “Year of Self-Hosted Software” while Adam reveals his homelab’s secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI).

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• Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
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Featuring:

• Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

People

• Techno Tim - Tim Stewart’s website, YouTube channel, and documentation hub
• Crosstalk Solutions - Chris’s channel, mentioned for building custom Ubiquiti API tools

Virtualization & Infrastructure

• Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containers
• TrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFS
• HexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development)
• Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deployment

Self-Hosted Software

• Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCR
• Paperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMs
• Ollama - Run large language models locally on your own hardware
• Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMs
• Plex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media library
• Home Assistant - Open-source home automation platform
• Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filtering

Document Intelligence & RAG

• Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelines
• PaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognition

AI & Agents

• Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episode
• OpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data

Networking

• Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi)
• Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devices

Container & Orchestration

• Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applications
• Kubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloads
• Fly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globally

Monitoring & Observability

• Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platform
• Prometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit

Security & Authentication

• Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable)
• Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization server

Databases

• MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQL
• Redis - In-memory data store for caching and messaging
• PostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational database

Hardware Mentioned

• Intel Optane - Ultra-low latency storage drives (discontinued but prized for ZFS special vdevs)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - GPU used for Plex transcoding and local AI inference

Concepts & Techniques

• ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operations
• PCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drives
• Medallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETL

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Damien Tanner (founder of Pusher, now building Layercode) is back for a reunion 17 years in the making. Damien officially returns to The Changelog to discuss the seismic shift happening in software development. From the first sponsor of the podcast to frontline builder in the AI agent era, Damien shares his insights on why SaaS is dying, why code review is a bottleneck (and non-existent for some), and how small teams can now build giant things.

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• Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

• Damien Tanner – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Layercode
• Pusher
• AI Engineer London Meetup
• How Claude Code Works (Jared Zoneraich, PromptLayer)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Armin Ronacher thinks AI agent psychosis might be driving us insane, Dan Abramov explains how AT Protocol is a social filesystem, RepoBar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening a browser, Ethan McCue shares some life altering Postgres patterns, and Lea Verou says web dependencies are broken and we need to fix them.

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Featuring:

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Gerhard is back for Kaizen 22! We’re diving deep into those pesky out-of-memory errors, analyzing our new Pipedream instance status checker, and trying to figure out why someone in Asia downloads a single episode so much.

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• Squarespace – A website makes it real! Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase.

Featuring:

• Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Kaizen 22 discussion #554
• Tw93/mole: 🐹 deep clean and optimize your mac.
• Stuff Goes Bad: Erlang in Anger
• Abacus.ai - the world’s first super assistant for professionals and enterprises

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft’s GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz’ 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!

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Sponsors:

• Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price.
• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
• Squarespace – A website makes it real! Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase.

Featuring:

• Mat Ryer – GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, X
• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”
• How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem
• 12 predictions for 2026

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Linus Torvalds pushes AI generated code, Jordan Fulghum thinks this is the year of self-hosting, FracturedJson formats for compact / human readability, Scott Werner believes a flood of adequate software is coming, and Sean Goedecke explains why generic software design advice is useless.

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Featuring:

• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

We’re joined by Sid Sijbrandij, founder of GitLab who led the all-in-one coding platform all the way to IPO. In late 2022, Sid discovered that he had bone cancer. That started a journey he’s been on ever since… a journey that he shares with us in great detail. Along the way, Sid continued founding companies including Kilo Code, an all-in-one agentic engineering platform, which he also tells us all about.

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Sponsors:

• Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
• Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.

Featuring:

• Sid Sijbrandij – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Sid’s cancer journey
• Kilo.ai

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!