Breaking Change

I'm about to get on a plane and will be gone for a couple weeks, but didn't want to leave you Breaking Changeless so I did the thing where I stand up in front of a microphone and talked at you. Again. Like I do.

Fun fact: this is the first and only time I've taken a phone call live, on-air! I was just too lazy to edit that out gracefully.

Whenever I go to Japan solo, I experience moments of loneliness, so I'd really appreciate it if you sent me some praise or complaints or ideas to [email protected] and I'll feel comforted by the knowledge that you exist. Your engagement sustains me.

Lotta weird and dumb links this go-round:

During the end-of-year podcasting doldrums, I'm pleased to bring you this Feature Release, in which I eschew my tradition of eschewing traditions and present a second annual sorting of the puns. As 2025 (a.k.a. Season 2) of Breaking Change comes to a close, Aaron Patterson once again joins the show to execute our latest iteration of the punsort algorithm.

Following along at home? Here's a spoiler-free link to the original Season 2 rankings.

Ready to be spoiled? Visit /puns for the final pun rankings of 2025.

If you agree, disagree, or are indifferent about where things landed, feel free to get it off your chest at [email protected].

I'm experiencing what breathing out of my nose properly feels like for the first time. Everything is new and wondrous and I've never felt so optimistic. This sensation lasted for two days and now I'm used to it and existence is once again pain.

Share your existential musings at [email protected] and I'll nod and sigh along. I might even nod and sigh performatively for you on the show!

Important ground covered in this episode:

Had a little pep in my step this time. Maybe it's because I decided to start recording after 7 AM for once. Maybe it's because I can finally fucking breathe out of my nose holes.

Tell me about what you do while you continue to draw breath at [email protected].

Things you can read if you're bored:

I'm back and I'm angry. My power went out, which caused my Internet to go down, which broke my favorite mug. And that's just the shit that happened before 7 AM. By 9 AM my doorbell was continuously chiming for no fucking reason.

Join me in the struggle. We shall persevere. Tell me how your morning went by writing in to: [email protected].

Here 4 U:

This may be the version 45 release of Breaking Change, but when you factor in its Hotfixes and Feature Release entries, this is somehow the 50th episode of the show!

Why? Why are we still doing this to ourselves? Write in your answer and how you feel about yourself as a result to [email protected]. Seriously, I need some new material.

The web runs on links, so have some:

Post-recording update: As I've been lobbying for (both publicly and behind the scenes), it has been announced that the RubyGems and Bundler client libraries are being transferred to Matz and the Ruby core team.

Mike McQuaid (of Homebrew fame) and I scheduled this episode of Hot Fix a week before the Ruby community exploded. Hot Fix is all about getting spicy, but even we were a little wary of the heat in that particular kitchen. The problem Mike brought to the table is the same one he's always on about: open source is not a career. Incidentally, Mike's favorite topic also happens to be relevant to the latest RubyGems controversy—because it all boils down to paying people to work on open source.

Not content to miss out on the fun, Jerod from The Changelog asked if he could join and discuss the ongoing Ruby drama as a group. So we decided to team up and do a collab episode—call it Breaking Changelog, I guess? It's nothing if not efficient: record once, edit twice, and syndicate everywhere.

If you don't mind swear words, listen to this version. If you don't like swearing, what the fuck are you doing here? (But seriously, you can listen to their edit if you want!)

Please send your compliments to [email protected] and your complaints to [email protected].

If you know who José Valim is, then you know he probably made a mistake by joining me for our third installment of 🔥Hotfix🔥. The inventor of the Elixir programming language is at it again with his colleagues at Dashbit and they've got a new product called Tidewave. It's a coding agent with a twist: it has such a deep level of integration with your web framework that it can get the executable feedback it needs to tackle the entire feature development lifecycle.

I do eventually let him plug the tool (and our conversation genuinely makes me want to try it—I logged a todo and everything!), but to be on Hotfix you gotta bring a thorny problem to the table, and he picked a great one: marketing hype aside, nobody has a clue what the future of AI agents looks like.

Like always, we totally 100% and A+ solved the problem by correctly predicting the future. You gotta listen to find out.

Every time I talk to José, I get ideas for what I should be doing instead of what I'm actually doing. If you feel so inspired, write into [email protected] and I'll read it on the next mainline version release of Breaking Change.

You can follow José on Bsky, X, and Mastodon. Pick your poison. ☠️

Hey, look! Breaking Change now has chapter support for each segment! More on how I did that while still upholding my commitment to laziness later.

I didn't get a good job connecting this version's release to what I was referencing, so to be clear I was referring to my heart rate as opposed to any other bodily functions. The other ones are getting up just fine, thank you. Get your head out of the gutter.

Thanks for all the great e-mails the last couple weeks! Throw yours on the pile at [email protected]. Hopefully Fastmail won't lose it.

For the folks who pronounce URLs like Earls:

It's an emergency bonus edition of Breaking Change as I take the covers off yet another show-within-a-show. I call it Feature Release, and its job is to fill in that middle number in our semantically versioned series of conversations together. No pun, no news, just some timely content wrapped up in a name, logo, and jingle package that still has that new podcast smell.

It's a 1-hour review of the Airpods, Apple Watch, and iPhone updates Apple announced today. You can see the full event video on YouTube. The Verge has a 17 minute abridged version if you just want the synopsis.

Please enjoy this episode of Feature Release! It may be the only one. Write into [email protected] with your feedback!