We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web. Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.

Pushing webpack forward (Interview)

Software’s best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews &amp; talk show.

Technology

Tech News

Podcasting

Gadgets

Software How-To

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.

The ol' hot & juicy (Friends)

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.

Run Gleam run (Interview)

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.

The threat to open source comes from within (News)

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.

Rug pull, not cool! (Friends)

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.

Pushing webpack forward (Interview)

Download our free app to listen on your phone