Building for application developers (Changelog Interviews #630)

Our 8th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 8 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Ajay Kulkarni from Tiger Data (Co-founder/CEO) is on the pod this week with Adam. He asked him to get vulnerable and trace his path to becoming a CEO. They dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and explore how founder values end up forming company culture (whether you intend them to or not). From his enterprise days to building Timescale (and the rename to Tiger Data), we cover the whole journey — even the haters, because haters gonna hate. Here's where it gets really interesting: Agents in the database! Not the hype. The real thing baby. They get into how fast you can go from idea to shipped these days, what it actually means to talk to your database, and the whole API/CLI/MCP/Skills movement.

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 49 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam for a trip down the Linux rabbit hole -- Docker vs Podman, building a Kubernetes cluster, ZFS backups with zfs.rent, bootc, favorite Linux distros, new homelab tools built with AI, self-hosting Immich, content creation, Plex and Jellyfin, the future of piracy and more.

We're joined by Zipline cofounder / CTO, Keenan Wyrobek. Zipline is on a mission to build the world’s first logistics system that serves all people equally via their fleet of autonomous drones that started in Africa delivering medical supplies and can now deliver packages (up to 8 lbs) directly to your door. They've solved a lot of gnarly technical and regulatory challenges along the way. We go deep with Keenan. We hope you'll find this one fascinating.

Why AI needs hard rules (not vibe checks), what Anthropic's acquisition of Bun's creators tells us about the AI takeover, Jonah Glover couldn't get Claude to recreate Space Jam's 1996 website, Google finally unkills something, and Bazzite is a distro for the next generation of Linux gaming.

Nick Nisi joins us to dig into the latest trends from this year and how they're impacting his day-to-day coding and Vision Pro wearing. Anthropic's acquisition of Bun, the evolving JavaScript and AI landscape, GitHub's challenges and the Amp/Sourcegraph split. We dive into AI development practices, context management, voice assistants, Home Assistant OS and home automation, the state of the AI browser war, and we close with a prediction from Nick.

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, stops by to help us explore his tech predictions for 2026 and beyond. Will companionship be redefined by consumer robots? Will quantum-safe become the only safe worth talking about? Is this the dawn of the renaissance developer? We're infinitely curious why Werner came to this particular set of conclusions. Are you?

Matheus Lima on what makes senior developers actually senior, Tega Brain created a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, Andrew Kelley moves Zig from GitHub to Codeberg, Matias Heikkilä says there's no free lunch for vibe coding, and your SSD data at rest might be at risk.

Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more.