The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

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. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow 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. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!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. 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, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow 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. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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

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). Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!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. 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:Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow 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. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!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. 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, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Layercode Pusher AI Engineer London Meetup How Claude Code Works (Jared Zoneraich, PromptLayer) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!