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The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

State of the "log" 2025 (Friends)

19 Dec 2025

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?

15.067 - 30.088 Jared Smith

Oh yes, it's late December once again. That classic changelog theme song is bumpin' and it's time for our 8th annual State of the Log episode. If this is your first time with us, welcome to the changelog.

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30.068 - 52.808 Jared Smith

the software world's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews, and weekend talk show that feels like you're hanging out with your friends in the hallway track of your favorite conference on repeat. Big thanks to our partners at Fly.io for helping us bring you awesome developer pods all year long. You know we love Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship.

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53.249 - 82.863 Jared Smith

Give it a try at Fly.io. All right, state of the log 2025. Let's do it. it. Well, friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine, again, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depot.dev. Kyle, we are in an era of disruption, right? I would also describe it as rethinking what we thought was true. And I guess that's kind of the definition of disruption.

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83.183 - 92.374 Jared Smith

But from your perspective, how are teams, reliability teams, CICD, pipeline teams, how are they all rethinking things? And where does depot fit into that?

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92.354 - 112.303 Kyle Galbraith

In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering that we're all living in. And they're starting to question like the bottleneck is no longer the act of writing code. The bottleneck is shifting. The most time consuming part is integrating the code.

112.523 - 128.202 Kyle Galbraith

It's everything that comes after. It's the build, it's the pull request review, it's the deployment, it's the getting it into production. Once it's in production, it's scaling up support teams to support it. It's adding documentation, all of these downstream problems.

128.682 - 148.412 Kyle Galbraith

And so through the lens of Depot, what we're really starting to think about is there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people. And what's the consequences of that?

148.732 - 169.309 Kyle Galbraith

What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team? There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created If there's three engineers and 297 agents also creating features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a pull request perspective.

169.369 - 186.57 Kyle Galbraith

But then you think about it through a build lens, too, of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans and now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running. Well, like you definitely don't want your builds taking 20 minutes because now like the entire pinch point is the build pipeline.

Chapter 2: How are teams rethinking software engineering in 2025?

279.228 - 295.228 Jared Smith

Go ahead. Recap it. I was just thinking about that because like, you know, you mentioned the new listener potentially. I was thinking like a tiny little recap. So state of the log. We're called the change log. So this is state of the log. And all year we we work tirelessly, Jared, to log everything.

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295.613 - 324.793 Jared Smith

I would say the developer journey, you know, from the new project to the sale of a company, to a new side project, to an acquisition, to you just, you name it, the latest platform that may be out there, the newest framework in the JavaScript world, which is like on the daily, bun acquisitions, just name specifically, you know, and as we talk to these humans, not just these machines, these humans in this world,

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325.111 - 343.68 Jared Smith

we get to podcast and share and all that good stuff. And this is a sort of an examination of that. But first we invite our listenership, those folks that are listening to the show to submit a voicemail. And then we hand that voicemail. Am I stealing some of your thunder here? I know you do a good job of like doing this. Am I stealing some of this? No, man. Okay, cool.

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344.702 - 350.471 Jared Smith

Um, break master cylinder behind the scenes produces our music. I won't share the real name because he's still anonymous.

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351.092 - 351.152

Um,

351.402 - 365.479 Jared Smith

But Break My Cylinder is beloved by us, produces all of our music. We love that. And, you know, Jared collects his voicemails. I stay out of it because I want to be surprised in this moment. I've listened to none of these yet. And so each year we do this state of the law.

365.499 - 385.202 Jared Smith

We kind of go back through, we invite folks to send voicemails, what they love about the show, what they don't love about the show. And then Breakmaster makes these cool remixes, which are super cool. And we have fun listening to those and just kind of like diving in. And for those who may be new and don't know me, I don't like watching movie trailers. Okay. And so these are like movie trailers.

385.702 - 405.57 Jared Smith

These are like little voicemail movie trailers that I can't watch because it ruins the movie. And so I've heard none of these. This is fresh for me. I'll hand it back to you, Jared. Hopefully I did a pretty decent job of describing state of law. That's right. So this is the movie and we're about to watch it together or listen to it as is the case with voicemail.

405.59 - 424.72 Jared Smith

So thank you to all of you who wrote in and to everybody who listened throughout the year. We put out a lot of pods, almost 150. If you count news, if you take news out, that's almost a hundred as each of our three legs of our table did about 50 episodes. As we tend to do per year, and so that's a lot.

Chapter 3: What are the consequences of increased code velocity in small teams?

542.748 - 569.448 Andrew Patton

and everything that Breakmaster Cylinder provides. I really missed JS Party this year. It's open for a few more dysfunctional developer episodes, but I love the multiple three-way conversations between Jared, Adam, and Nick Nisi, putting friends 89, 102, and the most recent. They are always very funny. They're always very relevant conversations. to the issues of the day.

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569.508 - 582.591 Andrew Patton

And I find it somewhat mind blowing when I get a peek into the habits and methods of Nick Nisi. Thank you all for all you do and looking forward to a great 2026.

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582.631 - 610.616 Jared Smith

The habits and methods. Yeah, that's a good show title. That's cool. That's cool, man. Next time Nick's on, we should have one called Habits and Methods of Nick Nisi. Oh, man. I do enjoy Nick as well. I concur with everything. What was his name again? I'm sorry. Andrew. Andrew. Everything Andrew said. I was too busy listening to Catch the First Name. I'm sorry, Andrew. But yeah, I concur.

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610.676 - 635.166 Jared Smith

Adam Jacob, Nick Nisi, Matt Reier, Piano to Guitar. I mean, that's just podcast gold there. So I have collated the list. I'll put that in the show notes. We'll have all these favorite episodes listed. Andrew listed 11. So that's a lot. Not the most. There is somebody who's going to list more than 11. It's probably going to be you, Adam.

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635.566 - 649.165 Jared Smith

But in addition to Adam, there's somebody else to set up a teaser. They're not a spoiler, but a teaser. Who's going to outdo Andrew. But still, that's a good list. And for our list, we try not to overlap listener lists. And so...

Chapter 4: How does Depot address bottlenecks in software development?

649.347 - 668.045 Jared Smith

You and I both created our own list, but however, we're kind of crossing off the ones that they mention as they go so that we don't have too much overlap because that's just repetition, and we all want to keep it dry around here. He took a lot of my favorites, though. I'm not going to lie. A lot of his favorites were my favorites. And speaking of J.S.

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668.066 - 687.414 Jared Smith

Party and Nick Nisi and Amel Hussain, who was on the show last year but didn't quite hit the three-timer pace that Nick hit and that Matt Reier hit, She's coming back on the show in January. So Amel actually did reach out recently and say, Hey, how come Nick's on the show more than I am? And I just said, I can't get rid of this guy.

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687.434 - 698.249 Jared Smith

You know, he's always hanging around and whereas you disappear for a while and then come back. So you're always welcome Amel and she's coming soon. So a little more JS party sprinkled in upcoming episodes.

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698.77 - 698.91 Jamie Tanna

Yeah.

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699.951 - 704.177 Jared Smith

All right. You want the Andrew Patton remix? Hit it. There you go.

705.372 - 732.207 Andrew Patton

Hello, ChangeLog family. I've been the pianist for many years, which is very exciting. I was hoping for a few more banging piano beats from Breakmaster Cylinder. They are always very dramatic and certainly interesting. Looking forward to Weird and Wonderful 2026.

732.946 - 759.257 Jared Smith

There you go. Those are special moments right there, man. Listen to those banging beats. A sweet voicemail remix like that. And a nice little crazy outro. If you knew Breakmaster, like we know Breakmaster. Very fitting. That's a very fitting outro to the Bangin' Beats. 100%. All right. Up next, because, hey, his name starts with a B. It's our old friend, and I think every year call her in her.

759.678 - 760.4 Jared Smith

Come on now.

760.901 - 778.161 Brett Cannon

It's Brett Cannon. Brett Cannon. Here we go. Hello, Adam and Jared. It's Brett Cannon calling for that annual tradition to see whether I can read dates appropriately while I tell you about my favorite episodes that I got to listen to this year. So I'm going to start off with The Power of the Button, which you actually recorded in 2024 but didn't publish until 2025, so I'm safe.

Chapter 5: What storytelling techniques are discussed?

3242.354 - 3261.441 Jared Smith

Not... It's one rattlesnake. Well, he floralized it, so... I like that. That's how stories go. They get better and better. You gotta embellish a little bit. Yeah, they get better as you get further away. You gotta pepper that story a little bit, you know? A little seasoning won't hurt anybody. Remember that den of rattlesnakes we had stumbled upon? Gosh, so many. Just... Yeah, one almost got us.

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3261.461 - 3292.465 Jared Smith

Why'd it have to be snakes? Yeah. Man, Homelab for sure. You know, Homelab's near and dear to my... My heart. Proxmox for life, ZFS for life, and Windows for life. Oh, wait. Well, Windows for a minute. Well, not quite. But I did get support on getting my Windows license from Nabil. So that was very kind of him to help me there. Oh, nice. Thanks, Nabil.

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3293.491 - 3321 Jared Smith

He lent me his support to get it for slightly less, which is very, very kind, very kind. Well, I do want to mention Nabil's mention of our AI coverage. And I think Andrew as well or somebody else earlier on, maybe it was Jamie, who said he's kind of a skeptic, but he appreciates our AI coverage because it's not completely saturated in the hype that you can get out there.

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3320.98 - 3339.866 Jared Smith

Because we've also been accused of that. Especially, it seems like people on Spotify in particular comment on our shows and they're very upset that we're talking about AI and one guy says it's all we talk about now and blah, blah, blah. And you can't keep everybody happy.

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Chapter 6: What are the hosts' thoughts on AI coverage?

3340.306 - 3349.519 Jared Smith

But I want to bring it up because it is something that we think about and something that we want to both talk about and recognize and use.

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3349.988 - 3377.515 Jared Smith

and ponder but we also understand that it is oversold and that it is over discussed and that we tend to lean into it at times when i think we have less interesting things on the docket we're like well it's always fodder for an interesting conversation because of all the questions right because we don't have the answers and so we're doing our best to both talk about it but not

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3378.676 - 3394.221 Jared Smith

gush too much, but then when we're excited, just go ahead and be excited. I think you probably, as you guys have been listening over the years, have gotten a taste of both our excitement and then our skepticism and then our disappointments and then our realizations of...

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3394.201 - 3418.47 Jared Smith

what it can do and how exciting that is and what it can't do and how frustrating that is and so yeah we're trying and it's not easy because if we wanted to just chase audience we would just lean hard into it like so many people have and i i've never wanted the changelog to become like yet another ai show and um so i appreciate that you all appreciate the non-ai topics

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3419.783 - 3436.199 Jared Smith

And if you, and when we hear the criticism, we take it very seriously. And then I look back at our most recent episodes. Like I go, I go through our playlist and I'm like, maybe we are just doing too much of this. And I look at it. I'm like, you know what? Nope. There's plenty of stuff in there. That's not, it's just like confirmation bias. I guess when people say it's all we talk about.

3437.96 - 3465.478 Jared Smith

I think it, it definitely is a recurring topic. Oh yeah. But it's not the isolated primary topic. Obviously. Of the show. Yeah, I mean, it's what episodes it is. Yeah, I think even like the show I did recently with Alex Kuchmar was that we were talking about the Linux rabbit hole essentially. Because I didn't even plan that really. We just started talking about the fun stuff.

3466.338 - 3485.996 Jared Smith

And that was kind of fun. And I think we were about 50 minutes in and he mentioned something he had done, vibe coding. And we talked about it on the podcast as well. I didn't even plan to mention it, really. Yeah. So it wasn't like a topic on my mind, but obviously he laid down the spades, so we played spades.

3486.978 - 3495.994 Jared Smith

Well, just wanted to mention that we do think about it and we hope to bring somewhat level-headed and yet also...

Chapter 7: What are some favorite podcast episodes mentioned?

3497.189 - 3516.233 Jared Smith

keeping to the edge of what things are going on and not ignoring it just because it's AI, because I feel like that's also foolhardy. And of course, news talks about it all the time because it's so much in the news. And so if you want to keep up with it without having to actually follow the news yourself, of course, I feel like we've tried to be a good resource for that.

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3516.633 - 3544.307 Jared Smith

But, you know, opinions vary and Mileage varies as well. Even my own mileage with the same tool I was using yesterday varies today. It's like, oh, I was so excited yesterday and then I hit a road block today and now I'm mad again. It's like doing two all over again. Because we're emotional beings. Well, let's get to Nobile's and our final Breakmaster Zillow Remix. Peak change look for me.

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3549.62 - 3567.612 Brett Cannon

was venturing in the wilderness together with the mysterious breakmaster cylinder and battling a whole bunch of rattlesnakes

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3581.564 - 3612.987 Jared Smith

there's a little trail off there I love the footsteps yeah I hope that ending means that we survived you know after whatever happened there happened the climactic yeah there was lasers there was a lot going on there somebody got carried away yeah like carried away with their talent then carried away with their Unfortunate event, maybe.

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3613.007 - 3634.471 Jared Smith

There was no speaking at the end in the walkway, so we don't know for sure. Could have been a park ranger getting us out of there. We're down and out. All right, we're done with BMC now. Thank you, BMC. Not forever, but just for this particular state of the log. Yes. And thank you to everybody who took the time out of your day. I know y'all are busy.

3634.971 - 3650.97 Jared Smith

I know it's asking a lot to record a voicemail and upload it through a form. None of that's easy. You know, if we were SaaS entrepreneurs, we'd be failing, right? There's too much friction. Our conversion rates would be low. Yeah. PLG is PL-ology.

Chapter 8: How do the hosts reflect on their year-end experiences?

3651.431 - 3673.344 Jared Smith

Yeah. All that to say, we thank you for going through that for us because it makes us feel good and hopefully makes you all feel good too. Should we talk about our own faves now? Let's get to our faves. I mean, come on. Enough of these people's faves. They don't know the real faves. So our friends at Framer are fans of this podcast and their sponsor.

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3673.564 - 3696.435 Jared Smith

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3742.535 - 3768.843 Jared Smith

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3768.863 - 3790.834 Jared Smith

It's like if it was a story arc, this is the final act of the pod. That's right. How do you want to do it? You want to go first? You want me to go first? You want to go tit for tat? Let's go at the exact same time and talk over each other. We've been known to do that. I mean, Jason will tell you. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I don't have a prescription. I'll take your lead.

3791.523 - 3818.697 Jared Smith

All right, well, I have a list that was longer than I was expecting. Ten. My list is ten deep, and these are all ten that have not been mentioned at all yet, which means I had a bunch of other ones that other people mentioned. And I'm just going to ten that were not mentioned. And I'll start with the oldest. And that would be interview 625, from open source to acquired with Ashley Jeffs.

3818.717 - 3846.77 Jared Smith

This was back in January. Okay. in which Ash told us all about Benthos and his journey to finding an acquirer for Benthos in Red Panda. And they, an open source success story in many ways. And also just a guy who cracked me up with the way he was. I mean, his mannerisms, the way he talks, his random contradictions of himself, like he would say left and then right.

3846.89 - 3870.308 Jared Smith

And he would stare at you, you know, like he's just a funny person. I really enjoyed him. I try to get him back onto a pound of fine. Cause I'm like, you're just funny and fun to be around. Please come play games with us. And he respectfully declined, but to my chagrin, I really just enjoy that guy. And so that is my first fave, is From Open Source to Acquired with Ashley Jeffs.

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