We take you one last time back to the All Things Open 2024 hallway track to talk with some friends, new & old. We speak with Alex Kretzchmar about self-hosting. We speak with Israa Taha about self-confidence. We speak with Avindra Fernando & Adhithi Ravichandran about self-employment.

We join the Whiskey Web and Whatnot podcast live from the hallway track at All Things Open 2024. Topics include: Chianti, content creation, open source, fake jobs, cancel culture, Silicon Valley (ding), frontend frustrations, the Roman empire & more.

At the tail end of 2019, we got together with Quincy Larson to celebrate ten years of Changelog & five years of freeCodeCamp by recording back-to-back episodes on each other’s pods. Can you believe it’s now five years later and we’re all still here doing our thing?! Let’s learn what Quincy and the amazing community at freeCodeCamp have been up to!

Go Time co-host, Johnny Boursiquot, joins Adam & Jerod to discuss not making the (first) cut, applying Founder Mode, being a cog (or not), realizing that companies are posting fake engineering jobs & the (maybe) imminent demise of the .io TLD.

Tech twitter (“tech X”?) is abuzz with Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay. How does that affect you or come into play when you’re not a founder? Does it matter at all to you, your projects & your code?

Emily Freeman joins the show alongside our Ship It co-host, Justin Garrison! We hear Emily’s burnout story & learn how she and Forrest Brazeal are putting tech-focused influencers on tap. But first: area code turf wars, bad movie reboots & buying used DVDs… at Starbucks?!

Silvia Botros joins Justin & Autumn for a phenomenal conversation about databases, her career path & the ins/outs of writing High Performance MySQL.

Shawn “swyx” Wang is back to talk with us about the state of DevRel according to ZIRP (the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon), the data that backs up the rise and fall of job openings, whether or not DevRel is dead or dying, speculation of the near-term arrival of AGI, AI Engineering as the last job standing, the innovation from Cognition with Devin as well as their mis-steps during Devin’s launch, and what’s to come in the next innovation round of AI.

Adam & Jerod discuss the news! But first, we discuss how you can keep up with the software world (good question, Tyler Boyd!) On the docket: Developer job postings trend, the Ladybird Browser Initiative, the Polyfill.js supply chain attack & is the future self-hosted?

Kelsey Hightower is back to share more of his wisdom. This time it’s one year after his retirement from Google. But guess what? He might be “retired,” but he’s not tired. In this episode Kelsey shares what drives him, what he fears, and how he thinks through his life choices and parenting. This is a good one.

We kick off our Microsoft Build 2024 “coverage” in this free-wheelin’ conversation with our friend, Shaundai Person! We’re talking Netflix infra, we’re talking sales, we’re talking real-world AI usage, we’re talking career choices…. What’s a good next step? Listen in!

Annie Sexton has been on quite a journey since she was last on the show back in early ‘22. On this episode, Annie takes us on that journey, shares her new-found perspective & tells us about how she’s approaching her side project this time around.

What makes a good, bad, and truly great workshop? How do you put together a Go workshop that works, and how do you get the most out of workshops you attend?

Which is smarter: specializing in a particular tech or becoming more of a generalist? It depends! Which is why Jerod invited “undercover generalist” Adolfo Ochagavía on our “It Depends” series to weigh the pros & cons of each path.

Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we’re bringing you conversations all about AI’s complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog.

THE Cameron Seay joins us once again! This time we learn more about his life/history, hear all about the boot camps he runs, discuss recent advancements in AI / quantum computing and how they might affect the tech labor market & more!

We’re all thinking about it and wondering if our job is safe from AI. Maybe. Maybe not. In this episode Johnny Boursiquot is joined some industry veterans who have been through multiple innovation cycles to share their insights and advice on this subject.

Shaundai Person joins Jerod & Nick for a fascinating discussion of her transition from a sales position to Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Along the way, we discuss sales as a superpower, how to build confidence in yourself & even sneak a little TypeScript talk in there because you know who…

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

Gergely Orosz is back for our annual year-end update on the tech market, writ large. How is hiring? Has AI really changed the game? What about that OpenAI fiasco?

We also talk in-depth about Gergely’s self-published book, The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which has been four years in the making.

Valerie Phoenix from Tech By Choice joins Amal & Kball to tell them all about her non-profit that’s passionate about helping people interested in technology, no matter their experience level.

KBall and Amal go deep on careers. They share their career journeys, talk through learnings and mishaps that happened along the way, and break down key factors to understand about big role transitions like “Senior->Staff” as well as “Engineer->Manager”.

On Monday, Kelsey Hightower announced his retirement from Google. On Tuesday, he sat down with us to discuss why, how & what’s next.

Along the way, Kelsey teaches us how not to suck at work, analyzes his magical demos, fights off the haters (again) & opines on System Initiative, Dagger & 37Signals moving off the cloud.

The panel dives into a topic that makes most software developers cringe: Professional networking. Starting with a definition - what does it even mean? - they go into hacks they’ve found for getting more comfortable with networking, building your network in person or online, and then using your network to find new job opportunities or consulting work.

Mat & Johnny interview everyone’s favorite LLM (Natalie with a special hat on) to see if it’d make a good hire as a Go dev. Also, Mat tries to turn it into his very own creepy robot by asking personal questions about his co-hosts. Things get weird. In a good way?