Automation at the speed of Swamp (Friends)
This week I’m talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped Swamp 900 times in four weeks, why he brought User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testing back from the 90s, why software architecture (and domain-driven design) suddenly matters more than knowing how to write code, the live demo where I pointed Swamp at my Proxmox box and watched it write its own automation (blew my mind!!), and why he’ll never accept a pull request to Swamp, ever.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.
Tailscale – Adam loves Tailscale! Easy, secure, identity-based access to anything. Tailscale deploys quickly and enables Zero Trust access to any resource on your network. From CI/CD runners across multi-cloud environments, to SaaS tools and infrastructure, Tailscale connects it all, seamlessly.
RWX – CI/CD platform for high velocity teams. When agents help developers write code in minutes, validation becomes your bottleneck. RWX gives agents programmatic control, sub-second cached builds, and semantic outputs they can act on. No commit required. Just iterate until CI passes, then push.
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:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Featured
Swamp Club
Swamp manual
Swamp extensions
Swamp leaderboard
Swamp on GitHub
Swamp extensions on GitHub
System Initiative
System Initiative on GitHub
AI coding tools
Claude Code
Claude Code docs
OpenAI Codex CLI
Codex on GitHub
Infrastructure and automation
Chef Infra
Proxmox VE
QEMU
Grafana
Honeycomb
Better Auth
TypeScript
Talos Linux
Ubiquiti
DigitalOcean
Hetzner Cloud
Amazon S3
Incus
Kubernetes
Developer platforms and companies
GitHub
GitLab
Block
Related Changelog episodes
Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up
From Chef to System Initiative
From Chef to System Initiative (remastered)
The war for the soul of open source
OSCON
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Agentic infra changes everything (Interview)
Adam Jacob joins us to discuss how agentic systems for building and managing infrastructure have fundamentally altered how he thinks about everything, including the last six years of his life. Along the way, he opines on the recent AWS outage, debates whether we’re in an AI-induced bubble, quells any concerns of AGI and a robot uprising, eats some humble pie, and more.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 5 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.
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.
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Anthropic on agentic misalignment
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
From Chef to System Initiative (remastered) (Interview)
The epic show with Adam Jacob has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Adam goes solo with Adam Jacob for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up and enjoy.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 7 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.
Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform.
Start building at Auth0.com/ai
CodeRabbit – AI-native code reviews, built for the modern dev stack. — CodeRabbit is your always-on code reviewer—flagging hallucinations, surfacing smells, and enforcing standards, all without leaving your IDE or GitHub PRs. Trusted by top teams to ship better code, faster.
Start free at CodeRabbit.ai
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:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
Ximian
Any Given Sunday speech
I’ll Devour You! (I shall look forward to the fight)
RIP Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Writing Code About Your Infrastructure? That's a Losing Race
Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative, discusses a shift in infrastructure automation—moving from writing code to building models that enable rapid simulations and collaboration. In The New Stack Makers, he compares this approach to Formula One racing, where teams use high-fidelity models to simulate race conditions, optimizing performance before hitting the track.
System Initiative applies this concept to enterprise automation, creating a model that understands how infrastructure components interact. This enables fast, multiplayer feedback loops, simplifying complex tasks while enhancing collaboration. Engineers can extend the system by writing small, reactive JavaScript functions that automate processes, such as transforming existing architectures into new ones. The platform visually represents these transformations, making automation more intuitive and efficient.
By leveraging models instead of traditional code-based infrastructure management, System Initiative enhances agility, reduces complexity, and improves DevOps collaboration. To explore how this ties into the concept of the digital twin, listen to the fullNew Stack Makers episode.
Learn more from The New Stack about System Initiative:
Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live
How System Initiative Treats AWS Components as Digital Twins
System Initiative Code Now Open Source
Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
From Chef to System Initiative (Friends)
Adam Jacob goes solo with Adam for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up. This is a different flavor of “Friends” for you. Enjoy.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 12 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Neon – Fleets of Postgres! Enterprises use Neon to operate hundreds of thousands of Postgres databases: Automated, instant provisioning of the world’s most popular database.
Test Double – Great software is made by great teams. Test Double builds both.
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Intel Innovation 2024 – Early bird registration is now open for Intel Innovation 2024 in San Jose, CA! Learn more OR register
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
Ximian
Any Given Sunday speech
I’ll Devour You! (I shall look forward to the fight)
RIP Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The ol' hot & juicy (Friends)
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.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 11 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Cloudflare – Read the Developer Week 2024 wrap-up or tune into Developer Week on Cloudflare TV.
imgproxy – imgproxy is open source an optimizes images for the web on the fly. It makes websites and apps blazing fast while saving storage and SaaS costs. It uses the world’s fastest image processing library under the hood — libvips. It is screaming fast and has a tiny memory footprint.
Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 90,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc.
Matt Asay on OpenTofu
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The cofounder of Chef is cooking up a less painful DevOps
Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.
Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.
If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up (Interview)
This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob and we’re talking about his mission at System Initiative to rebuild DevOps. They are out of stealth mode and ready to show off their transformative new power tool that reimagines what’s possible from DevOps. It’s an intelligent automation platform that allows DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure and use them to rapidly update their production environments.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
Drata – Put security and compliance on autopilot. Build trust with your customers and scale securely with Drata, the smartest way to achieve continuous framework compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and more.
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
System Initiative launch demo
What if Infrastructure as Code never existed, by Adam Jacob
10+ deploys per day at Flickr
Changelog Interviews #353: The war for the soul of open source
Changelog Interviews #460: The business model of open source
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The business model of open source (Interview)
This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 11 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
InfluxDB – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Read this Twitter thread from Adam Jacob
The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source featuring Adam Jacob
The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS (a deep dive on the business of open source)
Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef
Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob stepping down, will remain on board of directors
Tailwind CSS
Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB
Founders Talk #75: The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
featuring Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder of Cockroach Labs
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Venture Capital Isn’t as Evil as Twitter Thinks with Adam Jacob
About Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob is a co-founder of Chef Software and the creator of Chef. He has over a decade of experience designing, building, and managing large production systems. Adam is Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of The System Initiative.
Before Chef Software, he founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy where he built production cloud infrastructures. Adam has been responsible for large production systems, internal corporate automation, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts.
Links Referenced
Twitter: @adamhjk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjacob/
Personal site: https://sfosc.org
Company site: https://www.systeminit.com
The war for the soul of open source (Interview)
Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef) joins the show to talk about the keynote he’s giving at OSCON this week. The keynote is titled “The war for the soul of open source.” We talked about what made open source great in the first place, what went wrong, the pitfalls of open core models, licensing, and more.
By the way, we’re at OSCON this week so if you make your way to the expo hall, make sure you come by our booth and say hi.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
You can now watch Adam’s OSCON keynote on his YouTube channel.
“The war for the soul of open source”
Chef
Goodbye Open Core — Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
“So happy that @chef is now a 100% open source company. They are done being open core, and I have to say, I’m stoked about it. It aligns the company with its core values in a way that is so much more elegant and understandable.”
996 License
Utility monster on Wikipedia
Why we’re relicensing CockroachDB
Redis will remain BSD licensed
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Episode 5: The Last Mainframe with a Kickstart and a Double Clutch
How are companies evolving in a world where Cloud is on the rise? Where Cloud providers are bought out and absorbed into other companies?
Today, we’re talking to Nell Shamrell-Harrington about Cloud infrastructure. She is a senior software engineer at Chef, CTO at Operation Code, and core maintainer of the the Habitat open source product. Nell has traveled the world to talk about Chef, Ruby, Rails, Rust, DevOps, and Regular Expressions.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Chef is a configuration management tool that handles instance, files, virtual machine container, and other items.
Immutable infrastructure has emerged as the best of practice approach.
Chef is moving into next gen through various projects, including one called, Compliance - a scanning tool.
Some people don’t trust virtualization.
Habitat is an open source project featuring software that allows you to use a universal packaging format.
Habitat is a run-time, so when you run a package on multiple virtual machines, they form a supervisor ring to communicate via leader/follower roles.
Deploying an application depends on several factors, including application and infrastructure needs.
It is possible to convert old systems with old deployment models to Habitat.
Habitat allows you to lift a legacy application and put it into that modern infrastructure without needing to rewrite the application.
You can ease in packages to Habitat, and then have Habitat manage pieces of the application.
Habitat is Cloud-agnostic and integrates with public and private Cloud providers by exporting an application as a container.
Chef is one of just a few third-party offerings marketed directly by AWS.
From inception to deployment, there is a place for large Cloud providers to parlay into language they already speak.
Operation Code is a non-profit that teaches software engineer skills to veterans. It helps veterans transition into high-paying engineering jobs.
The technology landscape is ever changing. What skills are most marketable?
Operation Code is a learning by experience type of organization and usually starts people on the front-end to immediately see results.
Links:
Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Nell Shamrell-Harrington on Twitter
Nell Shamrell-Harrington on GitHub
Operation Code
Chef
Ruby on Rails
Rust
Regular Expressions
Habitat
AWS
Kubernetes
Docker
LinkedIn Learning
GorillaStack (use discount code: screaming)
.
Ep. 146 - Codeland - Mentorship, Technical Blogging, and Open Source Talks from Katrina Owen, Quincy Larson, and Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Katrina Owen, Quincy Larson, Nell Shamrell-Harrington)
In our final episode of our Codeland mini-series, Katrina Owen shares what it really takes to get that mentor you've always wanted, Quincy Larson gives us his best practices for writing technical blog posts people will actually read, and Nell Shamrell-Harrington explores what it really takes for an open source project to be successful and what you should know as a future contributor.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Sample Testing Guide
How to read Medium articles people will actually read
CodeNewbie YouTube channel
Continuous Integration (CI)
Open Source Governance
Sample Code of Conduct
Travis CI
Sample Contribution Guide
Be Lucky—it’s an easy skill to learn by Richard Wiseman
Codeland, CodeNewbie's conference - April 21 and 22 in NYC
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Katrina Owen
Katrina is an open source advocate at GitHub. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for leveling up your programming skills.
Quincy Larson
Quincy is a teacher at freeCodeCamp.com. Editor of Medium's largest technical publication.
Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a theatre student turned Sr. Software Engineer by way of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Chef, regular expressions, and DevOps technologies. She has governed multiple open source projects, which have taken the collaboration skills she learned in the theatre to new heights. She is also the scholarship chair of and a mentor with Operation Code - a non-profit which teaches coding skills to active duty military personnel, their dependents, and veterans transitioning into civilian life.