Forward Deployed Engineer job postings are up 800% according to Interview Query data, and that single number is the sharpest signal in this episode. Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak use Changelog Friends 117 as a director's commentary track on News 169, unpacking six topics that reward slower attention: the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networking, and Zstandard compression among them.
The alive internet theory and the dead framework theory sit in direct tension here, and the hosts work that contradiction out loud. React's continued dominance gets examined against the dead framework framing, and the Meshtastic section goes technical on what off-grid LoRa mesh networking actually looks like in practice. Zstandard gets more context than a headline allows.
The episode is worth the full runtime because the best parts are the digressions, not the conclusions. The FDE explosion alone raises questions about what the engineering job market looks like in 18 months. Fly.io's case for writing agents sits at the end of the show notes for a reason.
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