Forward Deployed Engineer job postings are up 800% according to Interview Query data, and that single number anchors this extended commentary episode from Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak on Changelog Friends 117. They treat it as a director's cut of Changelog News 169, running longer and deeper on the week's actual stories.
The episode covers six discrete topics: the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networking, Meta's Zstandard compression, the FDE hiring explosion, React's continued dominance despite years of predicted death, and the dead framework theory. Each segment goes further than the original news item, which is the point. The Zstandard and Meshtastic segments in particular reward technical listeners who want mechanism, not just headlines.
Read the original Changelog News 169 first, then come back to this. The show notes link directly to the alive internet theory at alivetheory.net, the Meshtastic project, and the fly.io post arguing you should write an agent. The commentary earns its runtime because Santo and Stacoviak disagree with each other on at least two of the six topics, and that tension is where the substance lives.
[READ ORIGINAL →]