Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed. (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

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Featuring:

• Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• zed.dev
• Zed raises $10M for a code editor built for collaboration
• The Changelog #241: The Story of Atom with Nathan Sobo
• GitHub officially says farewell to Atom
• Founders Talk #7: Henk Rogers / The Tetris Company
• Prioritize enablers and blockers - linear.app
• Zed’s language support

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

บท

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Start the show! (00:00:52)

3. Tetris! (00:02:38)

4. What's the mission of Zed? (00:08:20)

5. When GitHub was acquired (00:15:39)

6. Performance, extensibility, collaboration (00:22:49)

7. Sponsor: Postman (00:29:11)

https://www.postman.com/changelogpod

8. GPUI invented here (00:31:59)

9. Zed is going big (00:38:30)

10. Paging Chris Wanstrath! (00:48:35)

11. Engineered for performance (00:48:53)

12. Are you hiring? (00:52:03)

13. What's the business model? (00:57:49)

14. What makes a dev change? (01:02:40)

15. This multi-player world (01:05:50)

16. What can devs expect? (01:14:21)

17. Fast tooling is fast (01:18:06)

18. Closing out the show (01:25:02)

19. Outro (01:25:49)