Changelog Interviews

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Senior Staff Technologist at the EFF and the lead developer of Let's Encrypt, joined the show to talk about the history of SSL, the start of Let’s Encrypt, why it’s important to encrypt the web and what happens if we don't, Certbot, and the impact Let's Encrypt has had on securing the web.

James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, "Why I'm Frequently Absent from Open Source". He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.

Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.

Ben Ubois, the creator of Feedbin (a simple, good-looking online RSS reader) joined the show to talk about the indie web and developers, how RSS usage has changed over the years – particularly since Google Reader shutdown. We also talked about RSS vs the social web that we're in now and the idea of an RSS resurgence and taking back control over the content we choose to subscribe to.

Seth Vargo, the Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp, joined the show to talk about managing secrets with their open source product called Vault which lets you centrally secure, store, and tightly control access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications. We talked about Seth's back story into open source, use cases, what problem it solves, key features like Data Encryption, why they choose to write it in Go, and how they build tooling around the open core model.

Karen Sandler, Rachel Nabors, and Jono Bacon joined the show by way of some great conversations at OSCON in London, UK and All Things Open in Raleigh, NC. We talked about free software, web animation and motion in user interfaces, and how open source communities organize.

Chris Lamb joined the show to talk about his project Reproducible Builds — which is funded by The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. We talked about the importance of having a verifiable path from source code to compiled binary, what this set of software development practices is all about, what it means to have Reproducible Builds, the challenges faced when implementing these development practices, and the inherent security you gain from them.

Mark Nadal joined the show to talk about his hacker story and his venture backed open source datastore project called GunDB — a realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine. We talked about the details behind this database, how Mark secured funding, why yet another datastore, who's using the database, how Mark plans to sustain this project through products and services, his thoughts on the RethinkDB postmortem and more.

In this anthology episode we're featuring three awesome hacker stories from OSCON, All Things Open, and Node Interactive — Giovanni Caligaris about how he brought LibreOffice to the people of Paraguay by translating it to their native tongue. Stu Keroff about the Linux user group he started for kids called The Asian Penguins. Shiya Luo about how China does Node, translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, and the Great Firewall of China.

Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.

Sean Larkin joined the show to talk about Webpack, how fast open sources moves, how fast Webpack is moving, the core team, the formation, joining JS Foundation, the problem it's solving, the bleeding edge features, sustainability, Sean and team's efforts to build the community, their work on Open Collective, and more.

Max Howell, famous for creating Homebrew, joined the show to talk about his start in software and open source, the tweet that was heard around the world when he interviewed with Google and didn't get accepted, the creation of Homebrew, the naming process, as well as the difficulty letting go. We also talked about his passion for the Swift programming language, and his work on Swift Package Manager while at Apple.

In this special episode recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, TX Adam talked with James Snell (IBM Technical Lead for Node and member of Node's TSC and CTC) about the work he's doing on Node's implementation of http2, the state of http2 in Node, what this new spec has to offer, and what the Node community can expect from this new protocol.

From 18F — Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman joined the show to talk about how 18F is changing the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.

Django core contributor Andrew Godwin joins the show to tell us all about Python and Django. If you've ever wondered why people love Python, what Django's virtues are as a web framework, or how Django Channels measure up to Phoenix's Channels and Rails' Action Cable, this is the show for you. Also: Andrew's take on funding and sustaining open source efforts.

Jack Moffitt joined the show to talk about Servo, an experimental web browser layout engine. We talked about what the Servo project aims to achieve, six areas of performance, and what makes Rust a good fit for this effort.

Feross Aboukhadijeh joined the show this week to talk with us about his backstory, passive income, WebTorrent, WebRTC, Electron and the ins and outs of packaging apps for all platforms.

Dave Gandy joined the show to talk about the history of Font Awesome, what's to come in Font Awesome 5 and their Kickstarter to fund Font Awesome 5 Pro, and how everything they're doing is funneling back into the forever free and open source — Font Awesome Free.

Sandi Metz joined the show to talk about her beginnings on a mainframe, her 30+ years of programming experience, the ins and outs of OOP, her book Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (aka POODR), as well as her latest book 99 Bottles of OOP which she co-authored with Katrina Owen. We also covered a few listener submitted questions at the end.

Bertrand Le Roy joined the show to talk about all things .NET Core, their recent 1.0 release, where it's going, the open source around it, and Microsoft's shift towards more open source.

Mike McQuaid joined us to catch us up on the latest in Homebrew and the recent 1.0.0 release. We talked about no more `/usr/local` — Homebrew moves to `/usr/local/Homebrew` to keep `/usr/local` cleaner, auto-updates, the growth of the Homebrew community and how it has grown to almost 6000 unique contributors, and more.

Gavin Wood joined the show to talk about Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, The DAO, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), what could you build with Ethereum, and the future of digital currency. Gavin Wood is Founder of Ethereum, creator of the Solidity contract language, and Founder of Ethcore — the company that created Parity, an open source Ethereum client.

Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books. We talked to Cory about open source, the open web, internet freedom, his involvement with the EFF, where he began his career, the details he'll be covering in his keynote at OSCON, and his thoughts on open source today and where developers should be focusing their efforts.

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, joined the show to talk about their recent unveiling of the GitLab Master Plan, $20 Million secured in a Series B funding round, their idea of Conversational Development in this "post Agile world", and their focus on the enterprise and on-premise Git hosting as the business model to sustain and build GitLab into something 'modern software teams' can rely upon."

Eli Bixby, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, joined the show to talk to talk about TensorFlow, machine learning and deep learning, why Google open sourced it, and more.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, and Richard Feldman of NoRedInk joined the show to talk deeper about Elm, the pains of CSS it solves, scaling the Elm architecture, reusable components, and more.

Beyang Liu, the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, joined the show to talk about the backstory of Sourcegraph, how it works, how they're aiming to be the 'Google for Code', ideas around offline support for code search, how it's licensed, and their new software license called Fair Source.

Zeke Sikelianos joined the show to talk about GitHub's Electron project and the future of web folks making cross platform desktop apps. We talked about the web revolution around native vs web app, where Electron is heading, who's using it, and how cool it is to enable folks like Guillermo Rauch to build HyperTerm.

David A. Wheeler, from Core Infrastructure Initiative, joined the show to talk about the CII Best Practices Badge program.

Julian Shapiro, startup founder and developer, joined the show to talk about his story of entrepreneurship, open source, growth hacking, and more. Julian's story is a story you don't want to miss — plus he shares actionable advice on growing and marketing an open source project.

Guillermo Rauch joined the show to talk with Adam about how he got into programming, how that lead him to what he's doing now at ZEIT, the design of HyperTerm, and now.

Peter Hedenskog joined the show to talk about SiteSpeed.io and web performance. We covered where it came from, where it's going, and more importantly, simple ways you can focus on your web performance.

James Pearce, Head of Open Source at Facebook, joined the show to talk about that very subject — open source at Facebook, his path to software development, why he's the person to lead open source at Facebook, their view on open source, their culture of open source, how they choose what to open source, and more importantly — how they focus on, support, and nurture the community.

Alan Shreve, creator of the beloved ngrok, joined the show to talk about ngrok — what it is, why it exists, why he wrote it in Go, and ultimately why 1.0 is open source but 2.0 is not.

Arfon Smith from GitHub, and Felipe Hoffa & Will Curran from Google joined the show to talk about BigQuery — the big picture behind Google Cloud's push to host public datasets, the collaboration between the two companies to expand GitHub's public dataset, adding query capabilities that have never been possible before, example queries, and more!

José Valim and Chris McCord joined the show to talk all about how they're advancing the "state of the art" in the Elixir community with their release of Ecto 2.0 and Phoenix 1.2. We also share our journey with Elixir at The Changelog, find out what makes Phoenix's new Presence feature so special, and even find time for Chris to field a few of our support requests.

Dustin Kirkland joined the show to talk about Ubuntu — the most widely used flavor of Linux. We talked about the rise of Ubuntu, Ubuntu being everywhere, their collaboration with Microsoft to bring Bash to Windows, and what we can expect from the future of this Linux distro.

Parham Doustdar is a blind programmer and joined the show to talk about the advantages he has being a blind programmer, the tools he uses, why he had to quit school, and carving your own path. Note: We couldn't stop using visual words when talking with Parham — even he couldn't help himself. So you'll get to hear us all laugh at ourselves near the end.

Since airing this show, Pieter passed away due to his battle with a metastasis of bile duct cancer in both lungs. But rather than listen to this show with sadness, listen with a happy heart and let's celebrate Pieter's life, and what he has accomplished. Thank you Pieter from the bottom of our hearts for your time on this show and for all that you are. You are loved by us my friend. This show will forever be a very special show for us. Pieter Hintjens is the creator of ZeroMQ and The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4), a writer of many books and protocols, as well as a developer with decades of building software and communities -- he's someone who's given so much, and continues to give - even up until the time he is planning for his death.

Juan Benet joined the show to talk about IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open — addressed by content and identities. We talked about what it is, how it works, how it can be used, and how it just might save the future of the web.

Sara Chipps, the creator of Jewelbots, and George Stocker, the VP of Engineering at Jewelbots joined the show to talk about connected wearables for kids, keeping UX simple, building a business on open source, and influencing young girls through the possibilities of coding.

Big show! Matz, creator of the Ruby programming language, joined the show to discuss where he began as a programmer, the origins of Ruby, its history and future, Ruby 3.0, concurrency and parallelism, Streem, Erlang, Elixir, and more.

This episode is part of our remastered greatest hits collection and features Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, talking with us about its history, where it came from, why it has succeeded as a database, how its development has been sustainably funded, and the how and why of it being the most widely deployed database engine in the world.

Raquel Vélez, aka Rockbot, joined the show to talk about where she came from, how she got into programming with JavaScript, her passion for robots and mechanical engineering, the culture of npm, and more.

Andrew Cantino joined the show to talk with Jerod about Huginn, a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Think of it as a hackable Yahoo! Pipes plus IFTTT on your own server.

Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki joined the show to talk about Haskell, their book "Haskell Programming", learning to program, their book writing process, and more.

Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic, joined the show to talk about the past, present, and future of WordPress. We talked about the role of JavaScript for WordPress, their new REST API, Calypso, and more.

Jeremy Ruston joined the show to talk about TiddlyWiki — a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organizing, and sharing complex information. It's written in JavaScript and sports a custom fake DOM. We talked to Jeremy about his nearly 40 year career in programming, Hackability as a human right, Tiddlers — the atomic unit of data in TiddlyWiki and so much more.

Quincy Larson is the creator of an open source community called freeCodeCamp. We talked with Quincy about "the secret to getting good at coding", their curriculum that spans a solid year (totaling 2,080 hours) of deliberate coding practice, plans for financial sustainability of the project, and the people behind it on the leading/teaching side and the camper side.

José Valim joined the show to talk about Elixir. We learned about the early days of José's start as a programmer. José took us back to the beginning of Elixir and shared why Erlang got him so excited, we broke down features of the language, we talked about functional programming, concurrency, developing for multi-core systems, we talked about the Elixir community, the future of Phoenix, Ecto, and more.