Changelog Interviews

This week Adam went solo — talking to Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit, about all things Right to Repair. They discussed the latest win here in the US with Oregon passing an electronics Right to Repair law to allow owners the right to get their stuff fixed anywhere as well as limit the anti-repair practices of parts pairing. They also discussed the history of the DMCA, the challenges posed by Section 1201, the challenges of recycling products with glued-in batteries, the need for producer responsibility, the future of repairability, repair scoring systems to inform consumers, and so much more. Did you know that iFixit funds its advocacy work through the sale of its tools and parts? So cool.

This week we're talking about DNS with Paul Vixie — Paul is well known for his contributions to DNS and agrees with Adam on having a "love/hate relationship with DNS." We discuss the limitations of current DNS technologies and the need for revisions to support future internet scale, the challenges in doing that. Paul shares insights on the future of the internet and how he'd reinvent DNS if given the opportunity. We even discuss the cultural idiom "It's always DNS," and the shift to using DNS resolvers like OpenDNS, Google's 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. Buckle up, this is a good one.

This week Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph for a "2 years later" catch up from his last appearance on Founders Talk. This conversation is a real glimpse into what it takes to be CEO of Sourcegraph in an era when code intelligence is shifting more and more into the AI realm, how they've been driving towards this for years, the subtle human leveling up we're all experiencing, the direction of Sourcegraph as a result — and Quinn also shares his order of operations when it comes to understanding the daily state of their growth.

Listen to our newest album called Dance Party as a podcast! This is an EPIC bundle of BMC bangers. We double dog dare you to listen and try NOT to dance 🕺

Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.

This week we're joined by Stefano Maffulli, the Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). They are responsible for representing the idea and the definition of open source globally. Stefano shares the challenges they face as a US-based non-profit with a global impact. We discuss the work Stefano and the OSI are doing to define Open Source AI, and why we need an accepted and shared definition. Of course we also talk about the potential impact if a poorly defined Open Source AI emerges from all their efforts. Note: Stefano was under the weather for this conversation, but powered through because of how important this topic is.

This week on The Changelog we're talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she's had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they've faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

This week on The Changelog we're talking with Joe Reis about data engineering and the beginning of generative AI. We discuss phone hacking via frequency, the role of a data engineer, this AI hype cycle we're in, build vs buy, the disconnect between data analysts and the business, ethical considerations around AI-generated content, and more. We also discuss the tension between AI and traditional engineering, as well as the inevitability of AI integration into pretty much everything.

This week we're going deep on security and what it takes to shift left, seriously. Adam is joined by Justin Garrison (co-host of Ship It), plus two members of the BoxyHQ team — Deepak Prabhakara, Co-founder & CEO and Schalk Neethling, Community Manager and DevRel as well as fellow Changelog Slack member. We discuss how to shift left, the role of the developer and the burden of security, the importance of tooling, the difference between authentication and authorization, and a mindset change for when security takes place — it's a matter of "when" not "who."

This week we're joined by FreeBSD & OpenZFS developer, Allan Jude, to learn all about FreeBSD. Allan gives us a brief history of BSD, tells us why it's his operating system of choice, compares it to Linux, explains the various BSDs out there & answers every curious question we have about this powerful (yet underrepresented) Unix-based operating system.

Justin Garrison joins us to talk about Amazon's silent sacking, from his perspective. He should know. He works there. Well, as of yesterday he quit. We discuss how the cloud and Kubernetes have transformed the way software is developed and deployed, the impact silent layoffs have on employees and their careers, speaking out about workplace issues (the right way), how changes in organizational structure can lead to gaps in expertise and responsibility which can lead to potential outages and slower response times. By the way, we officially let the cat off out of the bag in this episode. Justin has joined the ranks here at Changelog and is taking over as the host of Ship It! Expect new episodes soon.

Hello 2024! We're kicking off the year with Dan Moore, author of ‘Letters to a New Developer’ — a blog series of letters of what Dan wished he had known when starting his developer career. We discuss the value of online communities for new developers, the importance of communication skills, and the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Dan shares his best advice for new developers, including the importance of saying no, leaving code better than you found it, and the value of skill stacking. So much wisdom and advice in this episode!

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we're featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening! 💚

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes.

This week on The Changelog we're joined by Drew DeVault, talking about the Hare programming language. From the website, Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. When we asked Drew why he created it, he said "[because] I wanted it to exist, and it did not exist." Wise words. We discuss Hare (of course), why he's so passionate about all things open source, the state of the language, fostering a culture that values stability, and oddly enough — what it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

This week we're gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon...we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they're working on at Sidero Labs.

This week on we're joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that's designed to bring developers and design to the same tool. The question they're trying to answer is "How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?" We go way back to Emil's startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to here from 20 years ago (think PSD > HTML days), what they did to build Dev Mode, what they're doing around codegen, the popularity of design systems, and what it takes to go from zero to Dev Mode.

This week we're talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company's Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows.

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that "new good internet." Cory's new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares his experience recording his own audio book under the direction of Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media, and what's to come from his next Science Fiction book The Lost Cause.

Jean Yang's research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are *the* layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs. That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led her to join us on this very podcast. We think you're going to enjoy this interview, we sure did.

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Matthew Sanabria (former Engineer at HashiCorp working on Terraform Enterprise), Nithya Ruff (Chief Open Source Officer and Head of the Open Source Program Office at Amazon) & Jordan Harband (Open Source Maintainer-at-large with dependencies in most JavaScript apps out there. There has been many changes this year in open source, and each of these perspectives lends insight into challenging and changing waters happening right now in open source.

Listen to our Next Level album as a podcast! We grew up in the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. It's no surprise that so many of our tracks are inspired by the 8-bit and 16-bit music of our youth. From Castlevania to Contra, Sonic the Hedgehog, and many more — we were inspired by all the nostalgic soundtracks from the games that got us here, to give our pods one-of-a-kind vibes. If you've been head nodding to our beats during our shows and you've been wishing for a way to listen outside of our pods, then this release will be an absolute delight. It's dangerous to go alone! Take this on your next coding adventure or deep work session...

This week Jerod goes solo with Philipp Heckel, creator of ntfy, to discuss this simple HTTP-based service that lets you send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer. They discuss why he built it, how he built it, and what his plans are for the future of this beloved side hustle.

This week we're joined by Marcin Kulik to talk about his project asciinema. You've likely seen this out there in the wild — asciinema lets you record and share your terminal sessions in full fidelity. Forget screen recording apps that offer blurry video. asciinema provides a lightweight, text-based approach to terminal recording with lots of possibilities. Marcin shares the backstory on this project, where he'd like to take it, who's supporting him along the way, and we even included 11 minutes of bonus content for Changelog ++ subscribers.

This week we're joined by Daniel Thompson, Co-founder and Core Member of Tauri. It's been a year since we last had Daniel on the show. He catches us up on all things Tauri, their continued efforts towards Tauri 1.5 (which just released), the launch of CrabNebula and how they're the people pushing the Tauri ecosystem forward and building on top of it, the state of Electron vs Tauri, and UI with Tauri. He even surprises us with his idea of creating a web browser.

This week we're taking you to the hallway track of the final Strange Loop conference. First up is AnnMarie Thomas — an engineering, business, and education professor. AnnMarie gave one of the opening keynotes titled "Playing with Engineering." We also caught up with many first-time and multi-time attendees who shared their favorite moments from Strange Loop over the years. You'll hear from Richard Feldman, Colin Dean, and Taylor Troesh. Last up we talk with Pokey Rule. He gave a talk about his project called Cursorless which is a spoken language for structural code editing. Changelog++ subscribers get a super extended version of this episode which includes everything we recorded at Strange Loop. Become a Changelog++ subscriber

This week we're joined by Steve O'Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. In Steve's post _Why Open Source Matters_, he says "open source is at a crossroads" and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today's conversation goes deep on this subject.

This week we're joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.

This week we're talking about the launch of OpenTF and what it's going to take to successfully fork HashiCorp's Terraform. We're joined by Josh Padnick to discuss what exactly happened, how HashiCorp's license change changes things, who has been impacted by this change, and ultimately what they are doing about it.

This week on The Changelog Adam is joined by Zach Lloyd, Founder & CEO of Warp. We talked with Zach last year about what it takes to build the terminal of the future, and today Adam catches up with Zach to see where they are at on that mission. They talk about the business model of Warp, how they measure success, reaching product/market fit, building features developers love, integrating AI, and the pros and cons of going open source (again).

This week we're talking to Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird. Andreas started SerenityOS as a means of therapy. It's self-described as a love letter to "'90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core." Andreas previously worked at Nokia and later at Apple on the WebKit team, so he had an itch to do something along the lines of a browser, and that's where Ladybird came from. We get into the details of compilers, OSs, browsers, web specifications, and the love of making software.

This week we're talking with Jonathan Carter who's on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we're talking about 30 years of Debian!

Leslie Lamport is a computer scientist & mathematician who won ACM's Turing Award in 2013 for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems. He also created LaTeX and TLA+, a high-level language for "writing down the ideas that go into the program before you do any coding."

This week Adam is joined by Abi Noda, founder and CEO of DX to talk about DX AKA DevEx (or the long-form Developer Experience). Since the dawn of software development there has been this push to understand what makes software teams efficient, but more importantly what does it take to understand developer productivity? That's what Abi has been focused on for the better part of the last 8 years of his career. He started a company called Pull Panda that was acquired by GitHub, spent a few years there on this problem before going out on his own to start DX which helps startups to the fortune 500 companies gather real insights that leads to real improvement.

This week we're joined by Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker. Now he's back with his next big thing called Dagger — CI/CD as code that runs anywhere. We're users of Dagger so check out our codebase if you want to see how it works. On today's show Solomon takes us back to the days of Docker, what it was like on that 10 year journey, his transition from Docker to Dagger, Dagger's community-led growth model, their focus on open source and community, how it works, and even a cameo from Kelsey Hightower to explain how Dagger works.

This week it's storytime with Steve Yegge! Steve came out of retirement to join Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering. Their next frontier is Cody, their AI coding assistant that answers code questions and writes code for you by reading your entire codebase and the code graph. But, we really spent a lot of time talking with Steve about his time at Amazon, Google, and Grab. Ok, it's storytime!

This week we're talking about type checking with Jake Zimmerman. Jake is one of the leads at Stripe working on Sorbet — an open source project that does Type checking in Ruby and runs over Stripe's entire Ruby codebase. As of May of 2022 Stripe's codebase was over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files. If you think you have a bigger Ruby codebase, Jake is down to go byte-for-byte to see who wins. Jake shares tons of wisdom and more importantly he shares why he thinks types will win in the end.

This week we're talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.

Taylor Troesh joins Jerod to discuss a bevy of software development topics: yak shaves, dependency selection, -10x engineers, IKEA-oriented development, his new content-addressable programming language & much more along the way.

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.

This week we're talking about Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, Head of Passwordless, at 1Password. Will Passkeys enable a passwordless future? Time will tell. Anna shares the what, the why, how, and the when on Passkeys.

This is our last week of hallway track coverage at The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Jeffrey Sica (Developer Experience & Programs @ CNCF), Eddie Zaneski (Kubernetes SIG CLI), Yaron Schneider (Co-creator of Dapr and Founder and CTO at Diagrid). Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week on The Changelog we're continuing our Maintainer Month series by taking to you back to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Stormy Peters (VP of Communities at GitHub), Dr. Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware), and Angie Byron (Drupal Core Product Manager and Community Director at Aiven). Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week on The Changelog we're taking you to the hallway track of The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Beyang Liu (Co-founder and CTO at Sourcegraph), Denny Lee (Developer Advocate at Databricks), and Stella Biderman (Executive Director and Head of Research at EleutherAI). Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.

This week Sarah Drasner joins us to talk about her book Engineering Management for the Rest of Us and her experience leading engineering at Zillow, Microsoft, Netlify, and now Google.

This week we're celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don't always have the community or support they need. That's why we're celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today's conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

José Valim joins Jerod to talk all about what's new in Livebook – the Elixir-based interactive code notebook he's been working on the last few years. José made a big bet when he decided to bring machine learning to Elixir. That bet is now paying off with amazing new capabilities such as building and deploying a Whisper-based chat app to Hugging Face in just 15 minutes. José demoed that and much more during Livebook's first-ever launch week. Let's get into it.

This week Adam talks with Andy Klein from Backblaze about hard drive reliability at scale.

This week we're joined by Zach Latta, the Founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club is the program Zach wished he had in high school.

This week we're talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that's climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, "We're all fighting the same fight."