Changelog Interviews

The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is "get that new project into production" and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to how we skill up and level up our teams, and so much more.

This week we're joined by the "mad scientist" himself, Feross Aboukhadijeh...and we're talking about the launch of Socket — the next big thing in the fight to secure and protect the open source supply chain. While working on the frontlines of open source, Feross and team have witnessed firsthand how supply chain attacks have swept across the software community and have damaged the trust in open source. Socket turns the problem of securing open source software on its head, and asks..."What if we assume all open source may be malicious?" So, they built a system that proactively detects indicators of compromised open source packages and brings awareness to teams in real-time. We cover the whys, the hows, and what's next for this ambitious and very much needed project.

This week we're talking to Toby Padilla, Co-Founder at Charm — where they build tools to make the command line glamorous. We talk about the state of the art, the next big thing happening on the command line and in ssh-land. They have an array of open source tooling to build great apps for the terminal and Charm Cloud to power a new generation of CLI apps. We talk through all their tooling, where things are headed for CLI apps, the focus and attention of their team, and what's to come in bringing glamor to the command line.

This week we're joined by Annie Sexton, UX Engineer at Render, to talk about her blog post titled Git Organized: A Better Git Flow that made the internet explode when she suggested using `reset` instead of `rebase` for a better git flow. On this show we talk about the git flow she suggests and why, how this flow works for her when she's hacking on the Render codebase (and when she uses it), the good and the bad of Git, and we also talked about the cognitive load of Git commits as you work.

This week we’re joined by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and we're talking about his extensive writing on work sample tests. These tests are an exercise, a simulation, or a small slice of real day-to-day work that candidates will perform as part of their job. Over the years, as an engineering leader, Jacob has become a practicing expert in effectively hiring engineers — today he shares a wealth of knowledge on the subject.

This week we're joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled "Incident" shouldn't be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we're talking with Nora about all things incidents — the learning and growth they represent for teams, why teams should focus on learning from incidents in the first place, their Howie guide to post‑incident investigations, why the next emerging role is an Incident Analyst, and she also shares a few book recommendations which we've linked up in the show notes.

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as "the open source Firebase alternative," a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam's perspective, he's never been more excited about what they're bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone from 0 to more than 80,000 databases on their platform — and they're still in beta...and it's open source. Hopefully today's show sheds some light on why everyone is talking about Supabase.

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store.

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart's Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way.

Our 4th annual year-end wrap-up episode! We don't naval gaze often, but when we do... we make sure you get your money's worth. Reflections, most popular episodes, our favs, and new this year: listener voice mails. Thanks for listening! 💚

We're joined by Eran Yahav — talking about AI assistants for developers. Eran has been working on this problem for more than a decade. We talk about his path to now and how the idea for Tabnine came to life, this AI revolution taking place and the role it will play in developer productivity, and we talk about the elephant in the room - how Tabnine compares to GitHub Copilot, and what they're doing to make Tabnine the AI assistant for every developer regardless of the IDE or editor you choose.

Today we're bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we've covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and Christina Gorton for hosting us. Check out their show at dev.to/devdiscuss

We're prepping for our 4th annual state of the "log" episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond. We thought it'd be **awesome** to include some listener voices on the show! So, please share your favorite Changelog guests, topics, or a-ha moments you've had over the last year. If you get your message included in the episode, we'll send you a free t-shirt. It doesn't have to be super produced. Just pop open your Voice Memos app on your phone or use QuickTime or Audacity on your laptop. Tell us what's on your mind. Then upload your audio to ~> changelog.fm/sotl We're recording the episode next week, so don't sleep on the opportunity. We'd love to hear from you!

Today we're joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it's used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what's next in funding open source creators, and we attempt to answer the question "what happens to open source once it's funded?"

Today we're joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify's developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify's hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of scaling millions of storefronts. We cover what developers can expect from the Hydrogen framework, Shopify's big bet on React Server Components, the future of Shopify at scale with Hydrogen powered by Oxygen, and a world where merchants never have to think about the complexities of scaling infrastructure.

This week we're bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Today we're joined by Shawn "swyx" Wang, also known as just "swyx" — and we're talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to "learn in public" and how he's been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx's recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls "living above or below the API," his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he's doing at Temporal and how's taking his frontend skills to the backend.

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features $STDOUT and contains explicit language.

Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the struggle of being an open source software maintainer.

This week we're joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of "the perfect storm" that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

Today we're talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill. If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we'll get in touch and send you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt in the merch store. Good luck...

This week we're joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we're talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It's the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan's history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna, and what's to come in the near future.

This week we're joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef's acquisition in 2020 for $220 million...in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much _stealth mode_ details as he could about System Initiative.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we're talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is "non-existent." After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com. On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we're all coding in the cloud.

This week we're bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective.

This week Neovim core maintainer TJ DeVries joins Jerod and guest co-host Nick Nisi (from JS Party) to follow-up on our Vim episode with a conversation dedicated to Neovim. TJ tells us why Neovim was created in the first place, how it differs from Vim, why Lua is awesome for configuration and plugins, what LSPs are all about, the cool tech inside tree-sitter, and how he's writing his own fuzzy file finder for Neovim called Telescope.

Today we're joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what's next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what's possible.

Today we're talking to Linus Lee about the practice of building software for yourself. Linus has several side projects we could talk about, but today's show is focused on Linus' dynamically typed functional programming language called Ink that he used to write his full text personal search engine called Monocle. Linus is focused on writing software that solves his own needs, all of which is open source, to help him learn more deeply and organize the knowledge of his life.

This week, Richard Hipp returns to catch us up on all things SQLite, his single file webserver written in C called Althttpd, and Fossil -- the source code manager he wrote and uses to manage SQLite development instead of Git.

This week we're joined by Lara Hogan -- author of Resilient Management and management coach & trainer for the tech industry. Lara led engineering teams at Kickstarter and Etsy before she, and Deepa Subramaniam stepped away from their deep roots in the tech industry to start Wherewithall -- a consultancy that helps level up managers and emerging leaders. The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you're ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.

This week we're sharing a special episode of our new podcast called Ship It. This episode is our Kaizen-style episode where we point our lens inward to Changelog.com to see what we should improve next. The plan is do this episode style every 10 episodes. Gerhard, Adam, and Jerod talk about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app.

This week we're talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use `cat` or `bat`? What about `man` vs `tldr`? Today's show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and _maybe_ love.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we tell Vim's story from the mouths of its users. Julia Evans, Drew Neil, Suz Hinton, and Gary Bernhardt join Jerod Santo for a deep and wide-ranging discussion about "the best text editor that anyone ever wrote."

This week we're talking to Rasmus Andersson about his journey as a software creator. We talk about the work he's doing right now on Playbit, a computing environment which encourages playful learning, building, and sharing of software. We also talk about his work on the Inter typeface, as well as the reasons why this font family needed to be free and open source.

This week we're sharing a recent episode from Founders Talk that we continuously hear about from listeners. Listen and subscribe to Founders Talk at founderstalk.fm and anywhere you listen to podcasts. On Founders Talk #75 — Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they're doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.

This week we're sharing one of the most popular episodes from our new podcast Ship It. Ship It launched in May and now has 8 episodes in the feed to enjoy...it's hosted by Gerhard Lazu, our SRE here at Changelog. In this episode, Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses, and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

On this episode we're talking with our good friend Mat Ryer whom you may know from the Go Time podcast. Mat created an awesome open source tool for putting just about *anything* in your Mac's toolbar. It was originally written in Objective-C, but it just got a big rewrite in Go and abig rename from BitBar to xbar. If you don't use a Mac don't hit skip on this episode quite yet! There are lessons to be learned for anyone interested in hacking on tools to make your life better. Plus, with this rewrite Mat has positioned xbar to go cross-platform, which we talk about as well.

This week we're talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced "Funds for Open Source." The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Maintainer Week is finally here and we're excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles. Today we're talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail. Thank a maintainer on us! We're printing a limited run t-shirt that's free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

This week we're joined by Ryan Dahl, Node.js creator, and now the creator of Deno - a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that uses V8 and is built in Rust. We talk with Ryan about the massive success of Node and how it impacted his life, and how he eventually created Deno and what he's doing differently this time around. We also talk about The Deno Company and what's in store for Deno Deploy.

This week is all about Maintainer Week — it's a week long event starting June 7th for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated. We're joined by Josh Simmons (Ecosystem Strategy Lead at Tidelift & President of Open Source Initiative) and Kara Sowles (Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitHub). Of course we love open source maintainers, that's why we're so excited about Maintainer Week and making it an annual thing. Today we talk through all the details of this event, what we can expect for this year and the years to come.

This week we're talking about the latest infrastructure updates we've made for 2021. We're joined by Gerhard Lazu, our resident SRE here at Changelog, talking about the improvements we've made to 10x our speed and be 100% available. We also mention the new podcast we've launched, hosted by Gerhard. Stick around the last half of the show for more details.

This week we're talking about open source on Mars. Martin Woodward (Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub) joins us to talk about the new Mars badge GitHub introduced. This collaboration between GitHub and NASA confirmed nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity’s launch possible. Today's show is a celebration of this human achievement and the impact of open source on space exploration as we know it.

This week Elixir creator José Valim joins Jerod and Practical AI's Daniel Whitenack to discuss Numerical Elixir, his new project that's bringing Elixir into the world of machine learning. We discuss why José chose this as his next direction, the team's layered approach, influences and collaborators on this effort, and their awesome collaborative notebook project that's built on Phoenix LiveView.

This week we're talking about NFTs — that's right, non-fungible tokens and we're joined by Mikeal Rogers, who's leading all things InterPlanetary Linked Data at Protocol Labs. We go down the NFT rabbit hole on a very technical level and we come out the other side with clarity and a compelling use of NFTs.

This week we're talking about Nix with Domen Kožar. The Nix ecosystem is a DevOps toolkit that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Nix helps you make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Domen is writing the Nix ecosystem guide at nix.dev and today he takes us on a deep dive on all things Nix.

This week we’re talking with Daniel Stenberg about 23 years of curl. Daniel shares how curl came to be, what drives and motivates him, maintaining a good cadence of an open source product, what to expect from http3, how many billions of users curl has, and Daniel also shares some funny stories like the "Spotify and Instagram hacking ring."

This week we're joined by long-time web developer Matt Patterson. Earlier this year Matt wrote an evocative article for A List Apart called The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. In this episode Matt sits down with Jerod to discuss, in-detail, why he believes the future of the web is server-rendered (again) and how Ruby on Rails is well positioned to bring that future to us today.