Changelog Interviews

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post "How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019" a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

We're talking with Adam Barr, a 23 year Microsoft veteran, about his book “The problem with software,” sub-titled "Why smart engineers write bad code." We examine that very idea, the gap between industry and academia, and more importantly what we can do to get a better feedback loop going between them.

We're talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.

We're talking with Mike McQuaid about Homebew 2.0.0, supporting Linux and Windows 10, the backstory and details surrounding the security issue they had in 2018, their new governance model, Mike’s new role, the core team meeting in-person at FOSDEM this year, and what’s coming next for Homebrew.

We're talking with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, Warewulf, and most recently Singularity — an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for enterprise and high-performance computing workloads. What's interesting is how Singularity allows untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. We cover the backstory, Singularity Pro and how they're not holding the open source community version hostage, as well as how Singularity is being used to containerize and support workflows in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and more.

We’re talking with Gina Helfrich the Communications Director for NumFOCUS about their story and history, the impact of open code on science, the difference between sponsored and affiliated projects, corporate backing, the back story of their education and events program PyData, and the struggles of storytelling and fundraising.

Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you've never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you _have to_ listen to this show!

Adam talks with Erik Kennedy about tactical design advice for developers. Erik is a self-taught UI designer and brings a wealth of practical advice for those seeking to advance their design skills and learn more about user interface design. We cover his seven rules for creating gorgeous UI, the fundamentals of user interface design — color, typography, layout, and process. We also talk about his course Learn UI Design and how it’s the ultimate on-ramp for upcoming UI designers.

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

Adam and Jerod talk to Kyle Daigle, the Director of Ecosystem Engineering at GitHub. They talk about GitHub Actions, the new automation platform announced at GitHub Universe this past October 2018. GitHub Actions is the next big thing coming out of GitHub with the promise of powerful workflows to supercharge your repos and GitHub experience. Build your container apps, publish packages to registries, or automate welcoming new users to your open source projects — with access to interact with the full GitHub API and any other public APIs, Actions seem to have limitless possibilities.

Adam caught up with Francesc Campoy at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA to talk about the work he's doing at source{d} to apply Machine Learning to source code, and turn that codebase into actionable insights. It's a movement they're driving called Machine Learning on Code. They talked through their open source products, how they work, what types of insights can be gained, and they also talked through the code analysis Francesc did on the Kubernetes code base. This is as close as you get to the bleeding edge and we're very interested to see where this goes.

Adam caught up with Brendan Burns (co-creator of Kubernetes and Partner Architect at Microsoft Azure) at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA to talk about the state of Kubernetes, the importance of community, building healthy cloud platforms, and the future of cloud infrastructure.

On this year's "State of the 'log'" episode we’re going behind the scenes to look back at 2018 as we prepare for 2019 and onward. We talk through our most popular episodes, most controversial episodes, and even some of our personal favorites. We also catch you up on some company level updates here at Changelog Media. We hired Tim Smith earlier this year as our Senior Producer, we retired Request for Commits, started some new shows...

Jerod is joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Ben Nickolls to talk Octobox, their open source web app that helps you manage your GitHub notifications. They discuss how Octobox came to be, why open source maintainers love it, the experiments they're doing with pricing and business models, and how Octobox can continue to thrive despite GitHub's renewed interest in improving notifications.

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts. They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Perry Mitchell joined the show to talk about the importance of password management and his project Buttercup — an open source password manager built around strong encryption and security standards, a beautifully simple interface, and freely available on all major platforms. We talked through encryption, security concerns, building for multiple platforms, Electron and React Native pros and woes, and their future plans to release a hosted sync and team service to sustain and grow Buttercup into a business that’s built around its open source.

In this special crossover episode of Founders Talk, Adam talks with Donald Fischer. Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it's being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user's privacy.

This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven't covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the "Framlication" beat of their own drum.

Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital joined the show to share his plans for funding the future generation of commercial open source software based companies. This is a growing landscape of $100M+ revenue companies ~13 years in the making that’s just now getting serious early attention and institutional backing — and we talk through many of those details with Joseph. We cover the whys and hows, why OSS now, deep details around licensing implications, and we speculate the types of open source software that makes sense for the types of investing Joseph and other plan to do.

Jerod invites Richard Feldman back on the show to catch up on all things Elm. Did you hear? NoRedInk finally had a production runtime error, the community grew quite a bit (from 'obscure' to just 'niche'), and Elm 0.19 added some killer new features around asset optimization.

In this special bonus call, Adam and Jerod talk with Allen "Gunner" Gunn about the Sustain Summit. They talk about what it is, the kind of conversations that happen there, issues the open source community are facing right now, and how Sustain stands out from traditional "unconferences." Sustain 2017 was a big hit, and this year's event should be even better. Join us!

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled "Setting expectations for open source participation" and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what's the goal? They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there's a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it's an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it's about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it. Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

In this special rebroadcast of JS Party, Jerod and Suz talk with John Resig about how he's using GraphQL at Khan Academy, some of the mistakes and successes using GraphQL, John's feelings on jQuery, and community Q&A.

We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly Twitter alternative, although that's its known claim to fame. Why it's probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why you would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

We talk with Dan Kohn, the Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to catch up with all things cloud native, the CNCF, and the world of Kubernetes. Dan updated us on the growth KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the state of Cloud Native and where innovation is happening, serverless being on the rise, and Kubernetes dominating the enterprise.

Jerod talked with Paul Fremantle, the CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2, about their new programming language, Ballerina — a cloud-native language which aims to make it easier to write microservices that integrate APIs. They talked about the creation of the language and how it was inspired by so many technologies, cloud native features like built-in container support, serverless-friendly, observability, and how it works with, or without, a service mesh — just to name a few.

Adam and Jerod talk with two members of Segment’s engineering team: Co-founder and CTO, Calvin French-Owen, as well as Software Engineer, Alex Noonan, about their journey from monorepo to microservices back to monorepo. 100s of problem children to 1 superstar child.

Adam and Jerod talk with Jason McGee, VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform about Istio — an open platform that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, control, and observe microservices. They cover what service mesh is, why its suddenly so interesting, who’s involved in Istio, their involvement with the CNCF, getting started, and what's next for Istio.

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

On this special bonus episode of The Changelog, we're playing the latest episode of Away from Keyboard with Jeff Robbins. While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to Tim about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.

Adam and Jerod invite back Katrina Owen after years away focusing on Exercism—a 100% free platform for code practice and mentorship with over 2500 exercises and 48 different language tracks. They talk to Katrina about how the platform has changed, the direction it's taken, the backstory on the recently launched version 2, and how she plans to turn Exercism into a sustainable business. Also, what happens if that doesn't work?!

Adam and Jerod are on location at OSCON and talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he’s doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software, and Abby Cobunoc Mayes about the work she’s doing at Mozilla for open science.

We talk with Nader Dabit, Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services, about the role of DevRel and what's involved in this "dream job", frontend and mobile developers using AWS Amplify to build cloud-enabled applications, how GraphQL, React, and others fit in, and the direction of React Native.

From open source project to a $3.8 million dollar seed round to transform Gatsby.js into a full-blown startup that's building what's becoming the defacto modern web frontend. In this episode, we talk with Jason Lengstorf about this blazing-fast static site generator, its building blocks and how they all fit together, the future of web development on the JAMstack (JavaScript + APIs), the importance of site performance, site rebuilds, getting started, and how they're focused on building an awesome product and an awesome community.

In this special episode of The Changelog we’re sharing a full-length episode of our newly launched podcast called Practical AI — covering AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science. In this episode Mat Ryer and David Hernandez joined Daniel and Chris to talk about MachineBox, building a company around AI, and democratizing AI.

We're on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Corey Sanders and Steve Guggenheimer — two Microsoft veterans focused on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. We talked about the direction and convergence of AI, ethics, cloud computing, and how the day to day lives of developers will change because of the advancements in AI.

Jerod Santo is riding solo talking with Kurt Mackey, co-founder of Fly. He talked to him about his work at Ars Technica, his prediction on tabs being a fad, and Kurt being a founding member of MongoHQ, which was later renamed to Compose and acquired by IBM. Jerod also talked to him about lighthouse scores, performance, and an interesting program Fly is instituting to compensate open source project maintainers.

Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo talk with Tim Bell, the founder and creator of CS Unplugged, a collection of free teaching material that teaches computer science through engaging games and puzzles. They talk to him about where this program came from him, the need for computer science in today's K-12 education programs, how CS Unplugged fits in, and how you can get involved.

We talked with Steve Dower and Dan Taylor at Microsoft Build 2018 about the history of Python at Microsoft, the origination of IronPython, Python Tools for Visual Studio, flying under the radar to add support Python, fighting from within to support open source, and more.

Zed Shaw – creator of Mongrel, Learn Python the Hard Way, and more – joined the show to talk through a recent Twitter thread from Zed where he shared his thoughts on open source, making money in open source, corporate interests and involvement, developer culture, and more.

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about 20 years of curl, what’s new with http2, and the backstory of QUIC - a new transport designed by Jim Roskind at Google which offers reduced latency compared to that of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2.

We're on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella's first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

Johannes Schickling, co-founder and CEO of Prisma, joined the show to catch us up on all things GraphQL — the tech, the possibilities, the community, how Prisma turns your database into a GraphQL API, their new business direction, Prisma Cloud, open source vs enterprise, and the upcoming GraphQL Europe in Berlin on June 15th.

Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she's seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack's growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community's big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin's upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.

Chad Hietala joined the show to talk with us about the long history of Ember.js, how he first got involved, his work at LinkedIn and his work as an Ember Core team member, how the Ember team communicates expectations from release to release, their well documented RFC process, ES Classes in Ember, Glimmer, and where Ember is being used today.