Changelog Interviews

Philipp Krenn joined the show to talk with us about Elasticsearch, the problem it solves, where it came from, and where it's at today. We discussed the query language, what it can be compared to, whether or not it's a database replacement or a database complement, Elasticsearch vs Elastic the company. We also talked about the details behind Elastic's plan of "doubling down on open" to open up X-Pack, which is open code paid add-on features to Elasticsearch. We discussed the implications of this on their business model, and what changes will take place at the code and license level on GitHub.

Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past ... and it's certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it's what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide. We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify -- which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.

We're rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits. But don't worry, The Changelog will be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It's the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we've had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.

Rhys Arkins joined the show to talk about automating dependency updates using Renovate. Renovate is an open source tool to keep source code dependencies up-to-date using automated Pull Requests. We talked about who’s using it, the languages and environments that are supported, self-hosted vs SaaS and how that plays into supporting this open source, auto-merging, being a GitHub App and in the GitHub Marketplace, and building this as a business on someone else's platform.

Suz Hinton joined the show to talk about live coding open source on Twitch. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, her goals and aspirations for live streaming, the work she's doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others can get started — and maybe some other fun stuff we have in the works at Changelog.

Tim Coulter joined the show to talk about Truffle — a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. We talked with Tim about how he got into Ethereum and dapp development, Solidity vs JavaScript, smart contract testing, EthPM which is like npm but for Ethereum, Why decentralization? Why dapps? Basically, why rebuild the internet? And last but not least - who's using Truffle and what have they built with it?

David Heinemeier Hansson joined the show to share the story of how JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp evolved into a full-fledged framework called Stimulus. We talked about ins and outs of Basecamp as it is today, Ruby, JavaScript and David's somewhat new found love for that language. How they open source because they can. And David's new YouTube series called "On Writing Software Well".

Max Coutté joined the show to share his journey of learning the math and programming required to build an open source Oculus headset for $100. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day he and his friends decided to built an Oculus headset because they couldn't afford one. This show takes you through Max's journey, how his teacher (aka Sensei) made all the difference, and how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source.

Todd Gamblin, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, joined us to talk about Moore’s Law, his work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the components of a micro-chip, and High Performance Computing.

Rico Sta. Cruz joined us to talk about his project Devhints (cheatsheets for developers). There are more than 365 cheatsheets you can contribute to and it's open source. We talked about the design, technical implementation, community, alternate interfaces like the command line. We also talked about RSJS, RSCSS, and Docpress.

From KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017 — Brendan Burns (Kubernetes co-founder) and Gabe Monroy (creator of Deis) joined the show to talk about the origin, impact, and future of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.

We're joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.

We talked with Jeremy Soller, the BDFL of Redox OS, a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications. In this episode we talk about; OS design principals, Jeremy's goals for Redox, why is Rust, the Micro-kernel, the Filesystem, how Linux isn't secure enough, how he's funding this his development, and a coding style in Rust called Safe Rust.

We talk with Alan Duric, Co-founder and CEO of Wire, an open source end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app for voice and video calls. In 2005 Alan co-founded Camino Networks which was later acquired by Skype, and his involvement with internet based voice communications goes back 20 years. We talk about the early days of Skype, why Wire is open source, the importance of encryption, the importance of secure messaging, their polyglot ways, and how they plan to stand apart from other apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and more.

We went back into the archives to conversations we had around blockchains and databases at OSCON 2017. We talked with Monty Widenius, creator of MariaDB the open source forever fork MySQL, Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger, the open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technologies, and Tague Griffith, Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs, the home of open source Redis and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise.

We're back in NYC at Microsoft Connect(); talking about the backstory of Visual Studio Code with Julia Liuson (Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio), Chris Dias (Principal Program Manager of Visual Studio and .NET), and PJ Meyer (Product Manager). We talk about the beginnings of the Visual Studio product line, how Microsoft missed the internet, how the community is judging Microsoft and looking at them with a very old lense, how Visual Studio Code evolved from lessons learned with their cloud based editor called Monaco, how they had to radically change to reach developers beyond Windows, and how this open source project is thriving.

Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joined the show to talk about what it means to be Cloud Native, the ins and outs of Dan's role to the foundation, how they make money to sustain things, membership, the support they give to open source projects, the home they've given to Kubernetes, Prometheus and many other projects that have become the de facto projects to build cloud native applications on.

We talked with Miguel de Icaza last week at Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Miguel gave us the backstory on how he's been competing with Microsoft for most of his developer career, and he shares the history of GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin — and what led him to now work at Microsoft.

Mike Perham is back for his 4th appearance to talk about his new project Faktory, a new background job system that's aiming to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language. We catch up with Mike on the continued success and model of Sidekiq, the future of background jobs, his thoughts on RocksDB in Faktory vs BoltDB, Redis, or SQLite, how he plans to support Sidekiq for the next 10 years, and his thoughts on Faktory being a SaaS option in the future.

We went back into the archives to conversations we had around data science at OSCON 2017. We talked with Vida Williams (Data Scientist) and Michelle Casbon (Director of Data Science at Qordoba) about the social impact of open data, personal data and transparency, privacy, the big data problem of public surveillance, electronic fingerprinting, the rift between data scientists and computer scientists, natural language processing, machine learning, and more.

Adam Morse joined the show to talk about Functional CSS and his project Tachyons - a CSS Toolkit that lets you quickly build and design new UI without writing CSS. We talk about Scalable CSS, the difference between "Atomic", "OOCSS", "BEM" and others, semantic class names, and where we go from here.

Preethi Kasireddy, a self-employed blockchain and smart contract Engineer, joined the show to talk about why she left the best job in the world at Andreessen Horowitz on the deal team, how she got entrepreneurship envy, the roadmap she laid out in 2015 and where she's at today as an engineer, her excitement for blockchain-based technologies, and why blockchains don't scale.

Sean Griffin joins the show to talk about doing Rails full-time, his love of Rust. and his project Diesel - a safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust. We discuss Sean’s path to working full-time on Rails, what he works on specifically, why Rust, why Diesel, and how much of Diesel’s design and featureset is a product of his experience with ActiveRecord and Rails.

Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.

Eduardo Cuducos joined the show to talk about Operação Serenata de Amor an Artificial Intelligence and Data Science project that aims to inform the general public about government corruption and spending. We talked about how this artificial intelligence project analyzes claims for reimbursement from congresspeople to determine illegal probability, how it monitors government spending, the technology behind it, and how other governments might be able to follow this model.

Eric Normand joined the show to talk about Functional Programming. We talked about FP vs OOP vs Imperative, why FP is popular again, the advantages and disadvantages of Functional Programming, and teaching Functional Programming concepts.

Mike Glukhovsky joined the show to talk about the future of RethinkDB. Mike was a co-founder of RethinkDB along-side Slava Akhmechet. RethinkDB shutdown a year ago officially on October 5, 2016 — and today we're talking through all the details with Mike. The shutdown, getting purchased by the CNCF, relicensing, buying back their IP and source code, community and governance, and some specific features that Mike and the rest of the community are excited about.

Dmitry Jemerov joined the show to talk about Kotlin - a language created by JetBrains that's designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language, and a "better language" than Java. We asked Dmitry "Why invent a new language?", talked through Google announcing official Android support, covered some of Kotlin's characteristics, Kotlin vs Swift, and more.

We talk with Brandon Keepers and Bex Warner about GitHub's Probot — GitHub Apps to automate and improve your workflows. You can use pre-built apps or easily build and share your own.

This episode features conversations from Sustain 2017 at GitHub HQ with Richard Littauer, Karthik Ram, Andrea Goulet, and Scott Ford. Sustain was a one day conversation for open source software sustainers to share stories, resources, and ways forward to sustain open source.

Karolina Szczur joined the show to talk about community building, building remote-first teams, the hiring process in tech, product development, and the inclusivity factor of web performance.

We talked with Tim Mecklem about building an artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves to help those with Type 1 Diabetes who want to "loop" — a process which involves monitoring glucose levels, predicting where a person's glucose levels are heading, then delivering insulin based on that prediction. Tim is a Developer at Gaslight in Cincinnati where he builds software solutions with Ruby and Elixir, and he's a member of the Nerves Core team.

If you find yourself chasing shiny objects and squirrels all time, you should 💯 listen to this episode featuring Ozan Onay (President of Bradfield School of Computer Science) where we discuss his recent blog post entitled _You Are Not Google_ which was the #1 link in Changelog Weekly - Issue #159. This show is full of wisdom and advice for every developer out there.

This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).

We are thrilled to produce this show to honor RabbitMQ’s 10th anniversary. Karl Nilsson and Michael Klishin joined the show to talk through 10 years of RabbitMQ — one of the most widely deployed open source message brokers with more than 35,000 production deployments worldwide.

Evan Prodromou has been involved in open source since the mid '90s. His open source travel guide – Wikitravel – grew up alongside Wikipedia and the web itself. In this episode, we hear Evan's history, try to solve open social networking once and for all, and learn how sprinkling a little artificial intelligence on to our products can yield big wins without having to shoot the moon.

We talked with Dustin Kirkland (Head of Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical) at OSCON about 12.04's end of life, the death of the Ubuntu phone, Snaps and snapd, and Bash on Ubuntu on Windows Server. This is the second installment of our mini-series from the expo hall floor of OSCON 2017. Special thanks to our friends at O'Reilly for inviting us to OSCON.

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that's rallying around this new way to think about APIs.

This week we take you behind the scenes of the new infrastructure for Changelog.com and talk with Gerhard Lazu. We relaunched the new brand and site for Changelog on Phoenix/Elixir in October of 2016 and we needed a better way to reliably host and deploy the site. That's where Gerhard came in. We cover all the details and decisions in this show.

We talked with Pam Selle at OSCON about the serverless revolution happening for JavaScript developers. This episode kicks off our mini-series from the Expo Hall floor at OSCON 2017.

On Friday, June 2, 2017 – GitHub announced the details of their Open Source Survey – an open data set on the open source community for researchers and the curious. Frannie Zlotnick, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers joined the show to talk through the backstory and key insights of this open data project which sheds light on the broader open source community's attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software.

Matt Biilman and Chris Bach joined the show to talk about JAMstack, Netlify CMS, how open source drives standards, and 10x-ing the speed of Smashing Magazine.

Tim Hockin and Aparna Sinha joined the show to talk about the backstory of Kubernetes inside Google, how Tim and others got it funded, the infrastructure of Kubernetes, and how they've been able to succeed by focusing on the community.

Justin Dorfman joined us for a special BONUS episode of The Changelog to share some details about Sustain Conference with you. It's a one day conversation for Open Source Software sustainers at GitHub HQ (SF) on June 19, 2017. No keynotes, expo halls or talks. Only discussions about how to get more resources to support digital infrastructure. Plus, we'll be there.

Scott Hanselman joined today's show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that's still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.

Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay, joined the show to talk about DevRel, his open source work (clipboard.js, Dracula Theme, jQuery Boilerplate, Browser Diet, et al), and his passion for teaching and giving talks at conferences. Zeno also shared some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons learned along the way.

Jason Laster joined the show to talk about Firefox Debugger and DevTools. We talked about the backstory of Firefox, Firebug, the new Debugger.html, why React and Redux made a good fit to develop Debugger as a standalone application, community efforts, and getting started.

Kent C. Dodds joined the show to talk about guiding and supporting first time contributors to open source. We talked about the many ways to be first-timer friendly, how to contribute to open source, the burden and balance of a maintainer, and a few of the projects Kent maintains, including his latest project at PayPal called Glamourous.

Will Norris (Engineering Manager at Google's Open Source office) joined the show to talk about their new release of the Google Open Source website as well as the release of Google's internal documentation on how they do open source. Nearly 70 pages of documentation have been made public under creative commons license for the world to use. We talked about the backstory of Google's Open Source office, their philosophy on OSS, their involvement in the TODO group, and much more.

Tracy Lee joined the show to talk about bringing people together, helping people, and making an impact. We covered learning JavaScript, the ins and outs of her road to get to where she's at today, hitting burnout and sleeping for two weeks, breaking into the JavaScript community, and the fun cruise, workshops, and conferences she's working on for the JavaScript community.