Changelog Master Feed

We add episode chapters to the website, KubeSail sells a PiBox, Nima Badizadegan wants you to use one big server, Gergeloy Orosz details oncall compensation across the software industry, Greg Kogan isn't impressed with how swamped you are at work, a dashboard template built on Bootstrap & Charm releases a CLI tool for shell scripts.

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we've officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And...not only has it been a journey for us, but it's also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

AngularJS creator Miško Hevery has a new web framework he wants to tell us about, but he's not pitching just another framework, but with different DX. He says that Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he's here to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG.

This is Adam and Jerod's pre-show call before hooking up with Chris Coyier to record episode 500 of The Changelog. We've been doing these off and on for awhile now. We hang out for 30ish minutes before the show begins and ship that conversation as a bonus for our Changelog++ members. We're doing this one different. You don't hit a round number like this very often. So, here it is. A standalone Backstage episode. Thanks for listening and here's to the next 500! 🥂

Our today's guest spent 4 days building a feature for his side project so that we could ship it together on Ship It!, while recording. The feature is called `rave` mode, and the context is Bass, an interpreted functional scripting language written in Go, riffing on the ideas of Kernel & Clojure. When the local build runs, you can now press `r` to synchronise the beats of your currently playing Spotify track with the build output. For a demo, see bass v0.9.0 release. Please welcome Alex Suraci, a.k.a. **vito**, the creator of Concourse CI and Bass. --- This episode is dedicated to the late John Shutt, the creator of Kernel. Your ideas continue in Bass. Thank you for getting them out into the world. ---

Our award <strike>winning</strike> worthy survey game show is back, this time Mat Ryer hosts it live on stage at GopherCon Europe 2022! Go Time's Natalie Pistunovich joins forces with Ronna Steinberg & Robert Burke to battle it out with V Körbes, Tamir Bahar & Konrad Richie. Let's see who can better guess what the GopherCon Europe gophers had to say!

Every year Mozilla releases an Internet Health Report that combines research and stories exploring what it means for the internet to be healthy. This year's report is focused on AI. In this episode, Solana and Bridget from Mozilla join us to discuss the power dynamics of AI and the current state of AI worldwide. They highlight concerning trends in the application of this transformational technology along with positive signs of change.

Oleksii Trekhleb has a new drawing app, Zach Leatherman did some markdown generator speed tests, Jorge Fioranelli built a framework for Engineering Managers, Crockford got interviewed on Evrone & Daniel Sieger wrote up his clean coding advice.

This week we're joined again by Ben Ubois and we're talking about RSS. Yes, RSS...the tech that never seems to die and yet so many of us rely on it daily. Ben is the creator of Feedbin, which is self-described as "a nice place to read on the web." Ben is also the maker of a new app on iOS for people who like podcasts. It's called Airshow and you can download it at airshow.fm. Ben catches us up on the state of Feedbin, we discuss the nine lives of RSS and its foundational utility for the indie web, the possibilities and short-comings of RSS, we get deep in the weeds on the Podcast 2.0 spec and the work being done on `<podcast:chapters>`, and Ben also shares the details on his new app called Airshow.

KBall and Juri dive deep into monorepos, their benefits and gotchas, and how Nx helps you improve the performance and maintainability of a monorepo setup.

Go 1.18 was a major release where we saw the introduction of generics into the language as well as other notables such as fuzzing and workspaces. With Go 1.19 slated to come out next month, one has to wonder what’s next. Are we in store to be blown away by new and major features like we saw in 1.18? Not exactly but there are still lots of improvements to be on the lookout for. Joining Mat & Johnny to touch on some of the most interesting ones is Carl Johnson, himself a contributor to the 1.19 release.

We know that many of you listen to this podcast while running 🏃‍♀️ or cycling 🚴‍♂️ Hey Dan! How many of you cycled to a conference? Gerhard knows a single person that cycled 764 miles for 8 days straight from Switzerland to Spain for this year's KubeCon EU. His name is Johann Gyger, a CNCF ambassador & a cloud consultant at Peak Scale. Johann is a cloud engineer at heart that is all in on sustainability. He is the main reason why Gerhard is super excited to talk about electric cars & Dagger at the Swiss Cloud Native Day this September.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel explore the geopolitics, economics, and power-brokering of artificial intelligence. What does control of AI mean for nations, corporations, and universities? What does control or access to AI mean for conflict and autonomy? The world is changing rapidly, and the rate of change is accelerating. Daniel and Chris look behind the curtain in the halls of power.

Brandur thinks soft deletion probably isn't worth it, the orange website delivers a high quality discussion on data structures, Podge O'Brien drops satirical management advice, team pico delivers prose.sh, Mat Ryer shares his thoughts on estimations & Matt Rickard's thoughts on RSS have us thinking about it as well.

This week we're joined by On Freund, former VP of Engineering at WeWork and now co-founder & CEO of Wilco. WeWork you may have heard of, but Wilco maybe not (yet). We get into the details behind the tech and scaling of WeWork, comparisons of the fictional series on Apple TV+ called WeCrashed and how much of that is true. Then we move on to Wilco which is what has On's full attention right now. Wilco has the potential to be the next big thing for developers to acquire new skills. Wilco aims to be the ultimate simulator to gain new skills on a real-life tech stack. If you want to skip ahead, you can request access at trywilco.com/changelog — they are moving our listeners to the top of the waiting list.

What's this? A Frontend Feud! The ShopTalk guys return to defend their championship over Syntax against new contenders: Una and Adam from The CSS Podcast!

How do beginners learn Go? This episode is meant to engage both non-Go users that listen to sister podcasts here on Changelog, or any Go-curious programmers out there, as well as encourage those that have started to learn Go and want to level up beyond the basics. On this episode we're aiming to answer questions about how to learn Go, identify resources that are available, and where you can go to continue your learning journey.

Gerhard's transition to a senior engineer started 10 years ago, when he embraced the vim mindset, functional core & imperative shell, and was inspired to seek simplicity in his code & infrastructure. Most of it can be traced back to one person: Gary Bernhardt, the creator of Execute Program, Destroy all Software and the now famous Wat idea. Few stick around long enough to understand the long-term impact of their decisions on production systems. Even fewer are able to talk about them as well as Gary does.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore DALL-E 2, the amazing new model from Open AI that generates incredibly detailed novel images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language. Along the way, they acknowledge that some folks in the larger AI community are suggesting that sophisticated models may be approaching sentience, but together they pour cold water on that notion. But they can't seem to get away from DALL-E's images of raccoons in space, and of course, who would want to?

This week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that's right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand. Adam Miller's journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a strong team that's been with him every step of the way (many of which are as close as family), and truly some of the best premium bikes available on the market today. BTW, Adam (host) is an owner of a Revel bike — he has a T1000 colorway Rascal that he's ridden on downhill trails, all-day epics, and everything in-between. If you enjoy this episode, please us know in the comments.

Anthony Hobday has 37 ways to spice up your designs, James Bennett has opinions on open source and PyPi security, Alicia Sykes compiled some awesome security/privacy options, ContextKeeper layouts out the real price of context switching, and Nick Nisi tells us all about jqq. Bam! Bam! Bam!

This week we're talking with Daniel Thompson about Tauri and their journey to their recent 1.0 release. Tauri is often compared to Electron - it's a toolkit that lets you build software for all major desktop operating systems using web technologies. It was built for the security-focused, privacy-respecting, and environmentally-conscious software engineering community. The core libraries are written in Rust and the UI layer can be written using virtually any frontend framework. We get into all the details, why Rust, how the project was formed, their resistance (thus far) to venture capital, their full commitment to the freedom virtues of open source, and all the technical bits you need to know to consider it for your next multi-platform project.

Deno team member Luca Casonato joins Jerod & Feross to tell us about Fresh – a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity.

This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale. Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world’s software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you’ll have a great company.”

A conversation with Ronna Steinberg, who was an OOP developer for many years, and now is a Go Google Developer Expert. Ronna has been thinking about Go and OOP for awhile, asking herself whether or not Go is an object oriented programming language. Tune in to find out her answer and hear some of the options gophers have for object oriented design.

Today we talk with two lovely folks from Transistor.fm: Jason Pearl, Senior Software Developer & Jon Buda, co-founder. Gerhard was curious to find out about their setup & how did it change with the launch of the new podcast website builder. After all, you have been hearing us talk about our setup for years, so it was high-time to challenge some assumptions and learn how another team is solving similar problems. TL;DL: keeping it simple is at the root of smooth operations & stable systems.

Coqui is a speech technology startup that making huge waves in terms of their contributions to open source speech technology, open access models and data, and compelling voice cloning functionality. Josh Meyer from Coqui joins us in this episode to discuss cloning voices that have emotion, fostering open source, and how creators are using AI tech.

Jarred Sumner's Bun comes out of the oven, Jeremy Brown doesn't want you prematurely optimizing, Armin Ronacher's not excited about his "critical" Python package, Daniel Thompson from Tauri thinks you should check out Rustlings, and we draw a straight line between Functional Programming jargon and boujee Gen Z slang.

Today we have a special treat: Bryan Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer! You may know Bryan from his work on DTrace. He worked at Sun for many years, then Oracle, and finally Joyent before starting Oxide. We dig deep into their company's mission/principles/values, hear how it it all started with a VC's blank check that turned out to be anything but, and learn how Oxide's integrated approach to hardware & software sets them up to compete with the established players by building servers as they should be.

OSS developer Jessica Sachs joins Jerod & Kball to discuss re-launching and maintaining Faker.js after it was abandoned last January, Component Driven Development & Neopets!

In our 6th Kaizen, we talk with Jerod about all the things that we cleaned up after migrating changelog.com from a managed Kubernetes to Fly.io. We deleted the K8s cluster and moved wildcard cert management to Fastly & all our vanity domain certs to Fly.io. We migrated the Docker Engine that our GitHub Actions is using - PR #416 has all the details. We did a few other things in preparation for our secrets plan. Thank you Maikel Vlasman, James Harr, Adrian Mester, Omri Gabay & Owen Valentine for kicking it off in our Slack #shipit channel. Gerhard's favourite improvement: the new shipit.show domain.

We're talking about the tools we use every day help us to be productive! This show will be a great introduction for those new to Go tooling, with some discussion around what we think of them after using some of them for many years.

We're listening! This week's experimental, super-brief Monday edition of "The Changelog" has the following new features: It's longer, there's no background music during the stories, and it includes stories previously not featured in the newsletter. If you like this better than the last one, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going... let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog!

Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that's still in use to this day. This time around we're going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free. Has James given up on the business? Or will this move Actual(ly) breathe new life into a piece of software that's used and beloved by many? Tune in to find out.

Jerod, Nick & Ali partake in a few rounds of _Story of the Week_, _TIL_, and _I'm Excited about $X_. Oh, and is TypeScript the new Java? Nick responds and emotes all over the place! 😆

A deep discussion on that tension between development speed and software quality. What is velocity? How does it differ from speed? How do we measure it? How do we optimize it?

Ben Johnson, the creator of Litestream, joined Fly.io a few weeks after we migrated changelog.com - episode 50 has all the details. That was pure coincidence. What was not a coincidence, is Gerhard jumping at the opportunity to talk to Ben about Postgres vs SQLite with Litestream. The prospect of running a cluster of our app instances spread across all regions, with local SQLite & Litestream replication, is mind boggling. Let's find out from Ben what will it take to get there. Thanks Kürt for kicking off this dream.

Drausin Wulsin, Director of ML at Immunai, joins Daniel & Chris to talk about the role of AI in immunotherapy, and why it is proving to be the foremost approach in fighting cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious diseases. The large amount of high dimensional biological data that is available today, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, creates unique opportunities to push the boundaries of what is possible in biology. To that end, Immunai has built the largest immune database called AMICA that contains tens of millions of cells. The company uses cutting-edge transfer learning techniques to transfer knowledge across different cell types, studies, and even species.

We're experimenting with something new: a super-brief Monday edition of "The Changelog" to help start your week off right and keep you up with the fast-moving software world. If you like this, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going... let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog. If you'd rather we didn't... also let us know!

Nick went to Amsterdam for JSNation & React Summit 2022 and he joins Jerod to report on all the goodness! He also sits down with two special guests involved with the confs to talk Jest Preview and GraphQL Cache

Adam and Jerod are joined by Ken Kantzer, co-founder of PKC Security. Ken and his team performed upwards of 20 code audits on well-funded startups. Now that it's 7 or 8 years later, he wrote up 16 surprising observations and things he learned looking back at the experience. We gotta discuss 'em all!

The year is 2053. The tabs-vs-spaces wars are long over. Ron Evans is the only Go programmer still alive on Earth. All he does is maintain old Go code. It's terrible! He must find a way to warn his fellow gophers before it's too late. Good thing he finally got that PDQ transmission system working...

Rob Barnes (a.k.a. Devops Rob) and Rosemary Wang (author of Infrastructure as Code - Patterns & Practices) are joining us today to talk about infrastructure secrets. What do Rosemary and Rob think about committing encrypted secrets into a repository? How do they suggest that we improve on storing secrets in LastPass? And if we were to choose HashiCorp Vault, what do we need to know? Thank you Thomas Eckert for the intro. Thank you Nabeel Sulieman (ep. 46) & Kelsey Hightower (ep. 44) for your gentle nudges towards improving our infra secrets management.

While scaling up machine learning at Instacart, Montana Low and Lev Kokotov discovered just how much you can do with the Postgres database. They are building on that work with PostgresML, an extension to the database that lets you train and deploy models to make online predictions using only SQL. This is super practical discussion that you don't want to miss!

This week Lee Robinson joins us to talk about his journey as a DevRel. We talk about what it means to be a DevRel, what orgs they fall under, how he runs his team at Vercel, Lee's three pillars of DevRel: education, community, and product, we compare the old days of DevRel vs now, and of course what makes a DevRel a good DevRel.

Today we are talking with Frederic Branczyk, founder of Polar Signals & Prometheus maintainer. You may remember Frederic from episode 33 when we introduced Parca.dev. This time, we talk about a database built for observability: FrostDB, formerly known as ArcticDB. eBPF generates a lot of high cardinality data, which requires a new approach to writing, persisting & then reading back this state. TL;DR FrostDB is sub zero cool & well worthy of its name.

Josh Goldberg joins Nick, Chris & a very nasally-sounding KBall for a fun conversation around TypeScript ESLint. They discuss why we need ESLint when we have TypeScript, some useful rules in typescript-eslint, how it works, and a few hot takes along the way!

This week we're featuring an episode of Grafana's Big Tent! LEGO Group principal engineer Nayana Shetty swaps observability survival stories (to drill or not to drill?) with hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback. The trio also reveals new and different observability strategies that have been successful and effective in their organizations. Plus: Nayana shares how she built her successful observability career brick by brick.

Could we create a digital human that processes data in a variety of modalities and detects emotions? Well, that's exactly what NTT DATA Services is trying to do, and, in this episode, Theresa Kushner joins us to talk about their motivations, use cases, current systems, progress, and related ethical issues.

This week Jesse Grosjean joins us to talk about his career as a solo indie Mac dev. Since 2004 Jesse has been building Mac apps under the company name Hog Bay Software producing hits such as WriteRoom, Taskpaper, and now Bike. We talk through the evolution of his apps, how he considers new features and improvements, why he chose and continues to choose the Mac platform, his business model and pricing for his apps, and what it takes to build his business around macOS and the driving force of the App Store.