Changelog Master Feed

For the first time ever, we're producing somebody else's podcast! Our friends at Grafana asked us to help them launch a show for the observability community. It's called Big Tent and on this episode we are backstage with Tom Wilkie, Mat Ryer, & Matt Toback talking through what they're up to and why we're helping out.

Feross has been working on something big. He joins Chris and Nick, along with guests Bret Comnes and Mik Lysenko to discuss Socket, what it is, and its focus on the security of the JavaScript supply chain.

In this episode we will discuss what it’s like to work with legacy code. How you work with it, how to avoid issues arising due to it, as well as when a greenfield rewrite is the best path forward. Hosted by Angelica Hill, joined by some wonderful guests: Dominic St-Pierre, Jeff Hernandez, Misha Avrekh, and Jon Sabados.

Nabeel Sulieman, Senior Software Engineer at Vercel, talks about KCert, a simpler alternative to cert-manager that he built. Gerhard tried it out, and he thinks that Nabeel is onto something. If you want to see the video that they recorded, ping us on Twitter or Slack. We love this story, especially the long-term approach of working on something that one truly believes in, and the only reason is because it's fun. The world needs more people like Nabeel, and we hope that this episode inspires you to go all out, and do just that.

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian's been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton. This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You'll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson's unique skillset, why Brian thinks C has stood the test of time, his thoughts on modern languages like Go and Rust, what's changed in 50 years of software, what makes platforms like Unix and the web so powerful, his take as a professor on the trend of programmers skipping the university track, and so much more. Seriously, this is a _must-listen_.

This last week has been a big week for AI news. BigScience is training a huge language model (while the world watches), and NVIDIA announced their latest "Hopper" GPUs. Chris and Daniel discuss these and other topics on this fully connected episode!

Jen Looper from Web Dev for Beginners and Front-end Foxes joins Jerod and Ali to discuss the exciting (but also intimidating) prospect of getting in to web development in 2022! Where should you start? What technologies should you focus on? Is it better to go all-in on a framework or stick with the fundamentals? Stuff like that!

This week we're bringing The Changelog to Go Time — we had an awesome conversation with Toby Padilla, Co-Founder at Charm where they’re building tools to make the command line glamorous. Toby and the team at Charm have gone "all in" on Go — all of Charm is written in Go. They moved to Go from other languages, saying "Go is the answer to building these type of tools." And even on this episode Toby says "I love Rust, it’s really cool, it’s a super-exciting language, but I jumped ship. I wanna be more productive, I wanna use all the fun toys, and so I started doing Go." Clearly this episode will be in good company here on Go Time. 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.

Pia Wiedermayer, Lead QA at Zühlke, is talking with Gerhard today about software quality. If the name sounds familiar, check out episode 28. Thank you Romano for the introduction 👋🏻 Do you remember the last time that you used an app, whether it was in the browser or on your mobile, and everything just worked? What about that intuitive feel, snappiness and you achieving the task that you intended to without feeling that you are fighting tech? Experiences like those take a lot of effort across multiple disciplines. They are designed, built and maintained over long periods of time. It all starts with people like Pia that really care about quality. It's so much more than just automated testing...

The term "foundation" model has been around since about the middle of last year when a research group at Stanford published the comprehensive report On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. The naming of these models created some strong reactions, both good and bad. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the ideas behind the report.

Zach Leatherman recently announced he will now be working on Eleventy – his simpler static site generator – while continuing to work at Netlify. What makes Eleventy special? How'd he convince Netlify to let him do this? What does this mean for the project's future? How many questions in a row can we type into this textarea? Tune in to find out!

What does it take to master a programming language like Go? Joining us is the author of Mastering Go to help us answer that very question and to discuss the third edition of the book.

Today's conversation with Kelsey Hightower showed Gerhard what he was missing in his quest for automation and Kubernetes. The fundamentals that Kelsey shares will most certainly help you level up your game. This is a follow-up to the last 45 seconds of the Kubernetes documentary. Oh, and we finally cleared where we should run our changelog.com PostgreSQL database 🙂

What happens when your data operations grow to Internet-scale? How do thousands or millions of data producers and consumers efficiently, effectively, and productively interact with each other? How are varying formats, protocols, security levels, performance criteria, and use-case specific characteristics meshed into one unified data fabric? Chris and Daniel explore these questions in this illuminating and Fully-Connected discussion that brings this new data technology into the light.

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 Amal and Nick are joined by Dan Shappir, a Performance Tech Lead at Next Insurance, to learn about enabling a performance-first mindset within your engineering org. Dan recently left his 7+ year tenure leading performance at Wix where he and his team improved, and monitored the speed of millions of websites around the world. Join us to learn how he lead a cultural transformation that propelled Wix sites to be faster than most other React apps in the wild - including ones built with frameworks like Next.js.

Ed Welch joins Mat and Jon to discuss logging. They explore the different options for logging in Go, and discuss what data is worth including. Everything from log levels, formats, non-structured vs structured logs, along with common gotchas and good practices when dealing with logs at scale.

In this week's episode Cameron Dutro, a software engineer at GitHub, Ship It listener and someone with an extraordinary attention to detail, joins us to talk about Kuby, a convention-over-configuration approach to deploying Rails apps. The question that we will be trying to answer is what happened to Rails Active Deployment. The path to that promise land is paved with good intentions, but it's complicated.

Daniel and Chris talk with Lukas Egger, Head of Innovation Office and Strategic Projects at SAP Business Process Intelligence. Lukas describes what it takes to bring a culture of innovation into an organization, and how to infuse product development with that innovation culture. He also offers suggestions for how to mitigate challenges and blockers.

This week we have the pleasure of Rich Burroughs, Senior Developer Advocate at Loft Labs and host of the Kube Cuddle podcast. We talk about multitenancy in Kubernetes and how to run Kubernetes in Kubernetes with vcluster. If you are using KiND, you will find this episode interesting, and maybe even helpful. We also talk about the role that Kelsey Hightower played in Rich joining the CNCF ecosystem. The key take-away is that **people make all the difference**. ADHD is something that Rich thinks about often. Gerhard was curious about the difference between ADHD and burnout, as well as this Twitter thread on re-reading sent emails.

Kent and our panelists dive deep on the hottest new React framework: Remix. What it does today, what makes it special, how it lured Kent away from a lucrative independent teaching career, and what's coming up next.

Let’s talk about the concept of immutable databases, the problems they target, and why you’d want to build one in Go.

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.

Alon from Greeneye and Moses from ClearML blew us away when they said that they are training 1000's of models a year that get deployed to Kubernetes clusters on tractors. Yes... we said tractors, as in farming! This is a super cool discussion about MLOps solutions at scale for interesting use cases in agriculture.

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.

Anthony Fu && Matias "Patak" Capeletto from the Vite core team join Jerod && Nick to discuss Vitest – a blazing fast unit-test framework powered by Vite, && Slidev – presentation slides for developers.

Mark Sandstrom and Ben Kraft join Jon and Mat to talk about GraphQL. What exactly is it this query language everyone has been talking about? How does it work? What Go libraries are out there, and where should you get started?

In today's episode, Gerhard is talking to Mauricio Salatino (@salaboy) about the Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes book that he is currently writing. Mauricio is a Staff Engineer at VMware where he spends most of his time contributing to Knative, an open source platform for running serverless workloads on Kubernetes. Gerhard & Mauricio spent a few months in 2021 working on Knative Eventing, and they both appreciate shipping great software continuously. Mauricio helped ship Knative 1.0. The from-monolith-to-k8s application used throughout this book has been a few years in the making. It doubles-up as a workshop-style guide for rearchitecting a Java monolith to a Cloud Native architecture running in Kubernetes.

Holla! This week we're playing _Story of the Week_ and _Today I Learned_ before turning our focus to Vest – a very cool validations framework created by Evyatar Alush.

On this episode, Michael Matloob and Daniel Martí pinky promise not to talk about Go 1.18's two big features (fuzzing and generics). Instead, we're focusing in on the *other* cool stuff that's new!

We finally did it! All our static files are served from AWS S3. This is the most significant improvement to our app's architecture in years, and now we have unlocked the next level: multi-cloud. We talk about that at length, and how it fits in our 2022 setup. The TL;DR is that changelog.com will fly, both literally and figuratively. We also address Steve's comment that he left on our previous Kaizen episode - thanks Steve! Towards the end, we talk about Gerhard's new beginnings at Dagger, where he gets to work with a world-class team and build the next-gen CI/CD. That's right, Gerhard is now walking the Ship It talk all day, every day. If you want to watch him code live, you can do so every Thursday, in our weekly community session. Kaizen!

From MIT researchers who have an AI system that rapidly predicts how two proteins will attach, to Facebook's first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for speech, vision, and text, Daniel and Chris survey the AI landscape for notable milestones in the application of AI in industry and research.

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 Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients. Why should Titan exist? In Joe's words, "Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn't sit well with us. So, we built Titan." On today's show Joe shares the journey, the why's, the how's, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.

Simey de Klerk recenty dove head-first into our transcripts repo and coded up a super-cool feature that's been on Jerod's wishlist for awhile now. So, of course, we invited him Backstage to tell the tale!

This week we are talking to Robin Morero, the person behind fabled.se, a DevOps consultancy from Gothenburg, Sweden. Their motto is "move faster and prosper", which Gerhard prefers to the initial "move fast and break things". Fabled works with startups primarily, and after 26 years, Robin has a few interesting insights to share. What do you think, are haunted codebases real? At what point do pull requests become harmful? What about k3s running on KVM as a simple starting point for production? If this reminds you of #7, and the follow-up YouTube stream with Lars, it's no coincidence.

Amal and Nick load up on coffee for a _not-so-vite_ (lame joke!) conversation with Evan You all about Vite – a batteries included next-generation frontend tooling library. Vite continues to push the ecosystem forward with even stronger defaults, super speedy local development workflows, and a highly extensible universal plugin API. Need we say more?!

Natalie and Johnny are joined by the co-founders of APIToolkit for a deep-dive on the topic. We discuss building them, maintaining them, how can we all be better users, and much more along the way.

In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.

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.

Ryan Carniato joins Jerod, Amelia, and Nick to discuss SolidjS – a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Gunnar Holwerda (Engineering Manager) and Tom Pansino (DevOps Team Lead) share with us a few stories about how the teams at opensesame.com manage AWS operational complexity. The first link in the episode show notes are the slides that Tom & Gunnar prepared for this conversation. Check them out as you hear us speak about the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre, and why you should always go for the bananas. If you like this episode, and have a similar story to share, please reach out to us. We all love real-world stories that we can learn from, and perhaps contribute to.

MLOps is an increasingly popular topic that is no longer just a subset of DevOps. Go is a great choice for infrastructure. What role does Go play in MLOps?

In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what's involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.

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.

Tobie Langel, Open source strategist and Principal at UnlockOpen, joins Chris, Feross, and Amal to discuss recent widespread incidents affecting the JavaScript community (and breaking CI builds) around the globe. Two widely used npm libraries were self-sabotaged by their single maintainer, yet again, highlighting the many gaps in our OSS supply chain security, sustainability and overall practices. We explore all these topics and solution on what our ecosystem needs to be more resilient to these types of attacks in the future.

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.

One of the most common questions we receive at Go Time is how to handle schema migrations in Go. In this episode Jon is joined by Mike Fridman and Vojtech Vitek, maintainers of the popular schema migration tool `pressly/goose`, to discuss techniques, tools, and tips for handling schema migrations.

Vincent Ambo –the person behind nixery.dev, tvl.fyi, and a former Google engineer– shares his take on monorepos, Nix, and fully declarative systems without any Flux, Argo or Kubernetes. While the tooling is impressive, it's the principles behind it that captivated Gerhard's imagination. Vincent has a rather interesting take on the monorepository idea, including one change - one version - one deploy. There are a lot of interesting links in the show notes, including all the code that Vincent uses to manage infrastructure. As a result of this conversation, Gerhard is running Nix on one of his Macs, and also started experimenting with his first NixOS production instance.