Changelog Master Feed

Building software is difficult and time consuming, but the maintenance of software is where we spend the majority of our time. In this episode, Ian and sam join Johnny and Kris to discuss how to build actually maintainable software, the features of Go that make it good for writing maintainable software, and different ways that we might define the term "maintenance".

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.

Yonatan Geifman of Deci makes Daniel and Chris buckle up, and takes them on a tour of the ideas behind his amazing new inference platform. It enables AI developers to build, optimize, and deploy blazing-fast deep learning models on any hardware. Don't blink or you'll miss it!

Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they've iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.

Amal, KBall, and Nick welcome David Khourshid to the show to talk about his project, XState. XState brings state management to a new level using finite state machines and is compatible with your stack. We talk about how the idea came to fruition, its practical uses, and where it's going.

I'm Gerhard Lazu, host of Ship It! A show with weekly episodes about getting your best ideas into the world and seeing what happens. We talk about code, ops, infrastructure, and the people that make it happen. Like Charity Majors from Honeycomb... clip from episode #11 And Dave Farley, one of the founders of Continuous Delivery... clip from episode #5 We even experiment on our own open source podcasting platform so that you can see how we implement specific tools and services within changelog.com. What works and what fails... clip from episode #10 Listen to an episode that seems interesting or helpful and if you like it, subscribe today. We'd love to have you with us.

To build or to buy, that’s a constant question we ask ourselves as software engineers. In this episode we dig into the nuance of these options and the space between them with an eye toward both the building of software and its eventual maintenance.

On this week's episode, Gerhard is joined by Kathy Korevec, former Senior Director of Product at GitHub, and now Vercel's Head of Product. Docs play an essential role in GitHub Actions, and Gerhard's experience has proven that. Building, testing, and shipping code with GitHub Actions works better because of their excellent docs. However, the docs that Kathy pictures are not what you are imagining. She explains it best in her post, **Maybe it’s time we re-think docs**, which is what started this whole conversation. The bottom line is, just as you wouldn’t ship untested code, shipping code without documentation is not optional. Today's conversation with Kathy explains why.

In this episode, Peter Wang from Anaconda joins us again to go over their latest "State of Data Science" survey. The updated results include some insights related to data science work during COVID along with other topics including AutoML and model bias. Peter also tells us a bit about the exciting new partnership between Anaconda and Pyston (a fork of the standard CPython interpreter which has been extensively enhanced to improve the execution performance of most Python programs).

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.

After months of talking about and planning this episode, we decided near the very end to invite Paul from Heavy Spoilers to join us for a deep, spoiler filled, discussion on the movie Tenet, which was directed by Christopher Nolan and released September 2020. If you're a fan of Tenet, you'll love this episode. **Warning**: This episode literally includes heavy spoilers. So come back after you've watched the film, or proceed if that doesn't bother you.

Alex Page & Sam Rose from Shopify's Polaris team join Jerod & Divya to discuss their open research) into finding and selecting a viable alternative for Sass at the company. Six solutions enter, but which one will walk away with the 🌹?

Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) and Jordan Lewis (Cockroach Labs) join Mat and Jon to talk about memory management in Go. We learn about the heap, the stack, and the garbage collector. There are also some absolute gems of wisdom scattered throughout this episode, don't miss it.

On today's show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John's appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life.

This week Gerhard is joined by Justin Searls, Test Double co-founder and CTO. Also a 🐞 magnet. They talk about how to deal with the pressure of shipping faster, why you should optimize for smoothness not speed, and why focusing on consistency is key. Understanding the real why behind what you do is also important. There's a lot more to it, as its a nuanced and complex discussion, and well worth your time. **Expect a decade of learnings compressed into one hour**, as well as disagreements on some ops and infrastructure topics — all good fun. In the show notes, you will find Gerhard's favorite conference talks Justin gave a few years back.

We're back with another Fully Connected episode -- Daniel and Chris dive into a series of articles called 'A New AI Lexicon' that collectively explore alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about AI. The fun begins early as they discuss and debate 'An Electric Brain' with strong opinions, and consider viewpoints that aren't always popular.

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.

Ahmad Awais joins Amal, Amelia, and Jerod to discuss scripting, automation, and building CLIs with Node! We hear Ahmad's back story, learn the ABC's of mastering Node automation tooling, and share automation wins from all of our lives (and Twitter too).

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.

Matt Holt joins Jon Calhoun to discuss Caddy, its history, and the process of creating a v2 of the popular web server. In the episode they discuss some of the challenges encountered while building the v2, reasons for doing a major rewrite, and more.

In this episode, Gerhard follows up on The Changelog #375, which is the last time that he spoke Crossplane with Dan and Jared. Many things changed since then, such as abstractions and compositions, as well as using Crossplane to build platforms, which were mostly ideas. Fast forward 18 months, 2k changes, as well as a major version, and Crossplane is now an easy choice - some would say the best choice - for platform teams to declare what infrastructure means to them. You can now use Crossplane to define your infrastructure abstractions across multiple vendors, including AWS, GCP & Equinix Metal. The crazy ideas from 2019 are now bold and within reach. Gerhard also has an idea for the changelog.com 2022 setup. Listen to what Jared & Dan think, and then let us know your thoughts too.

In Kenya, 33% of maternal deaths are caused by delays in seeking care, and 55% of maternal deaths are caused by delays in action or inadequate care by providers. Jacaranda Health is employing NLP and dialogue system techniques to help mothers experience childbirth safely and with respect and to help newborns get a safe start in life. Jay and Sathy from Jacaranda join us in this episode to discuss how they are using AI to prioritize incoming SMS messages from mothers and help them get the care they need.

Luis Villa of Tidelift joins the show to discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer from a legal perspective.

This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.

Mihai and Ashley join Jon to discuss data streaming. What is it, why is it being used, and common mistakes developers make when setting up. They also discuss some of the tools in the ecosystem, including Benthos, a tool created by Ashley Jeff's to make the plumbing part of data streaming easier to get right.

In today's episode, Gerhard is joined by Uma, CEO and co-founder of ChaosNative, as well as Karthik, CTO and also a ChaosNative co-founder. They talk Chaos Engineering and Litmus. Chaos Engineering is not just for super SREs. It is not meant to prevent outages. And, it is not just about hardware. Chaos Engineering is about testing how reliable your systems are. It’s meant to show you how things fail, including when other dependent systems fail - think cascading failures. This is a good way to discover inconvenient truths about that beautiful code that you wrote. Everything fails, and great insights are to be found when it does.

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.

SLICED is like the TV Show Chopped but for data science. Competitors get a never-before-seen dataset and two-hours to code a solution to a prediction challenge. Meg and Nick, the SLICED show hosts, join us in this episode to discuss how the show is creating much needed data science community. They give us a behind the scenes look at all the datasets, memes, contestants, scores, and chat of SLICED. !SLICED on Practical AI

This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim's journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.

On this episode, we make our big Frontend Feud announcement, welcome Amelia to the party, then share a metric crap ton of productivity tips & tricks: scripting, pomodoro, retaining your dev flow, and more!

Mat Ryer and Jerod Santo sit down to review and discuss the MOST and LEAST unpopular "unpopular opinions" since we started keeping track of such things. Also Generics.

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.

In this episode, Gerhard talks to his Skyhook Adventure friends: Alan Cooney, Saul Cullen & Wycliffe Maina. They are the ones that introduced Gerhard to the world of serverless in the context of Amazon Web Services. Gerhard shared his experience with remote work, how to ship software with confidence and consistency, and what to look for in infrastructure as code. At the heart of Skyhook Adventure are adventure trips, and 2020 was not a good one for this business. As you can already tell, code and infrastructure was not the biggest challenge for this team. Having said that, serverless, microservices, a monorepo and the event-based architecture played a big part in successfully navigating the challenges. This is a story about what happens when a good team allows itself to be guided by solid experience and keeps doing the right thing, long-term. It's fun, real, and it applies to many.

AI is being used to transform the most personal instrument we have, our voice, into something that can be "played." This is fascinating in and of itself, but Yotam Mann from Never Before Heard Sounds is doing so much more! In this episode, he describes how he is using neural nets to process audio in real time for musicians and how AI is poised to change the music industry forever.

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.

Gerhard talks to Tom Wilkie, VP of Product for Grafana Labs. They talk about Loki, Tempo, and how can Grafana Cloud offer such a generous free tier. The solution is in the Cortex architecture, which was used in Loki and in Tempo too. Yes, Tom is the Cortex co-author. We recommend that you listen to this episode in combination with episodes 3 and 11. That's the best way to get a more complete picture of the topics that we discuss today. Lastly, would you like to watch Gerhard & Tom pair-up and build Grafana dashboards like pros? Tom has this really interesting approach that Gerhard would like to learn too. We can either have a live YouTube stream, or record and then publish the video. Let us know your preference via our Changelog Slack, or just plain Twitter.

This week we talk with Kent C. Dodds, one of the greatest React teachers in the industry, all about React! Why choose React over another framework? What are the hardest parts about learning React? You'll find out this week!

The panel are joined by Teiva Harsanyi, author of 100 Go Mistakes, to talk about how best to make mistakes when writing Go.

Inspired by a recent article from Erik Bernhardsson titled "Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story", Chris and Daniel discuss all things AI/data team building. They share some stories from their experiences kick starting AI efforts at various organizations and weight the pro and cons of things like centralized data management, prototype development, and a focus on engineering skills.

Feross is back with a brand new web app for us to pick apart! Wormhole is the fastest way to send files on the internet and we want to know why he built it, how it works, and what crazy hacks he invented along the way.

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why "15 minutes or bust," and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it's actually really simple! They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard's favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

What is a Product Manager, and do Engineers need them? In this episode, we will be discussing what a Product Manager does, what makes a good Product Manager, and debating if engineering teams truly need them, with some tech companies going without them. We are joined by Gaëlle Sharma, Senior Technical Product Manager, at the New York Times, leading the Identity group.

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."

9 out of 10 AI projects don't end up creating value in production. Why? At least partly because these projects utilize unstable models and drifting data. In this episode, Roey from BeyondMinds gives us some insights on how to filter garbage input, detect risky output, and generally develop more robust AI systems.

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.

The panel discusses all the things that have to happen before you write a lick of code. Then, for _Story of the Week_: Dan Abramov thinks npm audit is broken by design. We also have thoughts. Lots of 'em.

Go modules brought about quite a few changes to the Go ecosystem. One of those changes is semantic import versioning (SIV), which has a fairly pronounced effect on how libraries are identified. In this episode we are joined by Tim Heckman and Peter Bourgon to discuss some of the downsides to these changes and how it has lead to what a subset of the Go community refers to as the "v2+ problem."

Kaizen means "change for the better", continuous improvement in this context. Failure is essential to learning, but how do we learn as a team? The simplest thing is to regularly dedicate time for taking a step back, talking about what works & what doesn't, maybe writing some of it down, and eventually deciding what we should improve next. I intend to make every 10th Ship It! episode a Kaizen one. This is the first one when we talk with Adam and Jerod 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. Let us know via Slack or Twitter what learnings are valuable to you so that we can produce the best content for you.

How did we get from symbolic AI to deep learning models that help you write code (i.e., GitHub and OpenAI's new Copilot)? That's what Chris and Daniel discuss in this episode about the history and future of deep learning (with some help from an article recently published in ACM and written by the luminaries of deep learning).