Changelog Master Feed

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is used all over the web as a text-based way of transmitting data. In this episode, we explore Go's encoding/json package, and others with Daniel Marti.

Have you heard the phrase, "Put yourself in their shoes?" In this episode, the conversation focuses on the "HOW" and why it all begins with empathy. Empathy is the key that enables access to another person's perspective and emotional state. It is also a fundamental aspect of building and sustaining relationships with others. The fascinating thing is that there are 3 types of empathy: cognitive, social, and empathic concern. Plus there's a counterpart component called compassion that moves us to take action.

We first launched a membership back in 2013... before they were cool! 😆 Now we're back with a brand new edition. It's called Changelog++ and we hope you love it. This episode of Backstage is a tell-all about the program. Why we think the timing is right, what we hope it can become, how we're experimenting with ideas to make it great, and what you can do to get involved.

Come hang with the bad boys of natural language processing (NLP)! Jack Morris joins Daniel and Chris to talk about TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and model training in NLP. TextAttack will improve your understanding of your NLP models, so come prepared to rumble with your own adversarial attacks!

Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff's awareness and focus on the long hard path.

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what's to come for the Windows command line experience.

Mikeal and Chris welcome (back) special guest Fred K. Schott, who you may recall from our episode on Pika. This time, we're talking ESM: what it is, what's new about it, why it's the future, writing libraries with it, and much more.

Robert and Ian join us to talk about the latest updates on generics in Go. What type of feedback are they looking for as developers get their hands on tools designed to experiment with generics and Go? What was the deal with the featherweight Go paper that also discussed generics? Why can't we use angle brackets for generics?

Sash Rush, of Cornell Tech and Hugging Face, catches us up on all the things happening with Hugging Face and transformers. Last time we had Clem from Hugging Face on the show (episode 35), their transformers library wasn't even a thing yet. Oh how things have changed! This time Sasha tells us all about Hugging Face's open source NLP work, gives us an intro to the key components of transformers, and shares his perspective on the future of AI research conferences.

Jerod assembles a team of WebRTC experts (Suz, Feross, Mikeal) for a deep, _deep_ dive on this _practically-ubiquitous_ yet _still-complicated_ web API. We review its history, share really cool applications using the tech, provide an excellent primer on what you need to know about it, and details some production gotchas. ALSO we celebrate how Feross single-handedly "upgraded the internet"! 🙌

The panel discuss testing frameworks in Go. After a brief overview of the concepts involved, we discuss how testing frameworks can make our lives easier, and why some people still choose to avoid them. Mat Ryer and Mark Bates chat with Boyan Soubachov about the future of the Testify project.

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha's work on Dracula deserved the same credit. _We agreed._ So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he's changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book -- 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno's book for free through our giveaway.

DevOps for deep learning is well... different. You need to track both data and code, and you need to run multiple different versions of your code for long periods of time on accelerated hardware. Allegro AI is helping data scientists manage these workflows with their open source MLOps solution called Trains. Nir Bar-Lev, Allegro's CEO, joins us to discuss their approach to MLOps and how to make deep learning development more robust.

Today's episode features _our very first guest_. We're joined by Danielle Rath, a notable expert and product developer in the caffeine and energy drink industry. Danielle is the founder of GreenEyedGuide Research and Consulting where she shares science-based information about energy drinks and caffeine, and helps people and companies where fatigue and caffeine use are prevalent. In this lengthly episode, we talk through all aspects of the science behind caffeine — its chemical structure and half-life, where and how it's being used, the good, bad, and the ugly, as well as practical advice for everyday consumption. If you consume caffeine of any sort, this is a _must listen_ episode.

An amalgam of interest on this week's episode starting with a peek at what's finally coming in Vue 3. We talk about the process of change in the Vue ecosystem and what interesting features are coming either very soon or not for a while depending on how you view time right now. Then, the panelists share what they've learned recently, and finish off with shout outs to the projects, ideas, and people we're appreciative of.

Your first week with a new programming language can be tricky. In this episode Jon is joined by Jacquie and DaShaun to talk about their first week with Go. What was their primary focus? What resources did they leverage? What made it stick, and what didn't?

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon's Razor, Gall's Law, Murphy's Law, Kernighan's Law, and too many others to list here.

The multidisciplinary field of AI Ethics is brand new, and is currently being pioneered by a relatively small number of leading AI organizations and academic institutions around the world. AI Ethics focuses on ensuring that unexpected outcomes from AI technology implementations occur as rarely as possible. Daniel and Chris discuss strategies for how to arrive at AI ethical principles suitable for your own organization, and what is involved in implementing those strategies in the real world. Tune in for a practical AI primer on AI Ethics!

We're joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help developers package and deliver software products to developers and enterprises.

KBall, Jerod, and Nick Nisi dive into GraphQL -- what it can do, what the challenges are, and how it differs from REST -- all with a generous helping of metaphor about buffets, restaurants, and of course bacon.

Choosing a database is hard. They each have their pros and cons, and without much experience it is hard to determine which is the best fit for your project. In this episode Johan Brandhorst joins us to talk about Postgres. When is it a good fit? How well does it scale? What libraries exist in Go for using Postgres?

Daniel and Chris get you Fully-Connected with open source software for artificial intelligence. In addition to defining what open source is, they discuss where to find open source tools and data, and how you can contribute back to the open source AI community.

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, a security platform that empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure. Prior to Snyk, Guy founded Blaze which was acquired by Akamai and became CTO. We talked through the topic of acquisition — the sale, the merge, the learnings, and why Guy might not be planning for Snyk to be acquired anytime soon. We started the conversation with Snyk's recent raise of $150 million dollars.

A listener request led us to Nikita Prokopov and FiraCode, and we're sure glad they did. When we think of open source software, fonts aren't usually high on the list of things that need maintaining. That's not true when your font also supports hundreds of programming ligatures like FiraCode does. Nikita has his hands full!

Blitz.js creator Brandon Bayer joins Jerod to dive deep into the foundational principles of this fullstack React framework. We talk about its inspiration (Ruby on Rails), its differentiation (a “no-API” data layer), and its aspirations (built-in auth, plugins, recipes, and more).

How reflective are you with the thoughts you think? In this episode, Mireille and Adam talk through a few more cognitive distortions. These "distortions" are general tendencies or patterns of thinking that are false or inaccurate, which also have the potential to cause psychological damage. Generally speaking, people develop cognitive distortions as a way of coping with adverse life events. The more prolonged and severe those adverse events are, the more likely it is that one or more cognitive distortions will form. By recognizing these patterns in our thoughts and possibly how, when, or why we're prone to use them, like many things, we create the opportunity to change them.

Building a new app in Go can involve a lot of technical decisions. How will your code be structured? How will you handle background jobs? What will your deploy process look like? In this episode we will walk through the decisions made while building the public release of Pace.dev.

We're joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari's plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.

A lot of effort is put into the training of AI models, but, for those of us that actually want to run AI models in production, performance and scaling quickly become blockers. Nikita from MemSQL joins us to talk about how people are integrating ML/AI inference at scale into existing SQL-based workflows. He also touches on how model features and raw files can be managed and integrated with distributed databases.

Did you know Feross taught Web Security at Stanford last Fall? On this episode, Divya and Nick enroll in his security school to learn about XSS, CSP, ambient authority, and a whole lot more.

Leaning from mistakes is key to progressing. In this episode Ben, Aaron, Kris, and Jon discuss some of our mistakes - like spending too much time designing a feature that isn't that important, or using channels excessively when first learning Go - and how we learned from them.

We're revisiting Shape Up and product development thoughts with Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Last August we talked with Ryan when he first launched his book Shape Up and now we're back to see how Shape Up is shaping up — "How are teams using the wisdom in this book to actually ship work that matters? How does Shape Up work in new versus existing products?" We also talk about the concept of longitudinal thinking and the way it's impacting Ryan's designs, plus a grab bag of topics in the last segment.

This full connected has it all: news, updates on AI/ML tooling, discussions about AI workflow, and learning resources. Chris and Daniel breakdown the various roles to be played in AI development including scoping out a solution, finding AI value, experimentation, and more technical engineering tasks. They also point out some good resources for exploring bias in your data/model and monitoring for fairness.

Mat Ryer talks to a new full-time Go programmer, an intern at Google, and a high-school programmer about the tech world from their perspective.

We take a listener request this week and discuss how we evolve alongside (or opt out of) the ever changing JavaScript syntax. Arrow functions and variable declarations take center stage, but a _wide_ range of new(ish) JS syntax and features are discussed. Then Feross shares his new app, Nick talks fiction books, and Jerod switches coding fonts.

You are not what you've been dealt. You might have heard in your life that you've inherited bad genes or even good genes, and from that you conclude that you're doomed or blessed. In some cases there's a margin of truth to that. However, the role of genes, Epigentics, and Neuroplasticity tell a different story. It's a story of hope and opportunity for change.

The incomparable Jessica Kerr drops by with a grab-bag of amazing topics. Understanding software systems, transferring knowledge between devs, building relationships, using VS Code _&_ Docker to code together, observability as a logical extension of TDD, and a whole lot more.

Daniel and Chris go beyond the current state of the art in deep learning to explore the next evolutions in artificial intelligence. From Yoshua Bengio's NeurIPS keynote, which urges us forward towards System 2 deep learning, to DARPA's vision of a 3rd Wave of AI, Chris and Daniel investigate the incremental steps between today's AI and possible future manifestations of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

How much do you focus on your sense of touch? Have you ever considered how or why this sense is so critical to our lives and how we manage ourselves? In this episode, Mireille and Adam discuss the neurophysiological underpinnings of our sense of touch and how our brains process these sensory experiences. According to David Linden, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, "The sense of touch is intrinsically emotional." Not only is touch relevant to our emotional experience, but it is a foundational aspect of the development of our nervous system and it impacts how we manage stress and respond to pain. It isn't surprising then to consider that touch is also extremely relevant to our relationships as we are apt to feel more connected to those with whom we engage in touch.

We often try new frameworks and tools in side projects or throwaway contexts, but you don't learn _that much_ about a thing until you use it to build something real. That's why we have Mat Ryer and David Hernandez joining us to share their experience of using Svelte while building their new startup, Pace.dev.

Mat, Jon, and Jaana discuss reflection and meta programming. How do other languages use reflection, and how does that differ from Go's approach? What libraries are using reflection well? What are some examples of bad times to use reflect? What alternative approaches exist? And what are those weird struct tags I keep seeing in Go code?

Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they're very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put "family and friends first, work second," how we should view work, and his biggest fear — the company failing.

We're talking about all things all-remote with Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab. Darren is tasked with putting intentional thought and action into place to lead the largest all-remote company in the world. Yes, GitLab is 100% all-remote, as in, no offices...and they employee more than 1,200 people across 67 countries. They've been iterating and documenting how to work remotely for years. We cover Darren's personal story on remote work while he served as managing editor at Engadget, his thoughts on how "work" is evolving and ways to reframe and rethink about when you work, this idea of work life harmony, and the backstory and details of the playbook GitLab released free of charge to the world.

The CEO of Darwin AI, Sheldon Fernandez, joins Daniel to discuss generative synthesis and its connection to explainability. You might have heard of AutoML and meta-learning. Well, generative synthesis tackles similar problems from a different angle and results in compact, explainable networks. This episode is fascinating and very timely.

JS Danger is back! Suz, Emma, and Divya square off in our don't-call-it-jeopardy game show. Will Emma totally redeem herself? Are Divya's trivia skills as on point as her debate skills? Will Suz murder Jerod in a fit of terrible-question-inducing rage?! Listen and play along!

Researchers have examined the power of story and discovered the way in which stories provide a framework that has the capacity to transcend language for universal understanding. According to Joe Lazauskas, "Stories illuminate the city of our mind...stories make us remember and they make us care." In this episode we dive deep into the power of story to explore the ways in which stories play a role in our emotions and in our relationships with others.

Databases are tricky, especially at scale. In this episode Mat, Jaana, and Jon discuss different types of databases, the pros and cons of each, along with the many ways developers can have issues with databases. They also explore questions like, "Why are serial IDs problematic?" and "What alternatives are there if we aren't using serial IDs?" while at it.

Plausible creators Uku Täht and Marko Saric join the show to talk about their open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We talk through the backstory of the project, why it's open source, the details behind a few viral blog posts Marko shared to bring in a ton of new interest to the project, why privacy matters in web analytics, how they prioritize building new features, the technical details behind their no cookie light-weight JavaScript approach, and their thoughts on a server-side option.

On the heels of NVIDIA's latest announcements, Daniel and Chris explore how the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture evolves the high-performance computing (HPC) landscape for artificial intelligence. After investigating the new specifications of the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU, Chris and Daniel turn their attention to the data center with the NVIDIA DGX A100, and then finish their journey at "the edge" with the NVIDIA EGX A100 and the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX.

Nick and Jerod welcome Dojo's Matt Gadd to the show to catch us up on what's changed with the framework since episode #25, what's coming in version 7, and to defend Nick's comment that if you like React you just might like Dojo better.