Changelog Master Feed

The United States has blacklisted several Chinese AI companies working in facial recognition and surveillance. Why? What are these companies doing exactly, and how does this fit into the international politics of AI? We dig into these questions and attempt to do some live fact finding in this episode.

In a world where an ex-hit-man named John Wick comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that killed his dog and stole his car — three die-hard fans (Adam, Jerod, and Brett) spend nearly 2 hours discussing the John Wick trilogy and then some.

KBall, Jerod, and Divya dig deep into how we learn. We look into how to choose what to learn, techniques for learning, and a set of respective resources.

Jerod is joined by Chris and Desmond (co-hosts of the ElixirTalk podcast) to catch up on what's moving and shaking in the Elixir and Phoenix communities. We discuss what's attractive about Elixir, what it means to have the language finalized, why folks are so excited by Phoenix LiveView, the ambitious new Lumen project that's bringing Elixir to WebAssembly, and more.

Mat is joined by Peter Bourgon, Kat Zień, and Ben Johnson to talk about application design in Go — principles, trade-offs, common mistakes, patterns, and the things you should consider when it comes to application design.

Chris and Daniel talk with Keith Lynn, AlphaPilot Program Manager at Lockheed Martin. AlphaPilot is an open innovation challenge, developing artificial intelligence for high-speed racing drones, created through a partnership between Lockheed Martin and The Drone Racing League (DRL). AlphaPilot challenged university teams from around the world to design AI capable of flying a drone without any human intervention or navigational pre-programming. Autonomous drones will race head-to-head through complex, three-dimensional tracks in DRL’s new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit. The winning team could win up to $2 million in prizes. Keith shares the incredible story of how AlphaPilot got started, just prior to its debut race in Orlando, which will be broadcast on NBC Sports.

What if you could have an Electron-like app framework without the Chromium dependency and resulting performance woes? Well, now you can. NodeGui is a Qt5-powered, cross-platform, native app GUI framework for JavaScript with CSS-like styling. In this episode, Jerod and Nick sit down with Atul –author of NodeGUI and NodeGUI React– to learn about this exciting framework. We ask him a zillion and one questions about it.

Mat, Filippo, Johan, and Roberto discuss security in Go. Does Go make it easy to secure your code? What common mistakes are Gophers making? What is fuzzing? How can attackers abuse your code if you use the default http mux?

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Valeri Karpov. Val has been the solo maintainer of Mongoose since 2014. This episode with Val continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

A brief announcement about the upcoming All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. What we'll be doing there, why you should join us, and how to win a FREE 🎟️ to the event.

Chris and Daniel take some time to cover recent trends in AI and some noteworthy publications. In particular, they discuss the increasing AI momentum in the majority world (Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Caribbean), and they dig into Hugging Face's recent model distillation results.

Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and contribute.

Special guest Nick O'Leary joins us this episode to chat about the Node-RED project, how it started, and the fascinating uses cases for it out in the wild. We go into some of the technical challenges behind designing easy to use interfaces for hardware, and ask Nick what the future of Node-RED looks like.

Mireille and Adam explore the habit loop, the role of environment as a cue, behavior change, the role of dopamine, willpower as a finite resource, and the impact of social influences on habits. As with any change, we need to collect data. Instead of trying to change a habit right away, treat yourself like a scientist in a data gathering stage and experiment with different rewards to better understand your habit loops. Making and breaking a habit is _different for everyone_.

The All Things Open conference is happening soon, and we snagged one of their speakers to discuss open source and AI. Samuel Taylor talks about the essential role that open source is playing in AI development and research, and he gives us some tips on choosing AI-related side projects.

Carmen and Jon talk with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer (the creators of Go) about its origins, growth, influence, and future. This an epic episode that dives deep into the history and details of the how's and why's of Go, and the choices they've made along the way in creating this awesome programing language.

Johnny, Carmen, Jon, and returning guest Stevenson Jean-Pierre talk about hiring engineers with a focus on junior roles. Why do we keep running into these ridiculous job listings that nobody could ever live up to? What benefits do junior developers bring to the team? Why don't teams put more focus on developing junior engineers? What can we do better?

The gang gets together to catch you up on what's new & noteworthy in the community. Then we share a few things we've learned recently in our first-ever "Today I Learned" segment. Finally, we wrap it up with things we're excited about.

Amal Hussein (Engineering Manager at npm) joined the show to talk about AST’s — aka, abstract syntax trees. Amal is giving a talk at All Things Open on the subject so we asked her to give us an early preview. She’s on a mission to democratize the knowledge and usage of AST’s to push legacy code and the web forward.

In this very special fully-connected episode of Practical AI, Daniel interviews Chris. They discuss High Performance Computing (HPC) and how it is colliding with the world of AI. Chris explains how HPC differs from cloud/on-prem infrastructure, and he highlights some of the challenges of an HPC-based AI strategy. !image

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability to contribute original value which is deeply rooted in the concept of aligned autonomy. We also covered the 6 core skills required for us to be empowered in our teams.

KBall, Divya, Feross, and Jerod get together to discuss tips and tricks for communicating with other coders, project stakeholders, and users.

Mat, Johnny, Jon, and special guest Ian Lance Taylor discuss generics in Go. What are generics and why are they useful? Why aren’t interfaces enough? How will the standard library change if generics are added to Go? How has the community contributed to generics? If generics are added, how will this negatively affect the language?

We’re talking with Sherol Chen, a machine learning developer, about AI at Google and AutoML methods. Sherol explains how the various AI groups within Google work together and how AutoML fits into that puzzle. She also explains how to get started with AutoML step-by-step (this is "practical" AI after all).

This episode is all about conferences and there is a lot to talk about! Why even go? What makes a conference worth it? How can you get the most of the experience? Is speaking worth all the effort? How can you make your talk _amazing_? How can you get your talk _selected_? We chime in on all of these questions plus more.

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they created one of the most popular API platforms and community.

LIVE from LondonGophers as part of GopherCon UK! Mat Ryer, and Mark Bates were joined by Liz Rice, Kat Zień, Gautam Rege to talk about the magic in Go's standard library. Huge thanks to the organizers of LondonGophers and GopherCon UK for making this possible.

Johnny, Mat, Jaana, and special guest Stevenson Jean-Pierre discuss serverless in a Go world. What is serverless, what use cases is serverless good for, what are the trade offs, and how do you program with Go differently in the context of serverless?

With the jumping off point of KBall's question: "What are best practices for organizing a Node project?" Mikeal and Feross drop an incredible amount of wisdom about Node, organizing using modules, release management, deployment approaches, how to adopt change, and more.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100's of open source projects which have been downloaded 100's of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It's an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you. Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

David Yakobovitch joins the show to talk about the evolution of data science tools and techniques, the work he's doing to teach these things at Galvanize, what his HumAIn Podcast is all about, and more.

KBall, Divya, and Chris talk about what's going on in all the big frontend frameworks, share some pro tips, and shout out awesome people and things in the community.

We're on the expo hall floor of OSCON 2019 talking with Eric Holscher, Ali Spittel, and Hong Phuc Dang. First up, we talk to Eric about his work at Write the Docs, ethical advertising, and the Pac-Man rule at conferences. Second, we talk with Ali about her passion for teaching developers, her passion for writing, and her new found love for podcasting. Last, we talk with Hong about her work at FOSSASIA, the disconnect between America and Asia in open source, and several of the cool open source projects they have on GitHub.

Mireille and Adam explore the importance of relationships and the concept of attachment. We often think of ourselves as individuals, but our lives are spent embedded within the context of social relationships. These relationships influence and shape our brains, which deeply influences who we are.

Hot off the heels of GopherCon 2019 — Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and special guests Jamal Yusuf, and Yingrong Zhao recap the conference and the importance of representation in the Go community.

Adam adds a twist to our YepNope format this week. Instead of 2v2, it's 1v1v1 with Mikeal reppin' team **Yep**, Divya on team **Nope**, and Feross sitting in the middle on team **It Depends**. You don't want to miss this excellent debate/discussion all about JS tooling complexity. > Many packages > New frameworks built all the time > Config hell. Webpack

Ryan Singer, head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, joined the show to talk about their newest book — Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters. It's written by Ryan himself and you can read it right now for free online at Basecamp.com/shapeup. We talked about the back story of the book, how the methodology for Shape Up developed from within at Basecamp, the principles and methodologies of Shape Up, how teams of varying sizes can implement Shape Up. Ryan even shared a special invitation to our listeners near the end of the show to his live and in-person Shape Up workshop on August 28th in Detroit, Michigan.

Redis is a an open source, in-memory data structure store, widely used as a database, cache and message broker. It now also support tensor data types and deep learning models via the RedisAI module. Why did they build this module? Who is or should be using it? We discuss this and much more with Pieter Cailliau.

Jerod, Feross, and Nick discuss the latest npm security fiasco, opine on the strengths and weaknesses of spreadsheets, explain CORS like they're 5 (sorta), and give shout outs to deserving purveyors of fine software.

Jon, Mat, Johnny, and special guest Cory LaNou discuss the ins and outs of structuring Go programs. Why is app structure so important? Why is it hard to structure Go apps? What happens if we get it wrong? Why do we confuse folder structures with application design? How should a new Go app be structured?

Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.

In this inaugural episode, Mireille and Adam explore what it means to be human at the most basic level. Our goal is to explore the inner-workings of the human brain to better understand our humanity. What are we capable of? What are the common experiences of life we all share? We start by asking the question, "what are the fundamentals of being human?"

Jon, Mark, Johnny, and special guest Jamal Yusuf discuss what to expect when attending a conference like GopherCon. What should you be doing before you attend GopherCon? What should you bring to the conference? What shouldn’t you bring? What are the training sessions about? What about the hacking sessions and talking with the Go team? What if you don’t know anyone?

We're trying a brand new segment called YepNope, wherein your intrepid panelists engage in a lively debate around a premise. In this debate, Feross and KBall argue that websites should work without requiring JS and Divya and Chris say, "Nah!" Please let us know if you like this style episode! We had fun recording it, but that doesn't matter much if y'all don't enjoy listening to it.

We're joined by C J Silverio, aka ceejbot on Twitter, aka 2nd hire and former CTO at npm Inc. We talk with Ceej about her recent JS Conf EU talk titled “The Economies of Open Source” where she laid our her concerns with the JavaScript language commons being owned by venture capitalists. Currently the JavaScript language commons is controlled by the npm registery, and as you may know, npm is a VC backed for profit start up. Of course we also talk with Ceej about the bomb she dropped, Entropic, at the end of that talk — a federated package registry for JavaScript C J hopes will unseat npm and free the JavaScript language commons.

Chris and Daniel take the opportunity to catch up on some recent AI news. Among other things, they discuss the increasing impact of AI on studies of the ancient world and "good" uses of GANs. They also provide some more learning resources to help you level up your AI and machine learning game.

KBall and Nick sync up with Node.js core contributor Ujjwal Sharma to dive deep into how to get into the world of open source software.

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It's an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you. Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Jerod, Mikeal, and Feross welcome Antoni Kepinski to the show to discuss his open source pizza ordering management web app. We talk about learning programming at a young age, how overwhelming web development can be these days, how Antoni decided which technologies to use, and more. This is a _super_ fun conversation with many insights and takeaways for developers at every stage of their career.