Changelog Master Feed

We're talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident ops and infrastructure expert, about the setup we've rolled out for 2019. Late 2016 we relaunched Changelog.com as a new Phoenix/Elixir application and that included a brand new infrastructure and deployment process. 2019’s infrastructure update includes Linode, CoreOS, Docker, CircleCI, Rollbar, Fastly, Netdata, and more — and we talk through all the details on this show. This show is also an open invite to you and the rest of the community to join us in Slack and learn and contribute to Changelog.com. Head to changelog.com/community to get started.

Is testing an art or a science? What and when should we test? What’s the point of testing and can it go too far? We explore all this and more in this jam-packed episode on testing.

No, this isn't science fiction! CTRL-labs is using neural signals and AI to build neural interfaces. Adam Berenzweig, from CTRL-labs R&D, joins us to explain how this works and how they have made it practical.

Jerod welcomes new panelists Emma Wedekind and Divya Sasidharan to the party! We get to know these two amazing ladies and then open up the conversation to talk about what's on their mind. Divya broaches the nuanced topics of keeping up with the fast pace of the developer world while maintaining balance and Emma wants to talk books.

We're talking with Alex Ellis, the founder of OpenFaaS — serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. We talked about the backstory and details of OpenFaaS, “the curious case of serverless on Kubernetes,” the landscape of open source serverless platforms, how Alex is leading and building this community, getting involved, and maintainership vs leadership.

Panelists Mat Ryer, Ashley McNamara, Johnny Boursiquot, and Carmen Andoh discuss the process of getting hired, hiring, and job interviews. If people are the most important part of a team, how do we pick who we work with? What's the process like? How can it better?

While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it's one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligence!

KBall MC'd a live show at React Amsterdam with a panel of 5 amazing React experts — Kitze, Michel Weststrate, Mike Grabowski, Vladimir Novick, and Andrey Okonetchnikov. It was a great discussion of state management solutions and the future of state management in the front-end.

What would be the impact on the world if a Computer Science education was available to you completely free of charge until you get a job in that field paying $50,000 or more? That's the question that drives Austen Allred and the team behind Lambda School. Lambda School is a revolutionary new school that invests in its students and they completely align their interests with their students. Seems like a novel idea, right? But Austen's path to Silicon Valley was where things began for him, so that's where we'll start today's conversation.

We’re talking with Emma Bostian about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jaana B. Dogan, and Mark Bates discuss how humans build machine to machine integrations via APIs — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and how to give yourself the best chance of success.

Longtime listeners know that we're always advocating for 'AI for good', but this week we have taken it to a whole new level. We had the privilege of chatting with James Hodson, Director of the AI for Good Foundation, about ways they have used artificial intelligence to positively-impact the world - from food production to climate change. James inspired us to find our own ways to use AI for good, and we challenge our listeners to get out there and do some good!

KBall and Jason geek out on the ins and outs of Gatsby. They talked through the fundamentals of working with Gatsby, the development process, and look into the future of Gatsby.

We’re talking with Syrus Akbary about WebAssembly and Wasmer — a standalone just in time WebAssembly runtime aiming to be fully compatible with Emscripten, Rust, and Go. We talked about taking WebAssembly beyond the browser, universal binaries, what’s an ABI?, running WebAssembly from any language, and what a world might look like with platform independent universal binaries powered by WebAssembly.

We're back! Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jaana B. Dogan, and Mark Bates discuss Go 2, the future of Go, what they like and don't like, and what they would add or remove.

GIPHY's head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joins us to discuss their recently released celebrity detector project. He gives us all of the details about that project, but he also tells us about GIPHY's origins, AI in general at GIPHY, and more!

KBall, Nick, and Chris dig into the various dimensions along which projects vary, dig into testing and best practices, and share a number of lessons learned from legacy projects.

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post "How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019" a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

Being that this is "practical" AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management.

Jerod and Nick are joined by Fred K. Schott – the main brain behind Pika. What's that, you ask? An effort to make modern JavaScript more accessible by making it easier to find, publish, install, and use modern packages on npm.

We're talking with Adam Barr, a 23 year Microsoft veteran, about his book “The problem with software,” sub-titled "Why smart engineers write bad code." We examine that very idea, the gap between industry and academia, and more importantly what we can do to get a better feedback loop going between them.

Our hottest of hot takes right after Apple's March 25th special event. We discuss the tough questions: Do people care about privacy? Will we subscribe to Apple News+? How much will Apple Arcade cost? Is Visa cooler than MasterCard? Are there any takeaways for developers? Is that Burt Reynolds?!

While at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2019 in Silicon Valley, Chris enjoyed an inspiring conversation with Anima Anandkumar. Clearly a role model - not only for women - but for anyone in the world of AI, Anima relayed how her lifelong passion for mathematics and engineering started when she was only 3 years old in India, and ultimately led to her pioneering deep learning research at Amazon Web Services, CalTech, and NVIDIA.

We discuss the news (built-in modules, OpenJSFoundation, Lambda School stipends), chat about the internet of JS things, and finish up with one of our favorite segments: shout outs!

Chris Coyier joins Suz and Jerod to continue the discussion on The Great Divide in front-end-land. We also use this as an opportunity to gush on how much CSS-Tricks has done for the community, get Chris' perspective on the history of the website, and finish up by sharing some _amazing_ Pens on CodePen.io.

Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.

We're talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.

The White House recently published an "Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence." In this fully connected episode, we discuss the executive order in general and criticism from the AI community. We also draw some comparisons between this US executive order and other national strategies for leadership in AI.

KBall and Suz interview Ashi Krishnan, visual poet and senior software engineer at GitHub. Topics include how Ashi got into programming, her upcoming talk at React Amsterdam, code bootcamps, and developer tools.

We're talking with Mike McQuaid about Homebew 2.0.0, supporting Linux and Windows 10, the backstory and details surrounding the security issue they had in 2018, their new governance model, Mike’s new role, the core team meeting in-person at FOSDEM this year, and what’s coming next for Homebrew.

Panelist Jerod Santo and first-time panelist Adam Stacoviak talk with Adam Wathan of Full Stack Radio fame about his CSS utility library called Tailwind CSS that's growing in popularity to rapidly build custom user interfaces.

While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conversation on the dark side of artificial intelligence.

We're talking with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, Warewulf, and most recently Singularity — an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for enterprise and high-performance computing workloads. What's interesting is how Singularity allows untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. We cover the backstory, Singularity Pro and how they're not holding the open source community version hostage, as well as how Singularity is being used to containerize and support workflows in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and more.

This week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It's capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about language models.

Panelists Suz Hinton and Nick Nisi discuss TensorFlow.js and Machine Learning in JavaScript with special guest Paige Bailey, TensorFlow mom and developer Advocate for Google AI.

We’re talking with Gina Helfrich the Communications Director for NumFOCUS about their story and history, the impact of open code on science, the difference between sponsored and affiliated projects, corporate backing, the back story of their education and events program PyData, and the struggles of storytelling and fundraising.

While at Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chris had an inspiring conversation with Anna Bethke, Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. Anna reveals how she started the AI for Social Good program at Intel, and goes on to share the positive impact this program has had - from stopping animal poachers, to helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Through this AI for Social Good program, Intel clearly demonstrates how a for-profit business can effectively use AI to make the world a better place for us all.

Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you've never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you _have to_ listen to this show!

KBall picks the brains of 4 of the speakers at JSConf Hawai'i to investigate the future of JavaScript and Web Development.

Chris sat down with Marta Martinez-Cámara and Miranda Kreković to learn how GirlsCoding.org is inspiring 9–16-year-old girls to learn about computer science. The site is successfully empowering young women to recognize computer science as a valid career choice through hands-on workshops, role models, and by smashing prevalent gender stereotypes. This is an episode that you'll want to listen to with your daughter!

KBall and Nick catch up with Nara Kaspergen and Jen Looper for a pair of conversations covering Voice UI Devices, using NativeScript for mobile development, and Jen's work with Vue Vixens helping make the Vue.js community welcoming to women and non-binary people.

Adam talks with Erik Kennedy about tactical design advice for developers. Erik is a self-taught UI designer and brings a wealth of practical advice for those seeking to advance their design skills and learn more about user interface design. We cover his seven rules for creating gorgeous UI, the fundamentals of user interface design — color, typography, layout, and process. We also talk about his course Learn UI Design and how it’s the ultimate on-ramp for upcoming UI designers.

Chris caught up with Jennifer Marsman, Principal Engineer on the AI for Earth team at Microsoft, right before her speech at Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She relayed how the team came into being, what they do, and some of the good deeds they have done for Mother Earth. They are giving away $50 million (US) in grants over five years! It was another excellent example of AI for good!

Panelists Nick Nisi, Suz Hinton, and Kevin Ball chat about the perceived _Great Divide_ in front end development, why 2019 is the year of TypeScript, and shout outs to inspirational members of the community.

Laura Gaetano was born in Italy, and by my count has lived in at least four different countries. Her multicultural upbringing has had a huge impact on her life. In fact, she currently works at the Travis Foundation with a focus on diversity and inclusion. We talk about her upbringing, her troubles with art school, the work she's doing now, and changes that may be on the horizon.

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

***Fully Connected** – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.* If you're anything like us, your New Year's resolutions probably included an AI section, so this week we explore some of the learning resources available for artificial intelligence and deep learning. Where you go with it depends upon what you want to achieve, so we discuss academic versus industry career paths, and try to set you on the Practical AI path that will help you level up.

With JavaScript in every corner of software development and npm in every corner right along with it, the rise of npm can be drawn as a hockey stick up and to the right with Isaac Schlueter at the top grinning ear to ear. After reading their recent announcement to hire a CEO, I knew it was time to talk one-on-one with Isaac about building npm and the journey of hiring his successor.

Your 3 intrepid hosts try to explain JS concepts (bind/apply, thunks, and ReasonML) to each other as if we're five year olds. Hilarity and/or confusion ensues. During _Pro Tip Time_, Suz tells a story of woe, KBall motivates himself, and Jerod tries to keep you in the flow. Finally, we point our project spotlight at Fly CDN and talk edge applications and IoT.

Adam and Jerod talk to Kyle Daigle, the Director of Ecosystem Engineering at GitHub. They talk about GitHub Actions, the new automation platform announced at GitHub Universe this past October 2018. GitHub Actions is the next big thing coming out of GitHub with the promise of powerful workflows to supercharge your repos and GitHub experience. Build your container apps, publish packages to registries, or automate welcoming new users to your open source projects — with access to interact with the full GitHub API and any other public APIs, Actions seem to have limitless possibilities.