The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).

We are thrilled to produce this show to honor RabbitMQ’s 10th anniversary. Karl Nilsson and Michael Klishin joined the show to talk through 10 years of RabbitMQ — one of the most widely deployed open source message brokers with more than 35,000 production deployments worldwide.

Evan Prodromou has been involved in open source since the mid '90s. His open source travel guide – Wikitravel – grew up alongside Wikipedia and the web itself. In this episode, we hear Evan's history, try to solve open social networking once and for all, and learn how sprinkling a little artificial intelligence on to our products can yield big wins without having to shoot the moon.

We talked with Dustin Kirkland (Head of Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical) at OSCON about 12.04's end of life, the death of the Ubuntu phone, Snaps and snapd, and Bash on Ubuntu on Windows Server. This is the second installment of our mini-series from the expo hall floor of OSCON 2017. Special thanks to our friends at O'Reilly for inviting us to OSCON.

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that's rallying around this new way to think about APIs.

This week we take you behind the scenes of the new infrastructure for Changelog.com and talk with Gerhard Lazu. We relaunched the new brand and site for Changelog on Phoenix/Elixir in October of 2016 and we needed a better way to reliably host and deploy the site. That's where Gerhard came in. We cover all the details and decisions in this show.

We talked with Pam Selle at OSCON about the serverless revolution happening for JavaScript developers. This episode kicks off our mini-series from the Expo Hall floor at OSCON 2017.

On Friday, June 2, 2017 – GitHub announced the details of their Open Source Survey – an open data set on the open source community for researchers and the curious. Frannie Zlotnick, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers joined the show to talk through the backstory and key insights of this open data project which sheds light on the broader open source community's attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software.

Matt Biilman and Chris Bach joined the show to talk about JAMstack, Netlify CMS, how open source drives standards, and 10x-ing the speed of Smashing Magazine.

Tim Hockin and Aparna Sinha joined the show to talk about the backstory of Kubernetes inside Google, how Tim and others got it funded, the infrastructure of Kubernetes, and how they've been able to succeed by focusing on the community.

Justin Dorfman joined us for a special BONUS episode of The Changelog to share some details about Sustain Conference with you. It's a one day conversation for Open Source Software sustainers at GitHub HQ (SF) on June 19, 2017. No keynotes, expo halls or talks. Only discussions about how to get more resources to support digital infrastructure. Plus, we'll be there.

Scott Hanselman joined today's show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that's still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.

Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay, joined the show to talk about DevRel, his open source work (clipboard.js, Dracula Theme, jQuery Boilerplate, Browser Diet, et al), and his passion for teaching and giving talks at conferences. Zeno also shared some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons learned along the way.

Jason Laster joined the show to talk about Firefox Debugger and DevTools. We talked about the backstory of Firefox, Firebug, the new Debugger.html, why React and Redux made a good fit to develop Debugger as a standalone application, community efforts, and getting started.

Kent C. Dodds joined the show to talk about guiding and supporting first time contributors to open source. We talked about the many ways to be first-timer friendly, how to contribute to open source, the burden and balance of a maintainer, and a few of the projects Kent maintains, including his latest project at PayPal called Glamourous.

Will Norris (Engineering Manager at Google's Open Source office) joined the show to talk about their new release of the Google Open Source website as well as the release of Google's internal documentation on how they do open source. Nearly 70 pages of documentation have been made public under creative commons license for the world to use. We talked about the backstory of Google's Open Source office, their philosophy on OSS, their involvement in the TODO group, and much more.

Tracy Lee joined the show to talk about bringing people together, helping people, and making an impact. We covered learning JavaScript, the ins and outs of her road to get to where she's at today, hitting burnout and sleeping for two weeks, breaking into the JavaScript community, and the fun cruise, workshops, and conferences she's working on for the JavaScript community.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Senior Staff Technologist at the EFF and the lead developer of Let's Encrypt, joined the show to talk about the history of SSL, the start of Let’s Encrypt, why it’s important to encrypt the web and what happens if we don't, Certbot, and the impact Let's Encrypt has had on securing the web.

James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, "Why I'm Frequently Absent from Open Source". He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.

Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.

Ben Ubois, the creator of Feedbin (a simple, good-looking online RSS reader) joined the show to talk about the indie web and developers, how RSS usage has changed over the years – particularly since Google Reader shutdown. We also talked about RSS vs the social web that we're in now and the idea of an RSS resurgence and taking back control over the content we choose to subscribe to.

Seth Vargo, the Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp, joined the show to talk about managing secrets with their open source product called Vault which lets you centrally secure, store, and tightly control access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications. We talked about Seth's back story into open source, use cases, what problem it solves, key features like Data Encryption, why they choose to write it in Go, and how they build tooling around the open core model.

Karen Sandler, Rachel Nabors, and Jono Bacon joined the show by way of some great conversations at OSCON in London, UK and All Things Open in Raleigh, NC. We talked about free software, web animation and motion in user interfaces, and how open source communities organize.

Chris Lamb joined the show to talk about his project Reproducible Builds — which is funded by The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. We talked about the importance of having a verifiable path from source code to compiled binary, what this set of software development practices is all about, what it means to have Reproducible Builds, the challenges faced when implementing these development practices, and the inherent security you gain from them.

Mark Nadal joined the show to talk about his hacker story and his venture backed open source datastore project called GunDB — a realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine. We talked about the details behind this database, how Mark secured funding, why yet another datastore, who's using the database, how Mark plans to sustain this project through products and services, his thoughts on the RethinkDB postmortem and more.

In this anthology episode we're featuring three awesome hacker stories from OSCON, All Things Open, and Node Interactive — Giovanni Caligaris about how he brought LibreOffice to the people of Paraguay by translating it to their native tongue. Stu Keroff about the Linux user group he started for kids called The Asian Penguins. Shiya Luo about how China does Node, translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, and the Great Firewall of China.

Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.

Sean Larkin joined the show to talk about Webpack, how fast open sources moves, how fast Webpack is moving, the core team, the formation, joining JS Foundation, the problem it's solving, the bleeding edge features, sustainability, Sean and team's efforts to build the community, their work on Open Collective, and more.

Max Howell, famous for creating Homebrew, joined the show to talk about his start in software and open source, the tweet that was heard around the world when he interviewed with Google and didn't get accepted, the creation of Homebrew, the naming process, as well as the difficulty letting go. We also talked about his passion for the Swift programming language, and his work on Swift Package Manager while at Apple.

In this special episode recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, TX Adam talked with James Snell (IBM Technical Lead for Node and member of Node's TSC and CTC) about the work he's doing on Node's implementation of http2, the state of http2 in Node, what this new spec has to offer, and what the Node community can expect from this new protocol.

From 18F — Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman joined the show to talk about how 18F is changing the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.

Django core contributor Andrew Godwin joins the show to tell us all about Python and Django. If you've ever wondered why people love Python, what Django's virtues are as a web framework, or how Django Channels measure up to Phoenix's Channels and Rails' Action Cable, this is the show for you. Also: Andrew's take on funding and sustaining open source efforts.

Jack Moffitt joined the show to talk about Servo, an experimental web browser layout engine. We talked about what the Servo project aims to achieve, six areas of performance, and what makes Rust a good fit for this effort.

Feross Aboukhadijeh joined the show this week to talk with us about his backstory, passive income, WebTorrent, WebRTC, Electron and the ins and outs of packaging apps for all platforms.

Dave Gandy joined the show to talk about the history of Font Awesome, what's to come in Font Awesome 5 and their Kickstarter to fund Font Awesome 5 Pro, and how everything they're doing is funneling back into the forever free and open source — Font Awesome Free.

Sandi Metz joined the show to talk about her beginnings on a mainframe, her 30+ years of programming experience, the ins and outs of OOP, her book Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (aka POODR), as well as her latest book 99 Bottles of OOP which she co-authored with Katrina Owen. We also covered a few listener submitted questions at the end.

Bertrand Le Roy joined the show to talk about all things .NET Core, their recent 1.0 release, where it's going, the open source around it, and Microsoft's shift towards more open source.

Mike McQuaid joined us to catch us up on the latest in Homebrew and the recent 1.0.0 release. We talked about no more `/usr/local` — Homebrew moves to `/usr/local/Homebrew` to keep `/usr/local` cleaner, auto-updates, the growth of the Homebrew community and how it has grown to almost 6000 unique contributors, and more.

Gavin Wood joined the show to talk about Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, The DAO, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), what could you build with Ethereum, and the future of digital currency. Gavin Wood is Founder of Ethereum, creator of the Solidity contract language, and Founder of Ethcore — the company that created Parity, an open source Ethereum client.

Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books. We talked to Cory about open source, the open web, internet freedom, his involvement with the EFF, where he began his career, the details he'll be covering in his keynote at OSCON, and his thoughts on open source today and where developers should be focusing their efforts.

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, joined the show to talk about their recent unveiling of the GitLab Master Plan, $20 Million secured in a Series B funding round, their idea of Conversational Development in this "post Agile world", and their focus on the enterprise and on-premise Git hosting as the business model to sustain and build GitLab into something 'modern software teams' can rely upon."

Eli Bixby, Developer Programs Engineer at Google, joined the show to talk to talk about TensorFlow, machine learning and deep learning, why Google open sourced it, and more.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, and Richard Feldman of NoRedInk joined the show to talk deeper about Elm, the pains of CSS it solves, scaling the Elm architecture, reusable components, and more.

Beyang Liu, the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, joined the show to talk about the backstory of Sourcegraph, how it works, how they're aiming to be the 'Google for Code', ideas around offline support for code search, how it's licensed, and their new software license called Fair Source.

Zeke Sikelianos joined the show to talk about GitHub's Electron project and the future of web folks making cross platform desktop apps. We talked about the web revolution around native vs web app, where Electron is heading, who's using it, and how cool it is to enable folks like Guillermo Rauch to build HyperTerm.

David A. Wheeler, from Core Infrastructure Initiative, joined the show to talk about the CII Best Practices Badge program.

Julian Shapiro, startup founder and developer, joined the show to talk about his story of entrepreneurship, open source, growth hacking, and more. Julian's story is a story you don't want to miss — plus he shares actionable advice on growing and marketing an open source project.

Guillermo Rauch joined the show to talk with Adam about how he got into programming, how that lead him to what he's doing now at ZEIT, the design of HyperTerm, and now.

Peter Hedenskog joined the show to talk about SiteSpeed.io and web performance. We covered where it came from, where it's going, and more importantly, simple ways you can focus on your web performance.

James Pearce, Head of Open Source at Facebook, joined the show to talk about that very subject — open source at Facebook, his path to software development, why he's the person to lead open source at Facebook, their view on open source, their culture of open source, how they choose what to open source, and more importantly — how they focus on, support, and nurture the community.