We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.
Johannes Schickling, co-founder and CEO of Prisma, joined the show to catch us up on all things GraphQL — the tech, the possibilities, the community, how Prisma turns your database into a GraphQL API, their new business direction, Prisma Cloud, open source vs enterprise, and the upcoming GraphQL Europe in Berlin on June 15th.
Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.
Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she’s seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack’s growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.
Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community’s big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin’s upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.
Chad Hietala joined the show to talk with us about the long history of Ember.js, how he first got involved, his work at LinkedIn and his work as an Ember Core team member, how the Ember team communicates expectations from release to release, their well documented RFC process, ES Classes in Ember, Glimmer, and where Ember is being used today.
Philipp Krenn joined the show to talk with us about Elasticsearch, the problem it solves, where it came from, and where it’s at today. We discussed the query language, what it can be compared to, whether or not it’s a database replacement or a database complement, Elasticsearch vs Elastic the company.
We also talked about the details behind Elastic’s plan of “doubling down on open” to open up X-Pack, which is open code paid add-on features to Elasticsearch. We discussed the implications of this on their business model, and what changes will take place at the code and license level on GitHub.
Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past … and it’s certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it’s what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide.
We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify – which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.
We’re rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits. But don’t worry, The Changelog will be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It’s the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we’ve had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.
Rhys Arkins joined the show to talk about automating dependency updates using Renovate. Renovate is an open source tool to keep source code dependencies up-to-date using automated Pull Requests. We talked about who’s using it, the languages and environments that are supported, self-hosted vs SaaS and how that plays into supporting this open source, auto-merging, being a GitHub App and in the GitHub Marketplace, and building this as a business on someone else’s platform.
Suz Hinton joined the show to talk about live coding open source on Twitch. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, her goals and aspirations for live streaming, the work she’s doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others can get started — and maybe some other fun stuff we have in the works at Changelog.
Tim Coulter joined the show to talk about Truffle — a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. We talked with Tim about how he got into Ethereum and dapp development, Solidity vs JavaScript, smart contract testing, EthPM which is like npm but for Ethereum, Why decentralization? Why dapps? Basically, why rebuild the internet? And last but not least - who’s using Truffle and what have they built with it?
David Heinemeier Hansson joined the show to share the story of how JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp evolved into a full-fledged framework called Stimulus. We talked about ins and outs of Basecamp as it is today, Ruby, JavaScript and David’s somewhat new found love for that language. How they open source because they can. And David’s new YouTube series called “On Writing Software Well”.
Max Coutté joined the show to share his journey of learning the math and programming required to build an open source Oculus headset for $100. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day he and his friends decided to built an Oculus headset because they couldn’t afford one. This show takes you through Max’s journey, how his teacher (aka Sensei) made all the difference, and how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source.
Todd Gamblin, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, joined us to talk about Moore’s Law, his work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the components of a micro-chip, and High Performance Computing.
Rico Sta. Cruz joined us to talk about his project Devhints (cheatsheets for developers). There are more than 365 cheatsheets you can contribute to and it’s open source. We talked about the design, technical implementation, community, alternate interfaces like the command line. We also talked about RSJS, RSCSS, and Docpress.
From KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017 — Brendan Burns (Kubernetes co-founder) and Gabe Monroy (creator of Deis) joined the show to talk about the origin, impact, and future of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.
We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.
We talked with Jeremy Soller, the BDFL of Redox OS, a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications. In this episode we talk about; OS design principals, Jeremy’s goals for Redox, why is Rust, the Micro-kernel, the Filesystem, how Linux isn’t secure enough, how he’s funding this his development, and a coding style in Rust called Safe Rust.
We talk with Alan Duric, Co-founder and CEO of Wire, an open source end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app for voice and video calls. In 2005 Alan co-founded Camino Networks which was later acquired by Skype, and his involvement with internet based voice communications goes back 20 years. We talk about the early days of Skype, why Wire is open source, the importance of encryption, the importance of secure messaging, their polyglot ways, and how they plan to stand apart from other apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and more.
We went back into the archives to conversations we had around blockchains and databases at OSCON 2017. We talked with Monty Widenius, creator of MariaDB the open source forever fork MySQL, Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger, the open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technologies, and Tague Griffith, Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs, the home of open source Redis and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise.
We’re back in NYC at Microsoft Connect(); talking about the backstory of Visual Studio Code with Julia Liuson (Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio), Chris Dias (Principal Program Manager of Visual Studio and .NET), and PJ Meyer (Product Manager).
We talk about the beginnings of the Visual Studio product line, how Microsoft missed the internet, how the community is judging Microsoft and looking at them with a very old lense, how Visual Studio Code evolved from lessons learned with their cloud based editor called Monaco, how they had to radically change to reach developers beyond Windows, and how this open source project is thriving.
Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joined the show to talk about what it means to be Cloud Native, the ins and outs of Dan’s role to the foundation, how they make money to sustain things, membership, the support they give to open source projects, the home they’ve given to Kubernetes, Prometheus and many other projects that have become the de facto projects to build cloud native applications on.
We talked with Miguel de Icaza last week at Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Miguel gave us the backstory on how he’s been competing with Microsoft for most of his developer career, and he shares the history of GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin — and what led him to now work at Microsoft.
Mike Perham is back for his 4th appearance to talk about his new project Faktory, a new background job system that’s aiming to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language. We catch up with Mike on the continued success and model of Sidekiq, the future of background jobs, his thoughts on RocksDB in Faktory vs BoltDB, Redis, or SQLite, how he plans to support Sidekiq for the next 10 years, and his thoughts on Faktory being a SaaS option in the future.
We went back into the archives to conversations we had around data science at OSCON 2017. We talked with Vida Williams (Data Scientist) and Michelle Casbon (Director of Data Science at Qordoba) about the social impact of open data, personal data and transparency, privacy, the big data problem of public surveillance, electronic fingerprinting, the rift between data scientists and computer scientists, natural language processing, machine learning, and more.
Adam Morse joined the show to talk about Functional CSS and his project Tachyons - a CSS Toolkit that lets you quickly build and design new UI without writing CSS. We talk about Scalable CSS, the difference between “Atomic”, “OOCSS”, “BEM” and others, semantic class names, and where we go from here.
Preethi Kasireddy, a self-employed blockchain and smart contract Engineer, joined the show to talk about why she left the best job in the world at Andreessen Horowitz on the deal team, how she got entrepreneurship envy, the roadmap she laid out in 2015 and where she’s at today as an engineer, her excitement for blockchain-based technologies, and why blockchains don’t scale.
Sean Griffin joins the show to talk about doing Rails full-time, his love of Rust. and his project Diesel - a safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust. We discuss Sean’s path to working full-time on Rails, what he works on specifically, why Rust, why Diesel, and how much of Diesel’s design and featureset is a product of his experience with ActiveRecord and Rails.
Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.
