Changelog Interviews

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Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #470

Returning to GitHub to lead Sponsors

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2021-12-02T00:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 39,318

Today we’re joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it’s used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what’s next in funding open source creators, and we attempt to answer the question “what happens to open source once it’s funded?”

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #469

Shopify's vision for the future of commerce

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2021-11-19T22:00:00Z #react +3 🎧 45,133

Today we’re joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify’s developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify’s hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of scaling millions of storefronts. We cover what developers can expect from the Hydrogen framework, Shopify’s big bet on React Server Components, the future of Shopify at scale with Hydrogen powered by Oxygen, and a world where merchants never have to think about the complexities of scaling infrastructure.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #467

Connecting the dots in public

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2021-11-05T18:00:00Z #culture +2 🎧 41,701

Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #465

Oh my! Zsh.

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2021-10-25T19:30:00Z #zsh +1 🎧 43,039

Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the struggle of being an open source software maintainer.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #464

This insane tech hiring market

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2021-10-19T20:30:00Z #career +1 🎧 46,380

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #463

Lessons from 10k hours of programming

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2021-10-08T21:00:00Z #practices +1 🎧 48,507

Today we’re talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill.

If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we’ll get in touch and send you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt in the merch store. Good luck…

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #462

Learning-focused engineering

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2021-10-01T21:00:00Z #learn +1 🎧 42,029

This week we’re joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we’re talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering.

Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #461

Fauna is rethinking the database

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2021-09-24T21:30:00Z #databases 🎧 42,890

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It’s the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan’s history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna, and what’s to come in the near future.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #460

The business model of open source

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2021-09-17T20:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 46,003

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #459

Coding in the cloud with Codespaces

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2021-09-11T04:00:00Z #github +2 🎧 42,419

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.”

After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com.

On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #457

Why Neovim?

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2021-08-31T21:30:00Z #neovim +1 🎧 48,243

This week Neovim core maintainer TJ DeVries joins Jerod and guest co-host Nick Nisi (from JS Party) to follow-up on our Vim episode with a conversation dedicated to Neovim. TJ tells us why Neovim was created in the first place, how it differs from Vim, why Lua is awesome for configuration and plugins, what LSPs are all about, the cool tech inside tree-sitter, and how he’s writing his own fuzzy file finder for Neovim called Telescope.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #456

OAuth, "It's complicated."

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2021-08-23T21:30:00Z #infosec 🎧 46,657

Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #455

Building software for yourself

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2021-08-23T18:00:00Z #oss 🎧 40,329

Today we’re talking to Linus Lee about the practice of building software for yourself. Linus has several side projects we could talk about, but today’s show is focused on Linus’ dynamically typed functional programming language called Ink that he used to write his full text personal search engine called Monocle.

Linus is focused on writing software that solves his own needs, all of which is open source, to help him learn more deeply and organize the knowledge of his life.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #453

Leading leaders who lead engineers

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2021-08-11T11:00:00Z #leadership 🎧 41,938

This week we’re joined by Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach & trainer for the tech industry. Lara led engineering teams at Kickstarter and Etsy before she, and Deepa Subramaniam stepped away from their deep roots in the tech industry to start Wherewithall – a consultancy that helps level up managers and emerging leaders.

The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you’re ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #452

Kaizen! The day half the internet went down

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2021-08-05T11:00:00Z #ops +2 🎧 41,155

This week we’re sharing a special episode of our new podcast called Ship It. This episode is our Kaizen-style episode where we point our lens inward to Changelog.com to see what we should improve next. The plan is do this episode style every 10 episodes.

Gerhard, Adam, and Jerod talk about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #451

Modern Unix tools

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2021-07-31T01:00:00Z #cli +2 🎧 45,435

This week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #450

Why we đź’š Vim

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2021-07-21T14:15:00Z #vim 🎧 50,381

On this special edition of The Changelog, we tell Vim’s story from the mouths of its users. Julia Evans, Drew Neil, Suz Hinton, and Gary Bernhardt join Jerod Santo for a deep and wide-ranging discussion about “the best text editor that anyone ever wrote.”

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #449

The story behind Inter

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2021-07-19T20:30:00Z #fonts +1 🎧 34,349

This week we’re talking to Rasmus Andersson about his journey as a software creator. We talk about the work he’s doing right now on Playbit, a computing environment which encourages playful learning, building, and sharing of software. We also talk about his work on the Inter typeface, as well as the reasons why this font family needed to be free and open source.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #448

Massive scale and ultra-resilience

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2021-07-09T19:00:00Z #oss 🎧 37,984

This week we’re sharing a recent episode from Founders Talk that we continuously hear about from listeners. Listen and subscribe to Founders Talk at founderstalk.fm and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

On Founders Talk #75 — Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #447

The foundations of Continuous Delivery

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2021-07-02T23:00:00Z #cicd +2 🎧 39,364

This week we’re sharing one of the most popular episodes from our new podcast Ship It. Ship It launched in May and now has 8 episodes in the feed to enjoy…it’s hosted by Gerhard Lazu, our SRE here at Changelog.

In this episode, Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses, and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #446

xbar puts anything in your macOS menu bar

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2021-06-21T20:00:00Z #go +2 🎧 36,210

On this episode we’re talking with our good friend Mat Ryer whom you may know from the Go Time podcast. Mat created an awesome open source tool for putting just about anything in your Mac’s toolbar. It was originally written in Objective-C, but it just got a big rewrite in Go and abig rename from BitBar to xbar.

If you don’t use a Mac don’t hit skip on this episode quite yet! There are lessons to be learned for anyone interested in hacking on tools to make your life better. Plus, with this rewrite Mat has positioned xbar to go cross-platform, which we talk about as well.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #445

Funds for open source

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2021-06-18T21:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 33,010

This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #444

Every commit is a gift

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2021-06-10T11:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 33,259

Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.

Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.

Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #443

Exploring Deno Land 🦕

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2021-06-08T12:00:00Z #deno +3 🎧 31,878

This week we’re joined by Ryan Dahl, Node.js creator, and now the creator of Deno - a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that uses V8 and is built in Rust.

We talk with Ryan about the massive success of Node and how it impacted his life, and how he eventually created Deno and what he’s doing differently this time around. We also talk about The Deno Company and what’s in store for Deno Deploy.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #442

Maintainer week!

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2021-05-28T21:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 29,019

This week is all about Maintainer Week — it’s a week long event starting June 7th for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated. We’re joined by Josh Simmons (Ecosystem Strategy Lead at Tidelift & President of Open Source Initiative) and Kara Sowles (Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitHub). Of course we love open source maintainers, that’s why we’re so excited about Maintainer Week and making it an annual thing. Today we talk through all the details of this event, what we can expect for this year and the years to come.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #441

Inside 2021's infrastructure for Changelog.com

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2021-05-21T21:00:00Z #updates +2 🎧 28,650

This week we’re talking about the latest infrastructure updates we’ve made for 2021. We’re joined by Gerhard Lazu, our resident SRE here at Changelog, talking about the improvements we’ve made to 10x our speed and be 100% available. We also mention the new podcast we’ve launched, hosted by Gerhard. Stick around the last half of the show for more details.

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