We first launched a membership back in 2013… before they were cool! 😆 Now we’re back with a brand new edition. It’s called Changelog++ and we hope you love it. This episode of Backstage is a tell-all about the program. Why we think the timing is right, what we hope it can become, how we’re experimenting with ideas to make it great, and what you can do to get involved.

Come hang with the bad boys of natural language processing (NLP)! Jack Morris joins Daniel and Chris to talk about TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and model training in NLP. TextAttack will improve your understanding of your NLP models, so come prepared to rumble with your own adversarial attacks!

Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what’s to come for the Windows command line experience.

Mikeal and Chris welcome (back) special guest Fred K. Schott, who you may recall from our episode on Pika. This time, we’re talking ESM: what it is, what’s new about it, why it’s the future, writing libraries with it, and much more.

Robert and Ian join us to talk about the latest updates on generics in Go. What type of feedback are they looking for as developers get their hands on tools designed to experiment with generics and Go? What was the deal with the featherweight Go paper that also discussed generics? Why can’t we use angle brackets for generics?

Sash Rush, of Cornell Tech and Hugging Face, catches us up on all the things happening with Hugging Face and transformers. Last time we had Clem from Hugging Face on the show (episode 35), their transformers library wasn’t even a thing yet. Oh how things have changed! This time Sasha tells us all about Hugging Face’s open source NLP work, gives us an intro to the key components of transformers, and shares his perspective on the future of AI research conferences.

Jerod assembles a team of WebRTC experts (Suz, Feross, Mikeal) for a deep, deep dive on this practically-ubiquitous yet still-complicated web API.

We review its history, share really cool applications using the tech, provide an excellent primer on what you need to know about it, and details some production gotchas. ALSO we celebrate how Feross single-handedly “upgraded the internet”! 🙌

The panel discuss testing frameworks in Go. After a brief overview of the concepts involved, we discuss how testing frameworks can make our lives easier, and why some people still choose to avoid them. Mat Ryer and Mark Bates chat with Boyan Soubachov about the future of the Testify project.

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha’s work on Dracula deserved the same credit. We agreed. So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he’s changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book – 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno’s book for free through our giveaway.

DevOps for deep learning is well… different. You need to track both data and code, and you need to run multiple different versions of your code for long periods of time on accelerated hardware. Allegro AI is helping data scientists manage these workflows with their open source MLOps solution called Trains. Nir Bar-Lev, Allegro’s CEO, joins us to discuss their approach to MLOps and how to make deep learning development more robust.

Today’s episode features our very first guest. We’re joined by Danielle Rath, a notable expert and product developer in the caffeine and energy drink industry. Danielle is the founder of GreenEyedGuide Research and Consulting where she shares science-based information about energy drinks and caffeine, and helps people and companies where fatigue and caffeine use are prevalent. In this lengthly episode, we talk through all aspects of the science behind caffeine — its chemical structure and half-life, where and how it’s being used, the good, bad, and the ugly, as well as practical advice for everyday consumption. If you consume caffeine of any sort, this is a must listen episode.

An amalgam of interest on this week’s episode starting with a peek at what’s finally coming in Vue 3. We talk about the process of change in the Vue ecosystem and what interesting features are coming either very soon or not for a while depending on how you view time right now. Then, the panelists share what they’ve learned recently, and finish off with shout outs to the projects, ideas, and people we’re appreciative of.

Your first week with a new programming language can be tricky. In this episode Jon is joined by Jacquie and DaShaun to talk about their first week with Go. What was their primary focus? What resources did they leverage? What made it stick, and what didn’t?

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon’s Razor, Gall’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Kernighan’s Law, and too many others to list here.

The multidisciplinary field of AI Ethics is brand new, and is currently being pioneered by a relatively small number of leading AI organizations and academic institutions around the world. AI Ethics focuses on ensuring that unexpected outcomes from AI technology implementations occur as rarely as possible. Daniel and Chris discuss strategies for how to arrive at AI ethical principles suitable for your own organization, and what is involved in implementing those strategies in the real world. Tune in for a practical AI primer on AI Ethics!

We’re joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help developers package and deliver software products to developers and enterprises.

KBall, Jerod, and Nick Nisi dive into GraphQL – what it can do, what the challenges are, and how it differs from REST – all with a generous helping of metaphor about buffets, restaurants, and of course bacon.

Choosing a database is hard. They each have their pros and cons, and without much experience it is hard to determine which is the best fit for your project. In this episode Johan Brandhorst joins us to talk about Postgres. When is it a good fit? How well does it scale? What libraries exist in Go for using Postgres?

Daniel and Chris get you Fully-Connected with open source software for artificial intelligence.
In addition to defining what open source is, they discuss where to find open source tools and data, and how you can contribute back to the open source AI community.

Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, a security platform that empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure. Prior to Snyk, Guy founded Blaze which was acquired by Akamai and became CTO. We talked through the topic of acquisition — the sale, the merge, the learnings, and why Guy might not be planning for Snyk to be acquired anytime soon. We started the conversation with Snyk’s recent raise of $150 million dollars.

A listener request led us to Nikita Prokopov and FiraCode, and we’re sure glad they did. When we think of open source software, fonts aren’t usually high on the list of things that need maintaining. That’s not true when your font also supports hundreds of programming ligatures like FiraCode does. Nikita has his hands full!

Blitz.js creator Brandon Bayer joins Jerod to dive deep into the foundational principles of this fullstack React framework. We talk about its inspiration (Ruby on Rails), its differentiation (a “no-API” data layer), and its aspirations (built-in auth, plugins, recipes, and more).

How reflective are you with the thoughts you think? In this episode, Mireille and Adam talk through a few more cognitive distortions. These “distortions” are general tendencies or patterns of thinking that are false or inaccurate, which also have the potential to cause psychological damage. Generally speaking, people develop cognitive distortions as a way of coping with adverse life events. The more prolonged and severe those adverse events are, the more likely it is that one or more cognitive distortions will form. By recognizing these patterns in our thoughts and possibly how, when, or why we’re prone to use them, like many things, we create the opportunity to change them.

Building a new app in Go can involve a lot of technical decisions. How will your code be structured? How will you handle background jobs? What will your deploy process look like? In this episode we will walk through the decisions made while building the public release of Pace.dev.

We’re joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari’s plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.

A lot of effort is put into the training of AI models, but, for those of us that actually want to run AI models in production, performance and scaling quickly become blockers. Nikita from MemSQL joins us to talk about how people are integrating ML/AI inference at scale into existing SQL-based workflows. He also touches on how model features and raw files can be managed and integrated with distributed databases.

Did you know Feross taught Web Security at Stanford last Fall? On this episode, Divya and Nick enroll in his security school to learn about XSS, CSP, ambient authority, and a whole lot more.

Leaning from mistakes is key to progressing. In this episode Ben, Aaron, Kris, and Jon discuss some of our mistakes - like spending too much time designing a feature that isn’t that important, or using channels excessively when first learning Go - and how we learned from them.

We’re revisiting Shape Up and product development thoughts with Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Last August we talked with Ryan when he first launched his book Shape Up and now we’re back to see how Shape Up is shaping up — “How are teams using the wisdom in this book to actually ship work that matters? How does Shape Up work in new versus existing products?” We also talk about the concept of longitudinal thinking and the way it’s impacting Ryan’s designs, plus a grab bag of topics in the last segment.