Changelog

Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.

Suz, Jerod, Nick and KBall talk about cringeworthy mistakes and failures they (and the community!) have experienced with JavaScript. They also give advice to themselves as if they were just starting out today in the JavaScript industry.

We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly an alternative Twitter, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

An amazing panel of AI innovators joined us at the O'Reilly AI conference to answer the most pressing AI questions from Quora. We also discussed trends in the industry and some exciting new advances in FPGA hardware.

David dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.

KBall interviews with Michael Chan, Juan Pablo Buriticá and Julián David Duque, and Tim Doherty at JSConf.US. Conversations about the importance of DRY code, the metaphors we use for software, JavaScript communities across Latin America, how to advocate for modern tech stacks in large companies, and fostering mentorship.

Here's a bonus segment from episode #57 of Founders Talk with David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. Check the feed for the full length episode (later today). We talked about sales in the full length episode, but this BONUS segment is a completely isolated conversation that's not included in the full length episode — so don't gloss over this thinking it's just a teaser.

We talk with Dan Kohn, the Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to catch up with all things cloud native, the CNCF, and the world of Kubernetes. Dan updated us on the growth KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the state of Cloud Native and where innovation is happening, serverless being on the rise, and Kubernetes dominating the enterprise.

Feross talks with Mathias Buus and Paul Frazee about the decentralized web, why the average person should care about decentralization of the web, the Beaker browser, Dat and the differences and similarities to BitTorrent, and how Paul and Mathias first got involved in this work.

Mahdi Yusuf worked a startup in his twenties and wasn't worried too much about his health. When he quit that job, he decided to take better care of himself and lost fifty pounds. Now, he's the CTO of Gyroscope, a startup that aims to be the operating system for the human body, but ever since joining, has gained weight back. Mahdi talks to me about how Gyroscope is trying to help people understand their bodies better, growing up with a love for computers, and trying to be healthy with a busy life.

Jerod talked with Paul Fremantle, the CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2, about their new programming language, Ballerina — a cloud-native language which aims to make it easier to write microservices that integrate APIs. They talked about the creation of the language and how they were inspired by so many technologies. cloud native features like built-in container support, serverless-friendly, observability, and how it works with, or without, a service mesh — just to name a few.

Chris and Daniel discuss new advances in AI research (including a creepy dancing video), how AI is creating opportunity for new chip startups, and uses of deep learning in healthcare. They also share some great learning resources, including one of Chris's favorite online courses.

KBall and Chad Hietala meet up at JSConf and talk about compilers for the frontend, Ember's binary opcodes, webassembly, and the future of performance optimization for the web.

After a very difficult 2014 that put Justin Dorfman in the hospital, he vowed to never go back. Justin has Bipolar I disorder, so coming to terms with his limitations and the sacrifices he needs to make to stay healthy hasn't been easy. He talks to me about his early BMX dreams, his transition from engineering to marketing, and the stigma around mental health.

Adam and Jerod talk with two members of Segment’s engineering team: Co-founder and CTO, Calvin French-Owen, as well as Software Engineer, Alex Noonan, about their journey from monorepo to microservices back to monorepo. 100s of problem children to 1 superstar child.

Eric Berry started Code Sponsor a year ago because of his passion for finding ways to sustain and fund open source developers. He ultimately had to shutdown due to potential legal issues with GitHub, but was given new life as CodeFund when he went to work for ConsenSys and Gitcoin. We talked through the backstory of this idea, why he's so passionate about funding open source, ethical advertising, being unapologetically focused on your mission, the value of honesty and openness, and the future direction of CodeFund.

Chris DeBellis, a lead AI data scientist at Honeywell, helps us understand what Mask R-CNN is and why it's useful for robot perception. We also explore how this method compares with other convolutional neural network approaches and how you can get started with Mask R-CNN.

In this special episode of JS Party at JS Conf in Carlsbad, Nick, Suz, Feross, and KBall talk about crazy JavaScript combinations, tips to get started speaking, being committed to diversity as a conference organizer, and much more.

Adam and Jerod talk with Jason McGee, VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform about Istio — an open platform that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, control, and observe microservices. They cover what service mesh is, why its suddenly so interesting, who’s involved in Istio, their involvement with the CNCF, getting started, and what's next for Istio.

This week, Daniel and Chris talk about playing Dota at OpenAI, O'Reilly's machine learning survey, AI-oriented open source (Julia, AutoKeras, Netron, PyTorch), robotics, and even the impact AI strategy has on corporate and national interests. Don't miss it!

Jerod, Nick, KBall, and Chris pre-party for JSConf by testing out some brand new segment ideas: Story of the Week, What the WHAT... WG, and Protip Time. What do you think of these segments? Like 'em? Love 'em? Not sure why we even? Please let us know!

Bryan Helmig, Wade Foster, and Mike Knoop started Zapier in 2011 as a side hustle. They ultimately applied to Y Combinator, twice. And this year they hit $35 Million dollars in annual revenue. I talked with Bryan Helmig (CTO) through the backstory of starting this company, being 100% distributed, the flexibility as well as the constraints of being remote-only, how they reached product market fit, growth, scaling their teams, and how they bring everyone together for company wide retreats.

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

Mike Bugembe teaches us how to build a culture of data-driven decision making within a company, leverage behavioral economics, and identify high value use cases for AI.

Jerod and Suz talk with John Resig about how he's using GraphQL at Khan Academy, some of the mistakes and successes using GraphQL, John's feelings on jQuery, and community Q&A.

While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to me about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.

Adam and Jerod invite back Katrina Owen after years away focusing on Exercism—a 100% free platform for code practice and mentorship with over 2500 exercises and 48 different language tracks. They talk to Katrina about how the platform has changed, the direction it's taken, the backstory on the recently launched version 2, and how she plans to turn Exercism into a sustainable business. Also, what happens if that doesn't work?!

Chris and Daniel help us wade through the week's AI news, including open ML challenges from Intel and National Geographic, Henry Kissinger's views on AI, and a model that can detect personality based on eye movements. They also point out some useful resources to learn more about pandas, the vim editor, and AI algorithms.

Jerod, Nick, and Chris talk with Jeff Lembeck about his tweets, the people behind npm, the need for empathy, and things they're excited about.

Thirteen years ago, Ashley Baxter inherited the family insurance business when her Dad passed away. Even though she's a talented photographer, and built a successful photography business, the insurance industry kept calling her name. Ashley talks about what excites her about insurance, the challenges of running a business, and how burnout forced her to focus.