Changelog

NESTED LOOPS is a JavaScript band that combines music and video with web tech to perform live at JSConf. In this episode, Jerod and Suz are joined by Jan Monschke and Kahlil Lechelt, which comprise 2/3 of the group. After sampling one of their tracks, we hear the story of how they got the band together, the journey of building a tech stack for their first live performance, and how that stack was then rewritten to be “good” for their second performance. Suz is at awe with the technologies at play. Jerod wonders if there’s room in the world for musicians directly targeting JavaScript devs. A good time is had by all.

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

Brett Gaylor joins Chris and Daniel to chat about the recently announced winners of Mozilla’s creative media awards, which focuses on exposing the impact of AI on society. These winners include a film that responds to the audience (via AI recognized emotions) and an interesting chatbot called Wanda.

In this episode, Nick talks with Ives van Hoorne about his project CodeSandbox. They chat about Ives deciding to work on it full-time, how CodeSandbox is built, some of its best features, and what lies ahead.

This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

Himani Agrawal joins Daniel and Chris to talk about how she got into data science and artificial intelligence, and offers advice to others getting into these fields. She goes on to describe the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning within AT&T and telecom in general.

Safia, Nick, Jerod, and Chris get together to talk about documentation. Documentation is essential in our work but it can be difficult to get buy in. The crew talks about how you can get others to care about it in your organization, tools that make documentation easier, and some examples of companies doing it right.

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framelication” beat of their own drum.

In this new and updates show, Daniel and Chris discuss, among other things, efforts to use AI in art and efforts to make AI interfaces look human. They also discuss some learning resources related to neural nets, AI fairness, and reinforcement learning.

Adam, Jerod, and Tim get together to put a spotlight on Apple’s October 30th Mac/iPad event from a developer’s perspective. They cover the specs of the new MacBook Air and the viability of having it as a development machine, the new Mac Mini in the ever popular Space Gray, and whether or not Tim will be able to stop pulling his hair out to find an affordable, yet powerful desktop machine with it, and the gorgeous new iPad Pro.

Disclaimer: no servers were harmed in the taping of this show. We hosted a special discussion with Jeremy Daly, Kevin Ball, Nick Nisi, and Christopher Hiller on the ideas around serverless, managed services, Functions as a Service (FaaS), micro-services, nano-services, all-the-services!

Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital joined the show to share his plans for funding the future generation of commercial open source software based companies. This is a growing landscape of $100M+ revenue companies ~13 years in the making that’s just now getting serious early attention and institutional backing — and we talk through many of those details with Joseph. We cover the whys and hows, why OSS now, deep details around licensing implications, and we speculate the types of open source software that makes sense for the types of investing Joseph and other plan to do.

Lindsey Zuloaga joins us to discuss bias in hiring, bias in AI, and how we can fight bias in hiring with AI. Lindsey tells us about her experiences fighting bias at HireVue, where she is director of data science, and she gives some practical advice to AI practitioners about fairness in models and data.

In this special episode of JS Party at Node + JS Interactive in Vancouver, KBall, Nick and Suz explore the proposed merger between the JS Foundation and the Node Foundation. They pick the brains of special guests Tierney Cyren (Node Foundation) and Dave Methvin (JS Foundation) about what’s happening with the merger, what it means for the ecosystem and for everyday JavaScript developers.

Jerod invites Richard Feldman back on the show to catch up on all things Elm. Did you hear? NoRedInk finally had a production runtime error, the community grew quite a bit (from ‘obscure’ to just ‘niche’), and Elm 0.19 added some killer new features around asset optimization.

Adam and Jerod talk with Allen “Gunner” Gunn about Sustain Summit. What is it, the kind of conversations that happen there, issues the open source community is having right now, and how Sustain stands out from events called “unconferences.”

Chris and Daniel are back together in another news/updates show. They discuss PyTorch v1.0, some disturbing uses of AI for tracking social credit, and learning resources to get you started with machine learning.

Adam, Jerod, and Tim get together to talk about Plex! Plex is a media server which allows you to store your movies, TV shows, music, photos, etc. Turns out, you can actually use it together with an antenna to watch live TV and DVR content. They chat about what has Adam so excited, the pros and cons (or as Adam said, “trade-offs”), and how to get started.

Where does Feross get all those wonderful toys? He builds them with JavaScript, of course! BitMidi – a website for listening to your favorite MIDI files – is his latest creation. In this episode, Jerod “sits down” with Feross to learn all about it. How do MIDIs even work? Why won’t they play on the web anymore? Can WASM save the day (hint: yes)? How does Feross get so many eyeballs on his creations? Is Preact awesome for building sites like this? What’s the future of BitMidi look like? Don’t ask us, listen to the episode!

Eryn O’Neil grew up in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago. When it came time for college, it was easy for her to move a few states over and go to college in a small town in Iowa. She now lives in Minneapolis, and after years of being self-employed, she just finished a months-long journey to find her next job. Eryn talks to me about being the first female engineering manager at her new company, what excites her about technology, the hurdles of married life, and staying healthy in a demanding industry.

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled “Setting expectations for open source participation” and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what’s the goal? They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there’s a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally joins Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson for an in-depth conversation about ‘everything AI’ at NVIDIA. As the leader of NVIDIA Research, Bill schools us on GPUs, and then goes on to address everything from AI-enabled robots and self-driving vehicles, to new AI research innovations in algorithm development and model architectures. This episode is so packed with information, you may want to listen to it multiple times.

Safia, Suz, KBall and Nick get together to talk about bugs! Not those pesky things you’re scared to squash because they might suddenly jump on you — this is all about JavaScript bugs; how you prevent some of the common ones, what tools you can use to reduce bugs in your code, and a panel group therapy session where they discuss the most difficult bug they’ve had to fix.

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it’s an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it’s about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it. Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

We met up with Wojciech Zaremba at the O’Reilly AI conference in SF. He took some time to talk to us about some of his recent research related to reinforcement learning and robots. We also discussed AI safety and the hype around OpenAI.

Suz, Nick, and KBall are joined by special guest Aimee Knight to talk about CSS, how it’s often trivialized and how that in turn affects the people who write it, what CSS in JS is, and how to get started with it.

Almost eight years ago, Suz Hinton made one of the biggest decisions of her life: move away from her home in Melbourne, Australia and move to the United States. After amicably breaking up with her boyfriend, another decision lied ahead: would she stay? Suz talks to me about culture shock, the hoops she had to jump through to get her visa, her parents, and dealing with burnout.

In this special rebroadcast of JS Party, 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.

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.