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.

Mat Ryer and Jerod Santo sit down to review and discuss the MOST and LEAST unpopular “unpopular opinions” since we started keeping track of such things. Also Generics.

This week we talk with Kent C. Dodds, one of the greatest React teachers in the industry, all about React! Why choose React over another framework? What are the hardest parts about learning React? You’ll find out this week!

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.”

Kaizen means “change for the better”, continuous improvement in this context. Failure is essential to learning, but how do we learn as a team? The simplest thing is to regularly dedicate time for taking a step back, talking about what works & what doesn’t, maybe writing some of it down, and eventually deciding what we should improve next. I intend to make every 10th Ship It! episode a Kaizen one.

This is the first one when we talk with Adam and Jerod 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. Let us know via Slack or Twitter what learnings are valuable to you so that we can produce the best content for you.

How did we get from symbolic AI to deep learning models that help you write code (i.e., GitHub and OpenAI’s new Copilot)? That’s what Chris and Daniel discuss in this episode about the history and future of deep learning (with some help from an article recently published in ACM and written by the luminaries of deep learning).

We discuss how Test Driven Development (TDD) can help you write better code, and build better software. Packed with tips and tricks, gotchas and best practices, the panel explore the subject and share their real-world experiences.

This week on Ship It! 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 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

Adam and Jerod sit down to answer a listener question (Hi, Alex! 👋) about how we podcast. Not how we create podcasts, but how we consume podcasts. Along the way we share an update on our comments feature, discuss the Apple Podcasts rollout debacle (and how it affected us launching Ship It!), and give a few personal recommendations of podcasts we’re listening to.

Chris and Daniel sit down to chat about some exciting new AI developments including wav2vec-u (an unsupervised speech recognition model) and meta-learning (a new book about “How To Learn Deep Learning And Thrive In The Digital World”). Along the way they discuss engineering skills for AI developers and strategies for launching AI initiatives in established companies.

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.

This week Emma and Adam are joined by Una Kravets to discuss difficult parts of CSS.

In this episode we talk with Daniel and Steve about their experience with event-driven systems and shed some light on what they are and who they might be for. We explore topics like the complexity of setting up an event-driven system, the need to embrace eventual consistency, useful tools for building event-driven systems, and more.

Nhung Ho joins Daniel and Chris to discuss how data science creates insights into financial operations and economic conditions. They delve into topics ranging from predictive forecasting to aid small businesses, to learning about the economic fallout from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

KBall, Amal, and Nick dive into key dimensions of what makes a developer work environment good – or bad. They discuss systemic factors, individual factors, what you can do about it, and a proposed scoring system for good work environments.

In this insight-filled episode, Bill Kennedy joins Johnny and Kris to discuss best practices around the design of software in Go. Bill talks through scenarios, lessons learned, and pitfalls to avoid in both architecture and coding of Go projects.

This week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.

Eric Normand (long-time FP advocate and author of Grokking Simplicity) joins Jerod and KBall for a deep conversation about Functional Programming in JavaScript. Eric teaches us what FP is all about, details the functional side of JS, and reviews the good/bad/ugly of React.

Oh, and join us in the #jsparty channel of our community slack where we’re giving away three FREE e-book copies of Eric’s new book! 🎁

Documentation. You can treat it as a dictionary or reference manual that you look up things in when you get stuck during your day-to-day work OR (and this is where things get interesting) you can immerse yourself in a subject, domain, or technology by deeply and purposefully consuming its manuals cover-to-cover to develop expertise, not just passing familiarity.

In this episode we pull in perspectives and anecdotes from beginners and veterans alike to understand the impact of RTFM deeply. Also Sweet Filepath O’ Mine?!?!

This week we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely.

Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases.

There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden).

American Express is running what is perhaps the largest commercial ML model in the world; a model that automates over 8 billion decisions, ingests data from over $1T in transactions, and generates decisions in mere milliseconds or less globally. Madhurima Khandelwal, head of AMEX AI Labs, joins us for a fascinating discussion about scaling research and building robust and ethical AI-driven financial applications.

Mat Ryer hosts our don’t-call-it-jeopardy game show live at GopherCon! Kat Zień, Mark Bates, and L Körbes put their Go knowledge to the test! Can you outwit our intrepid contestants?

Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan joins Jerod, Nick, & Feross for an in-depth discussion of his trending utility-first CSS framework. We cover why everyone complains about CSS, how Tailwind began and how it gained popularity, how developers use with Tailwind and integrate it into their workflows, and how Adam has managed to build a business around the project. Thanks, Bette Midler!

Suz, Amal, and Chris join Jerod to discuss what APIs are all about, share some APIs they admire, and lay out principles and practices we can all use in our APIs.

Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the wisdom Raj is leading with today, we have to go back to where things got started. To do that we had to go back like Prince to 1999…

Monitoring and debugging distributed systems is hard. In this episode, we catch up with Kelsey Hightower, Stevenson Jean-Pierre, and Carlisia Thompson to get their insights on how to approach these challenges and talk about the tools and practices that make complex distributed systems more observable.

What’s it like to try and build your own deep learning workstation? Is it worth it in terms of money, effort, and maintenance? Then once built, what’s the best way to utilize it? Chris and Daniel dig into questions today as they talk about Daniel’s recent workstation build. He built a workstation for his NLP and Speech work with two GPUs, and it has been serving him well (minus a few things he would change if he did it again).

Paul Smith (from “Obama’s Trauma Team”) tells us the tale of how Go played a big role in the rescuing and rebuilding of the HealthCare.gov website. Along the way we learn what the original team did wrong, how the rescue team kept it afloat during huge traffic spikes, and what they’ve done since to rebuild it to serve the people’s needs.

We’re joined by Elisha Goldstein, PhD - one of the world’s preeminent mindfulness teachers, a clinical psychologist, founder of the Mindful Living Collective and, creator of the six-month breakthrough program - A Course in Mindful Living. If you’ve ever used the Calm app, you might be familiar with his voice as he walks you through mindfulness practices to help calm negative emotions and anxious thoughts. He has extensive expertise in mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) and today he’s sharing his wealth of knowledge using mindfulness to naturally reduce anxiety and be more present and aware in our lives.

PostgreSQL aficionado Craig Kerstiens joins Jerod to talk about his (and our) favorite relational database. Craig details why Postgres is unique in the world of open source databases, which features are most exciting, the many things you can make Postgres do, and what the future might hold. Oh, and some awesome psql tips & tricks!