Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they’re very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put “family and friends first, work second,” how we should view work, and his biggest fear — the company failing.

We’re talking about all things all-remote with Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab. Darren is tasked with putting intentional thought and action into place to lead the largest all-remote company in the world. Yes, GitLab is 100% all-remote, as in, no offices…and they employee more than 1,200 people across 67 countries. They’ve been iterating and documenting how to work remotely for years. We cover Darren’s personal story on remote work while he served as managing editor at Engadget, his thoughts on how “work” is evolving and ways to reframe and rethink about when you work, this idea of work life harmony, and the backstory and details of the playbook GitLab released free of charge to the world.

Databases are tricky, especially at scale. In this episode Mat, Jaana, and Jon discuss different types of databases, the pros and cons of each, along with the many ways developers can have issues with databases. They also explore questions like, “Why are serial IDs problematic?” and “What alternatives are there if we aren’t using serial IDs?” while at it.

High expectations for performance in both life and work are common, but what do you do when you get stuck and you’re not able to achieve the results you desire? In this episode, Mireille and Adam talk through the different aspects of perfectionism and ways in which is can be adaptive and helpful and other ways in which it poses additional challenges. What happens when we avoid the possibility of failure as opposed to simply having high standards for our performance? How can we begin to focus on healthy striving as opposed to reaching for perfection?

Jason Warner (CTO at GitHub) joined the show to talk with us about the backstory of how he helped to lead GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Specifically how they trusted their gut not just the data, and how they understood the value they were bringing to market. We also talk about Jason’s focus on “horizon 3” for GitHub, and his thoughts on remote work and how they’re leading GitHub engineering today.

Divya and Nick welcome Deno’s Kit Kelly to the show to celebrate the highly-anticipated new JavaScript/TypeScript runtime’s big 1.0 release.

This is a wide-ranging discussion about all things Deno. We discuss why they’re using Rust, how they’re rewriting parts of the TypeScript compiler, their take on package management, what adoption looks like, their code of conduct, and more.

Chandler McCann tells Daniel and Chris about how DataRobot engaged in a project to develop sustainable water solutions with the Global Water Challenge (GWC). They analyzed over 500,000 data points to predict future water point breaks. This enabled African governments to make data-driven decisions related to budgeting, preventative maintenance, and policy in order to promote and protect people’s access to safe water for drinking and washing. From this effort sprang DataRobot’s larger AI for Good initiative.

Put on your dark hoodie, turn all the lights off, and join the author of Black Hat Go as we explore the darker side of Go.

Our Jeopardy-style (but don’t call it Jeopardy) game is back! This time Jerod plays the part of Alex Trabeck and Emma tries her hand at contestant-ing. Can Scott Tolinski from the Syntax podcast hang with Emma and Nick? Listen and play along!

What is a microservice, and what is a monolith? What differentiates them? When is a good time for your team to start considering the transition from monolith to microservice? And does using microservices mean you can’t use a monorepo?

AI legend Stuart Russell, the Berkeley professor who leads the Center for Human-Compatible AI, joins Chris to share his insights into the future of artificial intelligence. Stuart is the author of Human Compatible, and the upcoming 4th edition of his perennial classic Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is widely regarded as the standard text on AI. After exposing the shortcomings inherent in deep learning, Stuart goes on to propose a new practitioner approach to creating AI that avoids harmful unintended consequences, and offers a path forward towards a future in which humans can safely rely of provably beneficial AI.

Given all of the recent changes and adjustments many individuals have made to working remotely, Mireille and Adam discuss some of the relevant aspects of working from home. How do you develop habits that work for you to be the most productive? Which factors make a difference to be successful in navigating challenges that emerge and how can you develop ways of staying socially connected while being physically distant?

We’re talking with Josh Aas, the Executive Director of the Internet Security Research Group, which is the legal entity behind the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority. In June of 2017, Let’s Encrypt celebrated 100 Million certificates issued. Now, just about 2.5 years later, that number has grown to 1 Billion and 200 Million websites served. We talk with Josh about his journey and what it’s taken to build and grow Let’s Encrypt to enable a secure by default internet for everyone.

In late 2019, Bill Nichols, a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University with the Software Engineering Institute published his study on “the 10x developer myth.” On this show we talk with Bill about all the details of his research. Is the 10x developer a myth? Let’s find out.

Working from home can be challenging, especially amid school closings and everything else caused by COVID-19. In this episode panelists Jon, Mat, Carmen, and Mark share advice and experiences they have accumulated over many years of working from home. They cover separating your work space from your personal space, signaling to your family that you are busy, ways to keep track of the time, and suggestions for getting some exercise in when you can.

Mireille and Adam discuss the process of forming memories, the various types of memory, anxieties, phobias, panic attacks, and how our attention and our memory relates to learning. Where you place your attention influences what you might remember. What you are able to remember influences how you feel, the choices you make, and your future outcomes.

Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub, board member at Netlify) joins the party and brings his new, opinionated, full-stack, serverless web app framework with him. Will Redwood help usher in the future Tom predicted back in 2018? We discuss that and a whole lot more on this must-listen episode.

Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled “Does it spark joy?” In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding “What are you optimizing for?” and whether or not what you’re doing truly brings you joy.

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic and a national emergency here in the United States as well as many other countries around the world, it would be extremely difficult to have a serious conversation here on Brain Science that’s not colored by today’s very serious events. Mireille and Adam discuss the anxiety, fear, and panic that many may be facing. How do we navigate the unseeable unknown? How should we respond to change and the state of the world we are now living in?

Don’t panic. Prepare for change. Be adaptable. Be resilient.

Matt Brems from General Assembly joins us to explain what “data science” actually means these days and how that has changed over time. He also gives us some insight into how people are going about data science education, how AI fits into the data science workflow, and how to differentiate yourself career-wise.

Frank Karlitschek joined us to talk about Nextcloud - a self-hosted free & open source community-driven productivity platform that’s safe home for all your data. We talk about how Nextcloud was forked from ownCloud, successful ways to run community-driven open source projects, open core vs open source, aligned incentives, and the challenges Nextcloud is facing to increase adoption and grow.

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content.

We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

Interfaces are everywhere in Go. The basic error type is an interface, writing with the fmt package means you are probably using an interface, and there are countless other instances where they pop up. In this episode Mark, Mat, Johnny, and Jon discuss interfaces at length, exploring what they are, how they are using them in their own projects, as well as tips for how you can leverage them in your own code.

Mireille and Adam discuss the mechanism of attention as an allocation of one’s resources. If we can think of attention as that of a lens, we can practice choosing what we give our attention to recognizing that multiple things, both externally and internally, routinely compete for our attention. Distraction can also be useful when we utilize it intentionally to manage the focus of our attention.

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Mireille and Adam discuss shame as an emotional and experiential construct. We dive into the neural structures involved in processing this emotion as well as the factors and implications of our experience of shame. Shame is a natural response to the threat of vulnerability and perception of oneself as defective or inherently “not enough.”

Mireille and Adam dig deeper into empathy as a construct. What key brain structures are involved? How can we better understand empathy to be able to better navigate ourselves and our relationships with others both at home and in the workplace?

In this episode, we’re joined by Kelsey Hightower to discuss the evolution of cloud infrastructure management, the role Kubernetes and its API play in it, and how we, as developers and operators, should be adapting to these changes.

Chris and Daniel talk with Greg Allen, Chief of Strategy and Communications at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The mission of the JAIC is “to seize upon the transformative potential of artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of America’s national security… The JAIC is the official focal point of the DoD AI Strategy.” So if you want to understand how the U.S. military thinks about artificial intelligence, then this is the episode for you!

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the “open core” model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.