Jerod, Nick, and a node_modules-worthy collection of JS friends played an intense game of Frontend Feud at React Advanced London’s after-party back in October. Today, you get to play along with us!

In 2014 Gerhard joined CloudCredo, a startup co-founded by Colin Humphreys, Paula Kennedy & Chris Hedley. They stuck together through two acquisitions: Pivotal & VMware. This year, Colin, Paula & Chris co-founded Syntasso, the Platform-as-a-Product startup.

Today they all get together to talk about about what it takes to build a platform team, why Team Topologies is a good conversation starter and why a curated blend of off-the-shelf, composed, and self-created services are required in any organisation operating at scale.

Your hunch is right, all of them used to share the same Pivotal London office with Tammer Saleh, our guest from episode 31. Chris used to win all table tennis matches without even breaking a sweat, and today Gerhard gets his comeback. Touché!

You had questions, the Go Team had answers! Topics covered include generics (of course), governance (of course), Go 2, text editors, GitHub Copilot, garbage collection, and more.

The time has come! OpenAI’s API is now available with no waitlist. Chris and Daniel dig into the API and playground during this episode, and they also discuss some of the latest tool from Hugging Face (including new reinforcement learning environments). Finally, Daniel gives an update on how he is building out infrastructure for a new AI team.

Rich Harris joins Amal & Amelia for a Svelte deep-dive! What’s it all about? Why might you pick it over React and friends? What up with SvelteKit? Rich is working on it full-time now?! Will even more questions be answered?

In this episode Dominic speaks with Jon about his experience transitioning to using a screen reader and learning to code without his vision. They discuss how some of the tooling works, things other developers can do to make their code more accessible for blind teammates, and more.

Tammer Saleh, founder of SuperOrbital and former VP of Engineering at Pivotal, is joining Gerhard to talk about table tennis, remote work, and challenges that teams have with K8s.

Some years ago, both Tammer & Gerhard used to work in the same London office on CloudFoundry, and nowadays they are both into Kubernetes. Tammer and the SuperOrbital team are deeply experienced in this topic, and they help teams at companies like Bloomberg, Shopify, and federal U.S. agencies tackle hard Kubernetes and DevOps problems through engineering and training.

Why do companies need Kubernetes in the first place? Which are the right reasons for choosing it? Is Kubernetes a platform? Gerhard’s favourite: we are doing Kubernetes wrong, but it works better than when we were doing it right, so what’s up with that? This last one was a lot of fun, and we left the entire minute of laughter in at your request. Enjoy!

Today we’re bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we’ve covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and Christina Gorton for hosting us. Check out their show at dev.to/devdiscuss

This episode is a follow up to our recent Fully Connected show discussing federated learning. In that previous discussion, we mentioned Flower (a “friendly” federated learning framework). Well, one of the creators of Flower, Daniel Beutel, agreed to join us on the show to discuss the project (and federated learning more broadly)! The result is a really interesting and motivating discussion of ML, privacy, distributed training, and open source AI.

Salma Alam-Naylor joins us this week to share her thesis that JavaScript is best in moderation, and is a liability when creating performant, resilient, and accessible web applications. Salma says we’re drunk on JavaScript, and it’s time we learn how to leverage this powerful web primitive to enhance our web experiences, alongside HTML and CSS, instead of purely relying on JavaScript to completely run the show.

We’re prepping for our 4th annual state of the “log” episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond.

We thought it’d be awesome to include some listener voices on the show! So, please share your favorite Changelog guests, topics, or a-ha moments you’ve had over the last year.

If you get your message included in the episode, we’ll send you a free t-shirt.

It doesn’t have to be super produced. Just pop open your Voice Memos app on your phone
or use QuickTime or Audacity on your laptop. Tell us what’s on your mind.

Then upload your audio to ~> changelog.fm/sotl

We’re recording the episode next week, so don’t sleep on the opportunity. We’d love to hear from you!

Here’s a bonus episode this week from our friends behind Me, Myself, and AI — a podcast on artificial intelligence and business, and produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. We partnered with them to help promote their awesome podcast.

We hand picked this full-length episode to share with you because of its focus on using technology as a force for good, something we’re very passionate about. This episode features, Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, and the conversation touches on some interesting topics around the role tech companies play in society at large.

We’ve talked several times about getting started with Go. But Go is already 12 years old! Let’s talk about how it all started, and hear about it from the people who were there from the beginning.

Today we’re joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it’s used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what’s next in funding open source creators, and we attempt to answer the question “what happens to open source once it’s funded?”

This is our third Kaizen episode in which Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about GitOps the wrong way, ask questions with Honeycomb and realise that they must be holding the CDN wrong, and the effort that has been going into moving all changelog.com static files from regular volumes to an S3-like object store. If you like a good yak shake, listening to this one is a lot more fun than doing it.

Gerhard is most excited about the Ship It Christmas gifts that we have been preparing for you. While GitHub Codespaces is not going to be part of the upcoming Christmas special episode, today’s talk covers why investing in a Codespaces integration is worth it.
Changelog #459 and Backstage #20 are related to this topic.

Recently, GitHub released Copilot, which is an amazing AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI’s Codex model. In this episode, Natalie Pistunovich tells us all about Codex and helps us understand where it fits in our development workflow. We also discuss MLOps and how AI is influencing software engineering more generally.

Liana Leahy tells Amal and KBall all about her journey from software engineer to product manager. Along the way we learn what a PM does, how to be great at it, how to know if it’s for you, why the role is in such demand these days, and much more. - It’s UNIX, I know this!

Open Source and other source available projects have been a huge driver of progress in our industry, but building and maintaining an open source project is about a lot more than just writing the initial code and putting together a good README. On this episode of the maintenance mini-series, we’ll be discussing open source and the maintenance required to keep it going.

This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.

We upgraded to the new MacBook Pro M1 Max and decided to share our first impressions of the new hardware, how we migrate data and settings from our old machines (or don’t), which apps were “instant installs” for each of us, which apps we’re trying to live without, and how we get our new machines set up for work and play. Nerd out with us!

Zac Smith, managing director Equinix Metal, is sharing how Equinix Metal runs the best hardware and networking in the industry, why pairing magical software with the right hardware is the future, and what Open19 means for sustainability in the data centre. Think modular components that slot in (including CPUs), liquid cooling that converts heat into energy, and a few other solutions that minimise the impact on the environment.

But first, Zac tells us about the transition from Packet to Equinix Metal, his reasons for doing what he does, as well as the things that he is really passionate about, such as the most efficient data centres in the world and building for the love of it.

This is a great follow-up to episode 18 because it goes deeper into the reasons that make Gerhard excited about the work that Equinix Metal is doing. This conversation with Zac puts it all into perspective.

By the way, did you know that Equinix stands for Equality in the Internet Exchange?

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris ponder whether in-person AI conferences are on the verge of making a post-pandemic comeback. Then on to BigScience from Hugging Face, a year-long research workshop on large multilingual models and datasets. Specifically they dive into the T0, a series of natural language processing (NLP) AI models specifically trained for researching zero-shot multitask learning. Daniel provides a brief tour of the possible with the T0 family. They finish up with a couple of new learning resources.

Today we’re joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify’s developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify’s hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of scaling millions of storefronts. We cover what developers can expect from the Hydrogen framework, Shopify’s big bet on React Server Components, the future of Shopify at scale with Hydrogen powered by Oxygen, and a world where merchants never have to think about the complexities of scaling infrastructure.

This week we are joined by Sophie Alpert, Head of Engineering at Humu, and former lead of the React Core team, to discuss her experience on being a very early adopter, contributor, and eventually maintainer of React. In her 4+ years on the Core team, she went from supporting a new niche OSS UI library to supporting a project used by millions of developers around the world. Join us to hear about this epic journey, as well as Sophie’s thought’s on some common critiques and misconceptions of React.

Tiago Mendes joins Mat, Jon, and Johnny to discuss eventual consistency and strategies for changing data at scale.

This week Gerhard is chatting with Romano Roth, Head of DevOps at Zühlke, a company founded by Gerhard Zühlke in 1968. Nowadays they help companies all over the world build, ship and run anything from factory robots, to AI assistants in complex regulatory environments, and even medical devices that perform autonomous robotic surgery.

When Romano is not leading a team of 30 software engineers that specialise in operations, infrastructure and cloud, he is one of the organisers of DevOps Days Zürich, and also the DevOps Meetup group, which is how Gerhard and Romano met in 2019.

Having started his career as a .Net developer back in 2002, Romano had his fair share of dev and ops challenges, and he always enjoys seeing real business value delivered continuously in an automated way. In recent years, Romano’s perspective broadened, and now he sees DevOps realities across many companies. If you are curious about what good DevOps looks like, and what are the real challenges, then Romano has some good insights for you.

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Rachel Nabors –beloved educator, animator, & documentation engineer at Meta– joins Amal and Amelia for a first look at the brand new React docs!

This massive overhaul to the React website (which supports 2 million+ developers around the world) was no easy feat! We dive into all the behind the scenes coordination, as well as the goals, wins, and intended outcomes of this new way of approaching educational content and API reference material for open source projects.

We’re “doing it live” with Jerome Hardaway, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft and the Executive Director of Vets Who Code — a veteran-led and operated 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that focuses on training veterans, active duty military, and military spouses in software development and open source with the goal of starting careers in the technology industry.

This is a lengthly conversation in and around Jerome’s story, the Vets Who Code mission and impact, the experience of being in the United States Military, and the opportunity and potential of 1.5x’ing one of the most elite group of people on the planet.

In this episode, Gerhard is joined by Cyrille Le Clerc, Product Manager Lead on Observability at Elastic, and Oleg Nenashev, Principal Engineer at CloudBees.

It all started with Oleg’s tweet back in July, in which he was promoting Akihiro Kiuchi’s work on Jenkins monitoring with OpenTelemetry. This was done in the context of Google’s Summer of Code - a link to Akihiro’s demo is in the show notes.

As you may remember from episode 20, instrumenting our changelog.com pipeline is on Gerhard’s mind, and this conversation helped him clarify a few things. If you are thinking of instrumenting your CI/CD pipeline with OpenTelemetry, this episode is for you.