Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple!

They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

What is a Product Manager, and do Engineers need them? In this episode, we will be discussing what a Product Manager does, what makes a good Product Manager, and debating if engineering teams truly need them, with some tech companies going without them. We are joined by Gaëlle Sharma, Senior Technical Product Manager, at the New York Times, leading the Identity group.

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.”

9 out of 10 AI projects don’t end up creating value in production. Why? At least partly because these projects utilize unstable models and drifting data. In this episode, Roey from BeyondMinds gives us some insights on how to filter garbage input, detect risky output, and generally develop more robust AI systems.

This week we’re talking to Rasmus Andersson about his journey as a software creator. We talk about the work he’s doing right now on Playbit, a computing environment which encourages playful learning, building, and sharing of software. We also talk about his work on the Inter typeface, as well as the reasons why this font family needed to be free and open source.

The panel discusses all the things that have to happen before you write a lick of code. Then, for Story of the Week: Dan Abramov thinks npm audit is broken by design. We also have thoughts. Lots of ’em.

Go modules brought about quite a few changes to the Go ecosystem. One of those changes is semantic import versioning (SIV), which has a fairly pronounced effect on how libraries are identified. In this episode we are joined by Tim Heckman and Peter Bourgon to discuss some of the downsides to these changes and how it has lead to what a subset of the Go community refers to as the “v2+ problem.”

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).

This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.

This week we talk with Jean-Sébastien Pedron, RabbitMQ and FreeBSD contributor, about the importance of good release engineering for core infrastructure. Both Jean-Sébastien and I have been part of the Core RabbitMQ team for many years now. We have built some of the biggest CI/CD pipelines (check the show notes for one example), wrote and shipped some great code together, while breaking and fixing many things in the process.

We have been wrestling with today’s topic since 2016. Jean-Sébastien has some great FreeBSD stories to share, as well as an interesting perspective on shipping graphic card drivers. Oh, and by the way, it’s probably our fault why your remote car key stopped working that afternoon. It will all make sense after you listen to this episode.

This week we’re sharing a recent episode from Founders Talk that we continuously hear about from listeners. Listen and subscribe to Founders Talk at founderstalk.fm and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

On Founders Talk #75 — Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.

KBall and Nick Nisi sit down with Nick Fitzgerald to learn about running JavaScript on WebAssembly. They talk about almost instantaneous startup, running interpreted languages at the edge, and take a deep dive into the weeds of how Wasm based modules will change the future of application development.

Fuzzing is coming to the standard library. We speak to Katie Hockman and Jay Conrod who were part of the team responsible for designing and implementing it. We dig into the details, hear some best practices, where fuzzing can help your code, and learn more about how it works.

This week we’re sharing one of the most popular episodes from our new podcast Ship It. Ship It launched in May and now has 8 episodes in the feed to enjoy…it’s hosted by Gerhard Lazu, our SRE here at Changelog.

In this episode, 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 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

Nick Reese joins the party to tell us all about Elder.js, his opinionated static site generator and web framework built with SEO in mind. Elder.js was purpose-built with large, content-heavy websites in mind and already serves in many production capacities. We discuss imposter syndrome, the startup/product mindset, Svelte’s virtues, and much more.

Learning Go with code pop quizzes is a fun way to zoom in on different language features. People are looking forward to pop quizzes on Twitter and in conferences, and they also learn from that. Let’s chat about pop quizzes!

Why Cloud Native? What are the guiding principles that you should keep in mind as you are choosing a project from the Cloud Native Landscape? How do you build & ship an app in a Cloud Native way? Katie Gamanji, Ecosystem Advocate @ CNCF and former cloud engineer for American Express, Condé Nast and Microsoft, joins Gerhard to cover these topics in the context of the Cloud Native Fundamentals course that she developed. 15,000 students have already enrolled, and the initial feedback has been great. Tune in if you want to know why you should too, how to do it and when the course will become available for free.

This week we chat with Angie Jones about all things testing. We’ll cover unit testing, visual testing, end-to-end testing, and more!

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 Lars Wikman (independent Elixir/BEAM software consultant) why sometimes a monolith running on a single host with continuous backups and a built-in self-restore capability is everything that a small team of developers needs. That’s right, no Kubernetes or microservices. After 2 years of running changelog.com, a Phoenix monolith, on Kubernetes, what do I think? Join our discuss and find out!

Pinecone is the first vector database for machine learning. Edo Liberty explains to Chris how vector similarity search works, and its advantages over traditional database approaches for machine learning. It enables one to search through billions of vector embeddings for similar matches, in milliseconds, and Pinecone is a managed service that puts this capability at the fingertips of machine learning practitioners.

On this episode we’re talking with our good friend Mat Ryer whom you may know from the Go Time podcast. Mat created an awesome open source tool for putting just about anything in your Mac’s toolbar. It was originally written in Objective-C, but it just got a big rewrite in Go and abig rename from BitBar to xbar.

If you don’t use a Mac don’t hit skip on this episode quite yet! There are lessons to be learned for anyone interested in hacking on tools to make your life better. Plus, with this rewrite Mat has positioned xbar to go cross-platform, which we talk about as well.

This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Yulia Startsev from Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey team joins Jerod & Feross to talk compilers, going back to get your Master’s, making decisions as a group, process of shepherding a feature through TC39, how Firefox actually works, and LavaMoats. Yes, LavaMoats.

Porter lets you package your application artifacts, client tools, configuration and deployment logic together as a versioned bundle that you can distribute, and then install with a single command. Written entirely in Go, we speak to one of the creators about running an open source project, the importance of documentation, and more.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ian Miell, author of Docker in Practice as well as Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way. They talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, focusing on the tech while keeping a holistic view of the business. Following the money flows is key. Ian explains this concept really well, and Gerhard feels fairly confident you will be better off if you pay attention. Let us know in the comments!

William Falcon wants AI practitioners to spend more time on model development, and less time on engineering. PyTorch Lightning is a lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research that lets you train on multiple-GPUs, TPUs, CPUs and even in 16-bit precision without changing your code! In this episode, we dig deep into Lightning, how it works, and what it is enabling. William also discusses the Grid AI platform (built on top of PyTorch Lightning). This platform lets you seamlessly train 100s of Machine Learning models on the cloud from your laptop.

Tanner joins Nick to talk about his projects, react-query and react table, and discuss scratching your own itch in a maintainable way with open source.

This episode was recorded live from GopherCon Europe 2021!

Natalie & Mat host three amazing devs who gave talks that showcase using Go in unusual ways: Dr. Joakim Kennedy is tracking Go in malware, Mathilde Raynal is building quantum-resistant cryptography algorithms, and Preslav Rachev is creating digital art.

We hear from our speakers how they got into Go, how they made the choice to use Go for their unusual use case, and how it compares to other languages for their specific needs.

We also chat about conference talks, submissions and public speaking - how to start, good practices, and tips they collected along the way.