We’re talking about designing and building HEY with Jonas Downey, the lead designer behind HEY. In their words, “Email sucked for years, but not anymore.” We were super interested in how they went about solving the problems with email, so we invited Jonas on to share all the details and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of HEY.

The gang officially welcomes Amal Hussein as a panelist! After that it’s Pro Tip Time, then we finish up by attempting to demistify CSS Sweeper and the Space Toggle Trick.

We first launched a membership back in 2013… before they were cool! 😆 Now we’re back with a brand new edition. It’s called Changelog++ and we hope you love it. This episode of Backstage is a tell-all about the program. Why we think the timing is right, what we hope it can become, how we’re experimenting with ideas to make it great, and what you can do to get involved.

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what’s to come for the Windows command line experience.

It’s easy to forget that there’s a human on the other side of that <textarea>. So we tend not to give people the benefit of the doubt on the internet. This post is a gentle reminder of that fact and how active awareness of it would go a long way toward making it a more enjoyable place for all of us.

Jerod assembles a team of WebRTC experts (Suz, Feross, Mikeal) for a deep, deep dive on this practically-ubiquitous yet still-complicated web API.

We review its history, share really cool applications using the tech, provide an excellent primer on what you need to know about it, and details some production gotchas. ALSO we celebrate how Feross single-handedly “upgraded the internet”! 🙌

To celebrate our friend Zeno Rocha’s first book (and our new episode with Zeno discussing all the details) we’re giving away 3 FREE bundles of Dracula PRO && 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers 🙌

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha’s work on Dracula deserved the same credit. We agreed. So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he’s changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book – 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno’s book for free through our giveaway.

I thought it’d be cool to get mix test and mix format running on pushes to the changelog.com repo, so I gave GitHub Actions the old college try. After (not too much) futzing around on my own, I figured I’d have more success by getting an expert to help out. Good call be me! 😆

In this ~1 hour jam session, we go from zero to a successful Actions workflow. I learned a lot along the way, and you might too by joining us on the journey. Thanks, Jonathan!

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon’s Razor, Gall’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Kernighan’s Law, and too many others to list here.

We’re joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help developers package and deliver software products to developers and enterprises.

KBall, Jerod, and Nick Nisi dive into GraphQL – what it can do, what the challenges are, and how it differs from REST – all with a generous helping of metaphor about buffets, restaurants, and of course bacon.

We had an excellent interview with Beth Dakin and Ronak Shah from the Safari team about what’s new and interesting for developers in Safari 14. There were so many good moments that I figured a round-up post was warranted. ICYMI (or don’t have time for the full convo), here’s the highlights from my POV.

A listener request led us to Nikita Prokopov and FiraCode, and we’re sure glad they did. When we think of open source software, fonts aren’t usually high on the list of things that need maintaining. That’s not true when your font also supports hundreds of programming ligatures like FiraCode does. Nikita has his hands full!

Blitz.js creator Brandon Bayer joins Jerod to dive deep into the foundational principles of this fullstack React framework. We talk about its inspiration (Ruby on Rails), its differentiation (a “no-API” data layer), and its aspirations (built-in auth, plugins, recipes, and more).

We’re joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari’s plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.

We’re revisiting Shape Up and product development thoughts with Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp. Last August we talked with Ryan when he first launched his book Shape Up and now we’re back to see how Shape Up is shaping up — “How are teams using the wisdom in this book to actually ship work that matters? How does Shape Up work in new versus existing products?” We also talk about the concept of longitudinal thinking and the way it’s impacting Ryan’s designs, plus a grab bag of topics in the last segment.

We take a listener request this week and discuss how we evolve alongside (or opt out of) the ever changing JavaScript syntax. Arrow functions and variable declarations take center stage, but a wide range of new(ish) JS syntax and features are discussed.

Then Feross shares his new app, Nick talks fiction books, and Jerod switches coding fonts.

The incomparable Jessica Kerr drops by with a grab-bag of amazing topics. Understanding software systems, transferring knowledge between devs, building relationships, using VS Code & Docker to code together, observability as a logical extension of TDD, and a whole lot more.

Turns out everyone’s favorite macOS package manager has an official cask for managing fonts. Who knew?!